Sealing Basement Walls

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Sealing Basement Walls When Your Builder Didn't Do It For You

The best time to seal the walls of any basement are at the time when the house is being built. At that point exterior as well as interior walls are easy to access and coat with a waterproof barrier. Later on, if the walls leak, the job is going to be much more difficult and may include digging trenches around the outside of the house to get to the foundation or removing interior paneling or drywall to take care of interior walls. Sealing basement walls isn't that difficult to do initially, but too many homes have been built without contractors making the extra effort to do so. So if your builder didn't take care of the problem ahead of time, what should you do now?

For starters, you're probably never going to completely plug wall leaks by just coating the interior walls with a waterproof sealer. This is a problem you need to attack at its origin which is the outside of the walls. Begin by seeing how much water you can move away from your foundation. Are your gutters of adequate size and good enough repair to carry the water from rain and snow out past the foundation area? Does the ground slope towards or away from your house? If it slopes towards, you'll need to build the ground up all around the basement walls so that water is forced away from the house instead of soaking into the ground surrounding it. All of these things will help alleviate the amount of water that is pummeling your foundation.

Sealing Basement Walls: What If Those Suggestions Didn't Work?

If you've done everything you can do to direct water away from your home, and you're still experiencing leakage, there are other measures you can take. Digging a trench around the foundation in order to run drainage pipes, a process known as tiling, can do the trick. You will need to dig a 1 to 3' deep trench in order to accomplish this. Given you've already dug down so far, you may want to go ahead and do what other homeowners do which is to continue digging deeper in order to put some type of a barricade layer of paint or materials over the outside of the basement walls. Although these are big jobs, they will help maintain the integrity of your foundation.

Before you do anything, learn more about basement sealing paints

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