The Basement: Good News and Bad News

[rowyn]

Thursday and Friday night, I patched over the last two cracks in the basement. I didn't do the thorough job I had on the east wall, however, where I scraped up all the old sealant along the whole wall, and repatched. Instead, I only chiseled out a small section around the immediate leak, and filled that, then layered on cement until the leak stopped.

The good news is, it rained last night, and my basement still isn't leaking.

The bad news is, I finally came across an explanation of why the water problem has to be taken care of outside of the house. Underneath my many layers of patches, I'm pretty sure water is still seeping in through the foundation. Which is probably no big deal, as long as it stays water. Alas, I do not live in a warm part of the country, and eventually this water is going to turn to ice. And expand, thereby enlarging the crack and shifting, ever so slightly, my foundation and my walls. And then melt again, and fill up the now-larger crack, and ... well, you get the idea.

So ... I dunno. As a couple of other people have pointed out, this house has been here for fifty years and it's probably had this same issue the whole time. According to the inspector at the time I bought: "If it were going to fall off the foundation and slide down the hill, it would've by now."

So I'll probably get the gutters cleaned and water the house in the summer, and hope for the best.

Assuming my patches don't leak before then.

Comments

[kagetsume.livejournal.com]

The concern of ice may not be as bad as you're thinking. It all depends on this: Is your foundation bottom below the frostline? Which I believe is around 18 inches or so. If you are, then the water there won't freeze. This is why groundsource heatpumps work, and why basements tend to stay in a specific teperature range. Once you go a certain depth, the ground temperature stays fairly uniform. Or, at least that's my understanding.

-- Kagetsume.

[rowyn]

Hmm. I'll go measure it later, but I think it *is* lower than 18". It did occur to me that the frost is less likely to penetrate to the level of the floor, where the water's coming in. It also occured to me to put a space heater in that corner, but that seems excesively silly. ;)

And this part of the country doesn't have really long freezes anyway. We rarely have three consecutive days where the temperature is below freezing. So I'm unlikely to get a really hard freeze here.

Anyway, thanks for the note -- I feel better about it already. :)

[kagetsume.livejournal.com]

Not to mention expensive. Space heaters consume a *lot* of electrical power. They're very innefficient in terms of cost/heat amount.