Foundation 101 Keeping that foundation dry and solid for years to come

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[00:00:22] Eric Goranson: I walk in and realize it was going to be a lot more because they had asbestos tiles and flooring down in the, in the basement. So it was just going to be this ugly situation. So I started poking around and working around and went, the water's coming from over here. I said, can I go outside the house? I walk around the outside of the house and start doing a foundation inspection.

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[00:01:07] Eric Goranson: To find out more, head to pyramidheating. com, Oregon, CCB 5 9 3 8 2. Welcome to the round the house show. The next generation of home improvement. Thanks for joining me today. I'm Eric G. If you want to find out more about us, head over to around the house. Online. com. And of course, if you want to reach us here at the studio, 833 239 4144.

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[00:01:58] Eric Goranson: Some of those brand new [00:02:00] materials and things you can do inside and outside your house, experts, everything else over there and head over to around the house online for more information. Today, I wanted to give you the be all end all a foundation repair and wet basements. The truth behind it, because there is so much information out there.

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[00:02:40] Eric Goranson: And I tell you what, this can be a massive problem. And so if you have foundation issues, I really want to help you out today and see if we can get you taken care of with more information here for you because there is so many conflicting information. And then this is an industry that I have worked with companies on.

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[00:03:24] Eric Goranson: You are maybe slab on grade where it's just a concrete slab and maybe there's tensioned post tension cables in it or whatever. That's what that is. And, but if you've got an older house, whether you're in anywhere in the country, this will apply to you. And a lot of it does even apply to crawl spaces in many situations.

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[00:04:06] Eric Goranson: Dropping right next to the foundation that will cause damage to the concrete that will cause basement flooding And you never want to have that drop right next to it. It's just not going to be a good thing It's going to cause a ton of problems. It will degrade that And that's a big issue that we had here in portland In the major metropolitan area I'm in, they used to have the storm drain system and the sewer system go into the same plumbing system and go down.

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[00:04:55] Eric Goranson: But the problem was, is instead of making and put it into a storm drain system, they just dumped it right next to the home. So [00:05:00] we have tens of thousands of homes and our cities here that were built with a system that took care of the water. Now, it drops it next to it. And all of a sudden, there is tons of foundation damage because they didn't inform people and they just.

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[00:05:37] Eric Goranson: I have been in foundations where I could sit there with my fingers and pull it apart. And get through to the other side, not taking a screwdriver, just picking it apart and having it come apart. And that's really can be caused by that. Now we also had some areas here and this has happened in areas across the country.

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[00:06:19] Eric Goranson: Now you can run it out to the street if that is downhill, but here's a thing you need to talk to your city about or your County or wherever. If that's going to go out, you don't want to have it running it right across the sidewalk and talk to your people that manage the stormwater in the street. Some places they have it.

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[00:06:52] Eric Goranson: Now, the second of all, many streets, they don't want that. So you can't drain it there, but you could drain it at the edge of the yard. [00:07:00] And if it does soak into the yard, yeah, but you could get it. So if it does overflow, it does go across the sidewalk into the street. The only thing is in the, if it's winter time, that can cause ice in the sidewalk, which you could be liable for, also could cause discoloration of the sidewalk, mold moss growing on it.

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[00:07:31] Eric Goranson: That is a great project and it's a pretty easy DIY one. So all you need to do is grab PVC or ABS and run that down into the deck. Basically that gutter system to go into storm drain system. So you're just going to do that, get it away from the house. Then you can go into a perforated pipe or something like that to let it go back into the ground.

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[00:08:11] Eric Goranson: So that's the first tip right off the bat. Second of all, if you have a crack in your foundation, there are easy fixes for this and Simpsons, strong tie and. Rhino carbon fiber make carbon fiber patch kits for this. And this is something that I really want to talk about here in the next segment, because you can really have some serious foundation problems and can fix them without spending a ton of money on it.

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[00:09:00] Eric Goranson: And that's going to be really important to make sure that we get those answers for you. And I'll tell you how to do it, because there's an easy way to do it that you'll know that you have the solution and then you can go out and get those bids or even decide if you want to do it as a DIY project yourself, because that is an option as well.

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[00:09:38] Eric Goranson: Head over to around the house, online. com around the house. Be right back. Don't change that dial. We got more to show you.[00:10:00]

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[00:10:27] Eric Goranson: I am the fourth host of this show over the years, over the decades. And we have a great time here with the show. And hopefully we're helping you with information to help you navigate being a homeowner. And we do have a closed group out there as well. And that's on Facebook. It's called around the house nation.

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[00:11:04] Eric Goranson: If you want to hear those extended cuts, head over to around the house online. And for about a cup of coffee a month. You can be a part of that, uh, insider group there where you get the podcast a couple of days early, as well as those extended cuts and any information out there that goes out, uh, we've got some special stuff for you and we will have some exclusive episodes coming up as well.

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[00:11:44] Eric Goranson: We were talking about gutters into downspouts and repairing cracks with carbon fiber. But here's the thing. If you have some serious foundation problems, my favorite way to do this is to go find a structural engineer first, before you go out and get estimates, [00:12:00] have that structural engineer come in and take a look.

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[00:12:24] Eric Goranson: So if they come in and say, Hey, you need to use this carbon fiber. You need to do this to patch those cracks. No big deal. But if you need to put in helical peers or something like that. That now, you know where to go. We'll save you a ton of time in doing this. So it could cost you hundreds to a thousand bucks to get that engineered solution.

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[00:13:04] Eric Goranson: So what they do is they come in and clean up that foundation. They'll put a patch in there. For instance, I have used cement, cemental. Excuse me in that. And so it's a concrete repair product. You wet the wall down, basically make it up into like a, a softball size. That way you have the, uh, the right mixture.

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[00:13:43] Eric Goranson: Sometimes you'll put it down the crack and across it, depending which direction the crack goes, and that will give you a strength in there and it'll actually be stronger than the concrete around it. So that's a great way to do that. Now it's depending on which way the crack is going. If you have a crack that is going up and [00:14:00] down, that's one thing, but if you've got it in the middle of the concrete wall.

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[00:14:25] Eric Goranson: And that will add that strength back in it. The next one is I've seen people come in with steel I beams. They'll dig down, cut holes in the concrete floor, put some pieces in there of steel up and down and help buttress that wall in there again. That's another way to do it. I've seen different ways of doing that.

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[00:15:18] Eric Goranson: That's one way to do it. But what we've done in the past is we've actually, Came in and did a new interior foundation on the inside. So you leave the old foundation, you build one right on the inside and pour up against the old one. And you can create a whole new foundation that way. And if you do it and you want to add ceiling height to the basement, you can do that as well.

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[00:15:57] Eric Goranson: But this here, generally speaking, [00:16:00] we've had people stay in the house during this time. So there's no need to do all the repairs. You're not worried about breaking tiles, damaging plaster or drywall. So it's much more efficient to put a new interior foundation. And now you will lose some square footage of the basement because you're going to be losing six or eight inches around the perimeter on all sides of this, but you do have double the foundation strength now, or if not more, because that original foundation, of course, was already compromised.

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[00:16:46] Eric Goranson: And when you dig out a foundation on the inside, when you're doing that, you'll have to put new footings in. What you don't want to do, since you've already probably have a foundation issue anyway, The worst thing you can do is go in and just tear out the whole floor [00:17:00] because that's usually holding or keyed in those foundation walls from pushing in.

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[00:17:23] Eric Goranson: So there's a lot of different ways to do this. To make sure that you hold the house up and keep this structural, but it's a great way to do it and get you a whole brand new foundation on the inside. And if you've got brick or something pretty outside, don't worry about it. It'll still be the same. And so that's a great way to do it without having to lift the house up.

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[00:17:59] Eric Goranson: These people saw a [00:18:00] crack in their foundation and water coming in. They gave them an estimate of 40, 000 to fix this and it was a flooded basement. And that was really They hadn't put the crack, the homeowners did not put the crack and the flood together. So they just had a water in the basement thing. So I pull up 10 minutes early, it's going to kill time doing an estimate.

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[00:18:38] Eric Goranson: You could see she's just hold it together. He's horrified. They had just had a very high pressure sale of a 40, 000 fix. All right, we got to go out to break guys. I'm going to finish this story because it was a huge one. We'll do that just as soon as around the house returns. Don't go anywhere.[00:19:00]

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[00:19:22] Eric Goranson: And that's what we're talking about in this hour of the show. And people have been over there and had the high pressure sale. Homeowners were crying while she was, he was in shock. They had just gotten a 40, 000 bid. I walk in and realize it was going to be a lot more because they had asbestos tiles. And flooring down in the, in the basement.

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[00:20:01] Eric Goranson: And in there it's a split level basement. I see around the window, I see a crack in the foundation. Just one. That's it. So I go inside and say, Hey, I have an inspection camera. I just poke a hole in the drywall right here real quick. And, and I even have some patch in the car I can put on it. And it's just going to be the size of a pencil.

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[00:20:33] Eric Goranson: It was like 2, 500 bucks to fix this thing. And what's cool is that that was the appropriate solution for that. And quite frankly, we didn't even get the job because the homeowner said, I think I can do that actually, if that's all it is. So they were going to tackle it themselves. And so the right repair on that would have been going in there.

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[00:21:33] Eric Goranson: So it just follows down any paths of water. As soon as it hits damp soil, boom, off it goes. And within an hour it's sealed up. It's not going anywhere. So that then you have to just put the wall back after you put some carbon fiber over the top of that to make sure that you've got it taken care of, but that's all you have to do.

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[00:22:07] Eric Goranson: And they're basically like. 12 inch staples that'll tie things back together. So it doesn't move anymore. And you could put those in and then carbon fiber over the top or whatever you want to do and make that super strong that way. And that's a great way to tie concrete back together. So it doesn't move anymore.

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[00:22:49] Eric Goranson: And what looked like black mastic underneath it. So you had the double down asbestos down there and you're going to have to disturb that. So that was going to have to go. And then they had to refinish the basement. So that could have been an 80, [00:23:00] 000 project by the time they're all done or more. So this is where those things can get really expensive and it was a quick and easy fix.

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[00:23:27] Eric Goranson: And I want to say that with an asterisk there without going below grade. Is that if you have a foundation that is leaking at the point where the floor hits the wall, that is usually what they call a dry joint right there because they poured the walls first and then poured the floor down there second.

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[00:24:05] Eric Goranson: Your best solution is Going around the perimeter of the house on the inside and cutting the concrete and putting in a French drain system below that, then you can put new concrete in and finish it as you would with a sump pump. And that way it's grabbing that water, going into a low point and then pumping it out and away from the structure, 15, 20 feet away at least.

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[00:24:44] Eric Goranson: And most people did not fill those up with concrete or a slurry as they built them. So those can collect water and you can have water leaking in one corner and they can leak in between those blocks and come out a whole other place. So for that, really, you have to get [00:25:00] outside, dig up that foundation, get down, waterproof it all the way down to the ground.

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[00:25:22] Eric Goranson: You're just not going to get anywhere trying to do it. And so that's a big one right there. And let's talk about one other thing here too, while we're in this segment. Before we go out to break here in a few minutes, dry lock is a great product to slow down humidity transfer from the outside of the house to the inside.

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[00:26:04] Eric Goranson: It will help, but it is not the be all end all for humidity issues in a basement. So if you've got high humidity, Sure, you can dry lock it. The issue though is, is that it's still going to push through. It's going to push the dry lock eventually out of the concrete. It will bubble up. You'll have issues, but really that's, that's a minor difference.

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[00:26:45] Eric Goranson: Now, if you have a house, and I want to talk about this here. If you have a house, That maybe has a hill that is going towards the house, or you've got a hillside or even a mountain that comes down. And for time to time, you get water that comes down in [00:27:00] floods areas. I've had houses that I've worked with where they had groundwater that would continue like a stream coming down the hill into their backyard.

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[00:27:33] Eric Goranson: We dug that trench came down the side, down the property line and out towards the front. Then what we did is we put a French drain in the bottom of that with fabric. And then we put not gravel, but rock because we wanted that rock to look like a decorative piece, but we wanted to give it a space. So water could go down in there.

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[00:28:14] Eric Goranson: Now, if you don't have that, you could put it into a big pump drywall type thing where it gets overflowed. And it'll pump out and send it to another area. You could do that as well. But those are all secrets to making sure that works. And you can control groundwater that way. If you have a spot that every time you get heavy rains in the back because it's low or it's out front where it's low and you need to control water and get it someplace else, that's a great way to do it because it looks like landscaping.

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[00:29:06] Eric Goranson: the house show the next generation of home improvement. I'm Eric G. Thanks for joining me today. We've been talking about foundation repair. Wet basements, the truth behind all of it. And we've been diving into some big rabbit holes here. And hopefully these are things that really, that I can help you fix these issues around your house, because these foundation issues can be really scary and they can be even more scary when you bring somebody else that is a fear based contractor, trying to get your hard earned money when there are simple solutions at times.

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[00:29:57] Eric Goranson: There are fiber reinforced [00:30:00] products that can be sprayed on walls. Simpson strong tie has one. It is a really cool product and it's something that's been used in commercial buildings and I've seen it. They just used it up in Seattle to fix a bridge. They were trying to put a, it was a car bridge and they converted it over to their light rail system.

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[00:30:47] Eric Goranson: And so what they do is they come into this backside of a brick building, like the inside of it, and they put, almost like shotcrete, they spray this carbon fiber [00:31:00] mixture of concrete on the wall, they press in a carbon fiber mesh. into that starts to cure a little bit. Then they come back and spray over the top fit to the certain engineered mill thickness.

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[00:31:38] Eric Goranson: So they went around and did that. And it's a great solution. I have worked with the product. It is not a DIY product. Contractors that are experienced. And there's a handful of them in the country. It is a rough product to work with. It is tough trying to get that mixture. And we had a pallet of it and I was with a company.

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[00:32:16] Eric Goranson: It is something that is an engineered solution. So if you've got a commercial building or a brick house, Maybe in Southern California or anywhere in a earthquake zone. Simpson StrongTie does have some great products for that. Now you can go through, I've seen companies go through and put in layers of carbon fiber or strips to hold things together.

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[00:32:57] Eric Goranson: And that's something I wanted to talk about here as well is, [00:33:00] is. Earthquake retrofits with a foundation. And this is something that companies go out and do, but if you're going to tackle this as a DIY project, if you have a crawl space or a basement, there are brackets that you're going to do that ties the sill plate down to the foundation.

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[00:33:37] Eric Goranson: And you're like, how did that get out there? It's because the winds exceeded. Or water and winds exceeded the weight of the house and it blew it off or floated it right off the foundation. So you can go through and tie this down. And so some companies will go through and they'll tie that sill plate down, but there's so much more that needs to happen.

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[00:34:15] Eric Goranson: That post needs to have a bracket to the beam above it. So those brackets are holding that. So the post doesn't move. That beam then needs to have ties that tie it to the floor joists. The floor joists need to have brackets that are tied to the sill plate. You see where I'm going. Every wood connection needs to have a MITEC or a Simpson bracket there to hold that together.

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[00:34:59] Eric Goranson: So [00:35:00] those are things you got to be really careful with, with that. So if you're doing the earthquake retrofit, every piece of wood down there that is a structural member needs to be tied to the one next to it. So, like, with the joist going to the rim joist, or the band that goes around those floor joist systems, around the floor system, that needs to have brackets there, so everything needs to be bolted together with the right nails, screws that are structural, and tied in together, and that way, you're good to go.

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[00:35:55] Eric Goranson: What I tell people is I want to make sure that you have all those water issues resolved [00:36:00] before you finish a basement. And that could be two or three years you want to see. I just was answering a question yesterday. On Facebook on a group, not my group, but a group. And what they had was, is they had a serious issue.

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[00:36:33] Eric Goranson: And they just didn't waterproof anything correctly. And I had to tell him the bad news of, you're gonna have to one, test the mold, see what you got before you tear into it, understand what you're working with. Is this something that's going to be deadly to you? Is this something you need to be wearing a hazmat suit?

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[00:37:04] Eric Goranson: Now that mean it might mean using an inspection camera, making a tiny hole and seeing, or it means you're opening the whole walls up. Maybe you got to strip that whole basement down to the studs or beyond that to get that taken care of. But really you can't, I never recommend plastic down there because anytime you're putting plastic up And you're encapsulating insulation in behind it.

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[00:37:48] Eric Goranson: And that's awesome that they have to plan for that floor to raise inches because of frost teeth. It's going to actually raise that floor up inches. So everything in the basement has to float. So you need to [00:38:00] understand what has to go on in your area to make sure that you have a building that's going to withstand what mother nature is going to toss at it.

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[00:38:27] Eric Goranson: So spend some time, understand it, deal with some building science experts in your area, understand what's going to move, what's not going to move and spend a few seasons, making sure that that basement. It's not going to pour a bunch of water through it or move up and down or anything like that. So you understand it that way.

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[00:39:03] Eric Goranson: Cause nobody paid attention to that in January, February that basement floods and everything has to come out of it. And all those new materials are going in a dumpster because it got ruined. So I just want to make sure that we fully understand what goes on before we finish it. Thanks for tuning in to around the house.

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