Sunday, July 28, 2013
It Never Rains But...
Well, Mother Nature has helpfully answered one question for me: it's definitely not a broken pipe. One more torrential rainstorm confirms it: my house is leaking. I hear the rain start, I run and pull up the carpet I'd just got all dried and put back into place, and, sure enough, there comes water leaking in through the corner. I don't think I've ever gone through so many towels so quickly in my life. Well, at least that saves me a call to the plumber. Although obviously I'm going to need to make a few other calls...
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After our house was built, my dad bought plastic extensions to channel the downspouts several feet away from the foundation, ending at "dry wells" (round, bottomless, plastic boxes with grated covers) in the yard. It involves digging some shallow trenches, but it's a fairly inexpensive fix, especially compared to having someone regrade your yard to slope away from the foundation.
ReplyDeleteI do suspect cracks in your foundation, unless water is coming down the wall from an incorrectly attached gutter or downspout (Is your inside wall wet?). How old is your house? Have any of your neighbors experienced a similar problem? Can you e-mail Ask This Old House and see if they'll send someone out to help you?
I actually do have plastic extensions on the other two downspouts, although they don't end in any containers or ditches, just deposit the water away from the house. The leaky one already had a fairly long metal piece on it that serves the same function.
DeleteI'm pretty sure I do have cracks in my foundation. It's obvious that it has problems, anyway. I'm told the entire neighborhood does, that when these houses were built in the 1960s, the soil wasn't properly compacted. And my next-door neighbor is in the process of regrading his yard, so clearly he's had water issues, too. (And the water is definitely coming up from the floor, not down from the wall. There seems to be some dirt coming in with it, too.)
Fixing the gutter may help with the current problem -- I hope, I hope, I hope -- but basically, I'm going to have to bite the bullet and start calling foundation repair contractors to see what they can do for me. Even if it is going to badly affect my cash flow. I really should not have put it off this long.