New concrete fail = flooded house

this is shawn with gate city foundation drainage we're on a job today in greensboro doing some drainage work so i wanted to show you first of all look at this beautiful new driveway that the homeowner had poured and look what's going on here so the first time it so this is only a few weeks old this this concrete this black right here is the slab of the house and the first time it rained here the concrete was sitting up all the way to the house and this the this concrete driveway was higher than the slab and so the water went right off onto the slab and flooded the house and so take a look here we've got a full bubble of fall and that's an eight foot level too we got a full bubble of fall into the house couple that with the fact that the the height of the concrete is higher than the slab and this whole room here flooded all the floorings ruined everything and so she called the concrete guy who did this work back he came out he cut all this out of here and he put in a pipe right here a little what is that a three inch pipe and that was his solution and when the homeowner said and then the next the next time it rained this just filled up with water take a look here as well we're sloping uphill to the road and there's nowhere for this gutter water to go and so this customer called me out here and said and she she found me on youtube and she said what do i do here and i came out and took a look at it and i see this all the time with brand new concrete customers call me out and the concrete's sloping into their into their garage into their whatever here because you're talking about the house if we try to put a channel drain here now take a look we pretty much don't have any fall going from front to back here so that's pretty much level right there and so the problem is if we tried to put some kind of a channel drain here if it ever over got overwhelmed it would flood again and so we need a solution here that is 100 so the only way to fix this problem is to rip this concrete out dig it down and re-pour it so the homeowner was saying what happened here is there was another concrete guy in the neighborhood pouring and she ran over there and said hey i've got a driveway she had blacktop here and the guy just peeled the blacktop off and to save a little bit of money he didn't grade it down he didn't take any dirt out and so that's why this whole driveway is so high in elevation and so this homeowner of course that guy just ghosted the homeowner so she's got the news involved she's got me involved and so harvey and his crew are on the way this morning i actually beat him this morning and uh we're gonna get this demoed and dug out and formed today and then we're gonna pour tomorrow so that's what we're working on these are some pictures that the homeowner sent me this was right after the other concrete guy poured and you can see right here just how close it is up against the house right there and so the gas meter right there is a good a good point to see just how close it is also the stoop right there so that's way above the slab and it's sloping into the foundation here this is showing just how thick that concrete was poured and again she thought that it was the guy had way too much concrete out there and he didn't have anything to do with it so he just kind of finished it off and got it too thick so that contributed to the whole thickness thing this is the flooring that she had put down fairly recently and she had to rip it all out of there because it got soaked and then here is the underlayment under the laminate flooring and she's got a fan set up there and you can see how wet it is under there so i wanted to get a shot from back here see if you can see how that thing is sloping i just set this eight foot level back up and i wanted to show you really quickly this is a digital level slash angle finder i guess you would call it that i just bought it's a ryze pro let's put some actual numbers on this so this eight foot level is showing we've got a full bubble of fall into the house and that is reading 3 8 inch per foot of fall or a negative 1.85 degree slope or a negative 3.20 degree so you can see right there is zero percent and so we're falling down below that all right so that'll put some numbers on that for you to show you where we're at with this job and so of course we need to be falling in the opposite direction and so if we're falling in the opposite direction you can see just how much we need to come down and you're not coming up over here because if you come up over here you're in the same boat you're higher than the slab and so we need to come down over here and the only way you're gonna do that is ripping all this concrete out grating it back down and redoing the concrete so that's what we've got going on here the homeowner is also she said that when the guy was pouring he had way too much concrete out here and so look at how thick he poured that slab so she thinks what might have happened is the guy had too much concrete out here and he just he just made the the pad way too high so anyway that's what we're working on today i've been standing out here talking to the homeowner waiting for the concrete guys and she said the concrete guy that did this work showed up in a pickup truck so she's amazed that my concrete guys have got a dump truck a bobcat another dump truck and then a service truck back there so she said this is what it looks like when a proper concrete crew shows up and then i've got my little dump truck right there in case we have any extra dirt so we're just getting unloaded [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] of course the homeowner didn't want to have to replace all this concrete twice so we ended up cutting this upper section here that we thought was still okay and anytime you are mating up new concrete to existing concrete it can be kind of tricky here so we're trying to get a real straight line and get that nice the concrete guys break up the driveway in sections like this so that they can load up a dump truck and that dump truck can be running to the recycling while they're breaking it more [Music] the first load of concrete's off to recycling hey hurry back my dad we are making pretty good progress out here or the concrete guys i should say are and so this the contractor who poured this didn't want to fix it and so the homeowner actually called the news and so the news is out here right now talking to the homeowner and getting some footage so pretty interesting the homeowner is going to show us the inside damage where the the room flooded so let's take a look this is the room where the water came in so we're right outside this the driveway you can see it out here so what happened in this room okay so when it started to rain water came in if you look at this baseboard that runs across this room it was coming in the entire length of this baseboard not just in one spot but the entire length of the baseboard had water coming in yep and that's never happened before never happened before in the five years that i've lived here all right well that's what we're here fixing and he's doing a great job we got all the concrete torn out and now we are going to be cutting this grade way down to get our grade right so we can pour the concrete appropriately this time so every bit of dirt that comes out of here at this point is dirt that was that needed to come out originally so we're going to see how much dirt comes out of here [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] this was the solution that the original concrete contractor said would stop her flooding issues so yeah we're here replacing this concrete we got all the concrete torn out and now we are going to be cutting this grade way down to get our grade right so we can pour the concrete appropriately this time the customer already spent a bunch of money on this so she doesn't want to put the concrete all the way back to where it was so we're going to here and so harvey's just digging out some of this gravel and aggregate because she wants to do a flower garden across there so we're getting the gravel out of there over to that pile and then onto my truck and we're getting the dirt back in over there for her it can be tricky to match up new concrete to old concrete even though this new concrete here is only a couple weeks old so what we're going to do since she doesn't want to replace all of it she only wants to go to where that steak is right there so we we ran a chalk line from the stake right there to the edge right here where the curve begins and so we're just going to cut this line right here and straighten it out to make it look right so miguel's working on that [Music] uh [Music] [Music] [Music] we are just about finished or the concrete guys i should say are just about finished forming this up so you can see our chalk line right there that's that purple line that is the bottom of the slab over here there it is again right there on the bottom of that slab [Music] so that will be the top of the new concrete and we are sloping down just a little about two inches down to there and then we're sloping down of quite a few inches down to here so everything's gonna drain on that corner right there the way it used to drain so we should be in pretty good shape we left a bunch of dirt over here because we're going to have to refill to do our finished grating over here so we should be in good shape there as well and it looks like we're getting some rain here so it may be a couple days before we pour so we'll check back then we are back out here it's the next day the weather looks good so harvey said we could go ahead and pour and what we got going on here is that that concrete that the other concrete guy put in was about two weeks old or so and so harvey didn't want to back a concrete truck full of concrete onto that fairly new concrete and so i had to bring out my concrete buggy here and you can see it right there in the background gomes on it and so we used that so it took a little bit longer to to pour having to to buggy all that concrete back and forth but that way we ensure we didn't break up that new concrete [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so the concrete guys are finished with the pour and so we're just doing a little bit of floating on it and miguel's going around the house to go work on this back corner right here so he's going to get that really nice with the hand trowel harvey's up there cleaning up the concrete buggy and gomez is over here running the float so this is looking really good some rain out here and so i wanted to come i just talked to the homeowner she said the concrete's looking really good so take a look at this this is exactly what i want to see is this dry line right here hey what do you think i think it's doing what it's supposed to be yeah you see that nice dry line up against the house i love it all right i just talked to the homeowner and the news the news guy did call the original concrete contractor and pressured him into giving her a pretty good chunk of money back so she said that once we came out and started getting this concrete issue resolved that she she wasn't as worried about it anymore and she kind of had the energy to pursue the guy a little bit more so that is great news that she got some money back and so what's happening now is the water is just running on down here the way it used to so she's really really excited and again you can see all you can see how dry it is right along here and we kind of have a little bit of a swale right here where the water is just kind of running down through there and that's what we were going for she did all this finish grading here her son came over and helped her out with that so she said that was god awful trying to get all that done but she got it done and i offered to bring my harley rake over if she couldn't get it but they they took care of it so that was great news so this is a really really good exciting story that things turned out well for her i wanted to talk for another minute about this concrete job and the homeowner you know she pretty much thought okay it's just a driveway so she wasn't really too worried about it it never even crossed her mind that replacing a driveway could cause these kind of problems and so now of course she knows and she wants to spread the word that okay concrete can be a huge deal because the first rain instantly flooded her whole front room there and ruined all the all the flooring and there's no way to fix that and so i see this quite often where customers call me and they have brand new concrete and the concrete is sloping into the garage or into whatever and now it's just completely flooding it and they call me out there and they say well can you do a channel drain can you do this can you do that and at the end of the day the best thing to do is to get the concrete correct because if you try to put a channel drain in there as more water flows into the channel drain more water's got to get out of the channel drain to make room for it and so it can quickly be become overwhelmed whereas if the concrete is sloping correctly away it's going to be falling away naturally and the more rain the harder it falls away so it's just more sustainable to do that so really really check up on your concrete contractors and make sure that they're getting this concrete correct otherwise you can have problems like this and luckily the homeowner was able to get a pretty good chunk of money back from the original concrete contractor and that was all because of the news so she called the news and and said this is what's going on the news contacted him i wrote an assessment my assessment was very very matter of fact i didn't you know say anything was done wrong i just said this is this is not quite correct and this is what we need to do to fix it so you never want to bad mouth anyone else's work you just want to try to move forward from it and say okay here's what we need to do to get it correct and the news story should be coming out this summer sometime so if i get a hold of the news story i will put it in the description but that may be a couple months from now

Channel: Gate City Foundation Drainage

Views: 139,178

Rating: 4.920723 out of 5

Keywords: concrete driveway fail, driveway flooding house, driveway flooding, new driveway causes flooding, concrete sloping into house, concrete higher than slab, concrete higher than foundation

Id: _BRQJa2Al7U

Length: 26min 49sec (1609 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 25 2021