DIY - How To Waterproof your Basement - Install Exterior Sump Pump - Foundation Repair - Save Money!

hey YouTube put together a short instructional video on how to fix your foundational problems without paying an arm and a leg I got a couple of bids from reputable local foundation companies and I think the lowest one was like twelve thousand dollars and the highest one was over twenty thousand dollars and that's just not the kind of money I want to spend even though I did need to get this taken care of so what I did was hire a excavator and did the rest of the work myself and I think total out-of-pocket was just over five thousand dollars but certainly not the kind of money I would have spent hiring a foundation company but I hope you enjoyed this video I tried to put some captions at the bottom and the basement is absolutely fixed so I'm kind of excited today is May 1st 2020 and we are about to have a backhoe team show up had the utilities marked here gas meter there on the far end of the house and they're just a hand-dug all of the utilities to kind of get an idea of their depth gas is about 30 inches deep and then the fiber-optic cord here I think that's Google Fiber and then right down in that hole that conduit is the where the power cord comes out that's about 30 inches deep also just kind of located all of these to get an idea of where they are and how deep they are this is our other cable cord here for the backhoe guy but anyhow what we're gonna do there's clay up against this wall all the soil is actually clay and it's pushing in on the foundation and over time has caused cracks and it's basically needs to be pulled out and replaced with gravel I've got a couple of tons of gravel in the driveway over there so these guys are going to come through here dig all this out we're gonna put a membrane up against the wall waterproof membrane so the guys showed up with the backhoe a little while ago and did quite a bit of digging even though this was marked we did the call before you dig and and then mark all the utilities the power line actually got shallower and shallower as it came away from the house so it wasn't an actual 30 inches deep all the way out so the guy hit the power line and we're waiting on the power company to come back out and get our power back on but I guess the excavator guys are going to come back in the morning but here he got all the way to the all the way down to the basement sub tile drain tile and they'll be back tomorrow to finish digging this out I think they're gonna have to dig a little bit by hand just to get around all these utilities day one complete [Music] [Music] so one of the things you want to be super careful of when digging in a trench like this is that that wall doesn't cave in on ya this clay this is mostly clay and it's still quite wet now if we were to let this dry out and hot summer for a few days it might become a little bit more brittle and be prone to caving in but right now it looks like it's pretty safe to get down there and dig so what I'm gonna do you can see the drain pipe right there and it's actually they put it on top of the footer when they built the house and you can see it down on the other in there so what I'm gonna do is dig a small trench next to the footer so that when I put my new drain pipe in it's not sitting on the footer because that seam where the foundation wall goes on to the footer right there is most likely where water is coming through so you don't want the drain pipe on top of the footer so I'm down here in the trench alongside the house pretty far down and there's a fiber optics above me and I'm looking I'm looking along this footing here there's the drain tile looking along this footer and I got this putty knife here and this is where the the wall the concrete wall was poured up against the footer and there's a crack all the way down so obviously that's where water is getting into the basement so I'm gonna go along this thing and put that sealing on it it's kind of a rubber sealant I may even put that membrane here and roll it out so that it kind of goes out this way and directs the water into the drain tube canal but well that's just a big gap there all the way down the basement no wonder water's getting in I'm gonna try to seal that up before we put the membrane on here so I went to Home Depot and got some of this polyurethane sealant made by Loctite it's specifically designed for foundation walls and masonry cracks and basically going all the way along this cracked joint right here and just filling it up and there's some board there I got a breakout from a root but I bought the caulk version of this stuff so that I could kind of squirt it in a little bit and get it into that hole so I'm putting one layer on tonight and then kind of pushing it in and then I'll go back over it tomorrow morning and redo it and see if I can't get a good seal on here but then again like I said I am going to put that membrane over this joint right here so that we've got a double good seal [Music] [Music] so today we spent an enormous amount of time scraping this wall and getting it prepared to put the membrane on we want to make sure that all the dirts off the wall and it's scraped clean if you have primer that you can put on the wall see there's some spots where it was just very difficult to get the membrane on there smoothly but we did get it to adhere and most of the areas but we put the membrane all the way to the bottom where it kind of overlaps the pudding so that crease there that had the compromised place where the water was going through is sealed with the membrane also so once the gravel goes up along this wall it's gonna hold that membrane in place even better [Music] [Music] we got the drain pipe down all the way connected on this in one all the way down and he's about to drop some gravel in the hole we'll get that hole filled up Greville [Music] well the Beco guy got the hole filled back in I've got some dirt to put up against the house there with the shovel so I've got a big pile of dirt in the back from where I started digging it by hand but obviously we've got some grass to plant some grass seed thankfully it's springtime so hopefully we can get the grass back growing here but anyhow five days later we got it all put back together I got to put the window wells back on but we've got the new drain tile in place and it drains down to this end right here where there's a sump pump I've got to dig that that drain pipe out a little bit further to the road there but here's the sump well and I believe it's like 25 foot of lift and this is only about 8 feet of lift so should give it plenty of thrust to get that water out and we shall see we're supposed to get about an inch of rain tomorrow so see how this goes [Music] so here we are about a week after we finished all the work and got the dirt moved out put a bunch of grass seed here as you can see it's actually we tore up my neighbor's yard a little bit as well but last night we had close to two inches of rain and I still kind of need to grade that a little bit you can't really tell the the incline of that but that's definitely a hill coming down there off the house but last night we had a good good good rain and went to the basement this morning and lo and behold it is dry dry dry dry so the project worked we've officially taken the weight off that wall there and now we're just trying to grow some grass and put it back together like nothing happened [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Mark Butler

Views: 53,962

Rating: 4.8653464 out of 5

Keywords: foundation, repair, sump pump, basement, waterproofing, sealing, exterior, excavating, diy, save money, sumppump, water proof, water leak, dry basement, wet basement, fix foundation

Id: M1skWT7q4mY

Length: 13min 29sec (809 seconds)

Published: Sun May 17 2020