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the joys of being a homeowner

“I have no idea where the water is going.”

Something you never, ever want to hear a plumber say.

I mentioned over the weekend on bsky that I’m on round two of “why is there water in my basement?” which is perhaps one of the worst gameshows you can find yourself on as the co-owner of a house, perhaps only surpassed by “what kind of insects have infested my walls?” and “where did all the grounding wires for my electrical outlets disappear off to?”

The quick summary is that about six months ago, water showed up under the floor of my basement bedroom. No one could figure out where the water was coming from–the walls were totally dry–and we finally had to chalk it up to just one of those things that happens sometimes, have the floor reinstalled with an extra moisture barrier, and continue on. Then in the last several weeks, water randomly showed up in the store room (opposite corner of the house from my bedroom) and then under my bedroom floor again.

As you might imagine, I am not happy about this. Particularly the part where I had to move everything out of my bedroom so the floor could get ripped up again, meaning I’m sleeping on a mattress on the floor in one of the common areas now.

This time I called in some experts. The really frustrating part about this kind of thing is getting someone who can and will actually help you. My insurance guy thought it had to be a problem with the footer drain; he wanted me to try to find someone to scope it. Spoiler: no one wants to scope your footer drain. Plumbers tell you it’s not their problem, it’s a landscaping thing. Landscapers look at you blankly and ask if you’re sure you wouldn’t rather just install a french drain, because when all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a french drain, I guess.

I finally found a company that just does basements. A nice man named Edward showed up with a moisture meter and started looking rather grim once I showed him where the water had showed up. He said he needed to do more tests, but we probably had a moisture buildup in fill around our foundation wall, and it had finally broken through the cold joints between the footer, foundation wall, and slab.1 Apparently this is the most common cause of water showing up in your basement that isn’t from a leaky pipe, and the way to fix it involves installing a gutter. In your basement. Which involves jack hammering out a channel around the entire perimeter and also ripping out the bottom foot or so of all your drywall to accomplish that. (And they don’t reinstall the drywall when they’re done.)

This is me, breathing into a paper bag.

Except… that turned out to not be a problem. We had a much more unusual issue, one that in his experience occurs less than 1% of the time. The moisture meter, you see, showed that the foundation walls were bone dry… and the slab just got wetter and wetter the further from the walls it got. We had…

GROUNDWATER!

First, this made me feel less insane for insisting that there was absolutely no water coming in from the foundation walls. Because there wasn’t. Who doesn’t love being right? And second, something even more rare followed–the way to fix water under the slab was significantly cheaper than if it had been the standard cold joint issue.

First time in my damn life that having the unusual problem is actually a plus.

So instead, in a bit over a week, I get to have a construction crew come in and jackhammer a channel through the middle of my slab so they can put the drain in there and run it to our brand-new-for-reasons-of-the-previous-owner-being-an-idiot sump pump.2 And it’ll hopefully only take a day! So in two weeks, I might even have a floor in my room and get to go back to working at my desk instead of on the dining room table! Huzzah!

1 – A cold joint is the joint/pseudo-joint you get when you pour concrete on top of concrete that has already set. Often these are bad, but they’re actually an expected and necessary thing when you’re talking about your slab, footer, and foundation wall; all three of those come from separate pours of concrete. Which is actually a good thing. If your soil settles (and it inevitably will) the foundation is a lot more likely to crack if it’s all one piece.

2 – So about that sump pump. While I was still trying to find anyone who would look at the damn foundation drain, my plumbers said they didn’t do that kind of drain, but they could check out the sump pump. And I thought sure, the sump pump was original to the house and there was a non-zero possibility that was the problem, in which case getting that fixed would clear things up. It didn’t, by the way. But I’m still happy I had it looked at. Because you see, the utter genius from whom we purchased this house was a bit of a do-it-yourselfer. Our plumber had already had the fun of bringing the hot water heater self-install the guy did up to code, which involved, among other things, six hours redoing all the copper work because there were multiple pipes and valves that had no purpose apparent to any plumber who hadn’t been driven mad by an eldritch being. What our long-suffering plumber discovered was that this genius had buried the sump pump drain line. Where did it go? After twenty minutes of searching, he located a little pit drain 80 feet away that he thought might be the end point. To test this out, he borrowed our hose and put water down the cleanout. The water neither backed up nor went t the pit drain, which was what caused him to say “I have no idea where the water is going.” Cool cool cool. The next day, he called out his buddy the drain guy, who scoped that line and discovered that the sump drain (a 1.5″ pipe) went out 8 feet, took a sharp right turn into a corrugated drain line (a 3″ pipe with no adapter, see the problem here?) that went 80 feet to the pit drain–and to keep the corrugated line in place, the previous owner had helpfully driven metal spikes through it. Because as we all know, there is nothing better for the structural integrity of a pipe. We now have an above-ground drain for the sump pump.3

3 – But that wasn’t even all. Because while the drain guy was dealing with all that, our plumber got the sump pit open (it’s normally sealed for radon mitigation), which first meant he had to call his other friend, our electrician, because the outlet the pump was plugged into was installed so that it was hanging directly over the sump pit.4 Because as we all know, the best place for an electrical outlet is as close as possible to a place known to be, I don’t know, prone to filling with water. At any rate, once he’d extracted the eight-year-old sump pump, he discovered that there’d been some kind of leak, indicated by all of its bolts being rusted and it being so covered with calcite mineralization that it looked like the ghost of a sump pump. Oh, and when it had been installed, the former owner hadn’t bothered to trim the drain line short enough, so had “just kind of jammed the pump in there” such that it was sitting at an angle. For eight years.5

4- An arrangement our electrician called “goofy” because he is a man prone to understatement.

5 – True wisdom in home repair is knowing and accepting that you are not the guy to fix the thing. For fuck’s sake, just call the guy who is.

2 replies on ““I have no idea where the water is going.””

Whoa, what an “adventure”.

“No one could figure out where the water was coming from…” is a phrase to summon fear in the hearts of many. I am glad the cause was able to be identified, and a fix is possible. Here’s to a dry basement!

We had to do the jackhammer-arouond-the-perimeter-thing, about 25 years ago. No fun – get noise-cancelling headphones. Wishing you the best of luck.

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