I had a wet basement problem and I got some excellent advice from a very knowledgeable home inspector on how to fix it. He said I had to re-grade the land around the entire house so that water would drain away from the foundation, and that it should be a shallow slope (no more than 1-in-12) and go out for at least ten feet. One dump truck's worth of fill dirt later, a month of manual labor, and a large bag of grass seed, and the problem was solved, and hasn't recurred for 8 years so far.
I had contractors quoting me tens of thousands of dollars to dig up the entire basement to install French drains, put in more sump pumps, seal the concrete walls, and re-drywall everything afterwards, but all of that would've just been expensive band-aids over the real problem, which was that water was falling on the lawn and flowing towards the house instead of away from it. Fortunately I already had good gutters that drained to the street, but if I hadn't, the home inspector definitely would have recommended that too.
I have more money now so if I were to do it again I'd just hire a guy with a bobcat to do the grading instead of doing it all by hand with a wheelbarrow, shovel, and hand tamper. With the right tools it would only take half a day (and cost $1k or less).
For the benefit of others reading this: water management techniques are site specific and the optimum strategy will depend on how water is approaching a building.
Grading the ground to slope away from a house will work wonders if your problem is surface water, but different techniques will be required if your problem is ground water or roof run-off. Further, the degree of water protection required will depend heavily on both climate conditions and soil type. If you have fast-draining soil (e.g. sand) drainage will take care of itself regardless of how much rain you get. If you have non-draining soil (e.g. clay) you will need to go to a lot more trouble to keep water out even if it doesn't rain too much.
Further, most of the techniques people are discussing in this thread--surface grading, french drains, exterior foundation waterproofing, roof rainwater diversion--are building code requirements in most areas. Any house built in at least the last 20 years, by competent contractors and in a jurisdiction with adequate code enforcement, should have all of these features built in.
Older properties may, or may not, have water management features. Whether this is a problem will depend on local soil conditions and climate. If in doubt, consult a qualified engineer.
> Any house built in at least the last 20 years, by competent contractors and in a jurisdiction with adequate code enforcement, should have all of these features built in.
For those not in the construction business, this sentance needs the following addition ", but you need to check." Relying on code inspection and competent builders is like relying on software to follow RFC must and should. They should do it, but there's a significant chance they didn't and it's going to be your problem if they didn't, so you should confirm before you buy. You also can't rely on home inspectors to find this kind of thing; again, they should.
My general experience dealing with contractors in a large city with a decent permitting system demonstrates that you have to basically force the contractor to comply - they won’t even do a permit unless you mention it first and some will even actively go out of their way to try to convince you not to get one. Not every contractor I’ve worked with is like this but more often than not it is the case.
Permits are often time-consuming to get and can be expensive. If you go shopping on price, you will likely find contractors who believe the best thing they can do for you is to avoid the time and expense. After all "I'm going to build it to code anyway."
Having done a lot of work on two houses now, I don't shop on price, and my contractor always gets permits and does inspections.
All good points. I'll add that the company that wanted to charge me tens of thousands to put in all those features were saying it was a groundwater issue because they wanted to make money, but they were lying to me. They were essentially salespeople, and they didn't get paid unless they did work. The home inspector, meanwhile, who I paid and who wasn't beholden to any construction interests, gave me the correct diagnosis. There's an important lesson here that's especially apt for construction; always get independent advice. The few hundred it'll cost you is absolutely worth it because the typical cost of construction is so much more.
As for code compliance -- like pretty much all houses in the area, it was built in the 1950s, so it didn't have any of that stuff per code. It had been substantially renovated recently by people who clearly were not following code and/or the permitting process and who fucked all sorts of things up (including the grading of the foundation; they had actually made it worse while doing unrelated landscaping). I also had some "fun" issues with unpermitted electrical work. If I had to guess I'd say that it could be over half of all work that isn't done correctly. So definitely don't trust it. Have someone who reports only to you looking over everything (if you don't have the knowledge yourself).
"I also had some "fun" issues with unpermitted electrical work."
Ca. 2004, we bought a house in a new-ish subdivision of Cedar Park, north of Austin. Built in the mid '90s, it wasn't extremely high-end, but it also wasn't the lower end with the failing drywall joints that were very common. Later, I was replacing a light fixture in a bathroom and discovered that none of the fixtures had electrical boxes behind them---the fixture was attached to the drywall with Romex just going off into the wall.
My current house was built in the 1950s and subsequently remodeled and added-onto at least twice. The custom oak kitchen cabinets by a previous owner are pretty nice. The custom wiring and plumbing less so. Back when I was trying to use ethernet-over-power, I had a fun game of, "Will this outlet get signal?" We had a plumber install a new kitchen faucet and he had to re-do the drain and supply lines in the cabinet---he took the "Device", the prior drain piping, back to the shop to show the rest of the guys.
Receptacles connected using 10 AWG wire despite the fact that the connecting screws are only capable of securely connecting 12 and 14 AWG wires.
Building ground consisting of a copper wire buried in a deep hole instead of connected to a ground rod.
Neutral wires from four 15A circuits connected to a single 14 AWG pigtail in the service panel.
Multi-wire branch circuits wired with both hot wires connected to the same leg at the service panel. Illegal, and very dangerous, as heavy loads can overload the neutral wire to twice its rating without tripping any breakers.
Worst of all, the most dangerous work was done by allegedly qualified electricians who were trained to know better.
My house was destroyed by Hurricane Irma and I had to gut the interior. I found an area where, I am assuming the previous owner repaired as I cannot in my wildest dreams imagine a licenced electrician would do it, anyway the area, was an area where the romex did not reach the other side of the romex, so the person took speaker wire twisted them together, to be about the size of the romex wire and linked the two stands of romex They did not strip the plastic shielding from each strand of wire, just joined them at the ends. So I had 120 running thru basically a single strand of speaker wire.
This is a great observation about the home inspector being more likely to give you an impartial diagnosis. There's an old guy who's a semi-retired home inspector down the block from me and it makes me think I should hire him for consultation when thinking about big projects.
Definitely do it. I got easily 20X the value out of my home inspector than what I paid him. Not just here on the drainage problem but on other stuff as well. I paid him $800 in total to inspect two homes, he gave me detailed reports for each one plus all sorts of useful insights during the several hours each inspection took, and then he answered a bunch of questions via email for free after I ended up closing on the second house and discovering the various problems with it. And for consultation on just a single issue I'd expect you'd pay a bit less than $400.
I usually get at least 3 quotes. A detailed quote is a good sign they know what they are doing. An open ended quote is a good sign they dont. This does not work 100% of the time. But a good diagnosis goes a long way. Someone I know wanted a bit of electrical and sheetrock work done in their house. The dude gave her a piece of paper with 1 number on it, how much. No detail/swag of material, no detail/swag of hours, nothing, just a price. What is interesting is I (and this is just luck) I seem to always get one awful, one medium, and one good. Just kind of worked out that way. The nice thing is once you find a decent contractor they can recommend others or do the work themselves. But finding a decent one can be a pain.
Getting quotes will help you if you already knew exactly what work you needed performed, but if I had talked to 3 water infiltration mitigation companies I would have just ended up with 3 quotes in the tens of thousands of dollar range. None of them did landscaping, which was what I actually needed. So I wouldn't rely on quotes when there's any ambiguity in the problem. I would rely on quotes if e.g. I needed to replace my entire roof, or replace all my windows. Those at least are narrowly scoped.
What is the best way to self educate on these topics?
I know I could buy and comprehend some used college text books. I am also interested in other related topics related to home / building construction and maintenance.
What related topic(s) do you recommend? Any suggestions on how to approach formally learning these things from trusted sources?
Anything by Joseph Lstiburek[0] will give you a good insight into best practices from an engineering and research perspective. He has a lot of stuff on his website[1] but it's it's not very discoverable. Look under the guidance tab but be prepared to hunt around.
If you're interested in the legal requirements for construction--which, unfortunately, are not necessarily the same as currently understood best practices--buy the relevant building code documentation for your jurisdiction.
Along those lines how would one do some formal education on wanting to build (and maintain) their own house? I want to understand what my options are, what my limitations are (non-building code related), what the trade offs are (materials, techniques, site requirements). I want to self educate not only for the initial design and site selection but also so I have enough knowledge to work with contractors and understand the suggestions they are making.
This is all new to me (apartment dweller) but it's coming soon and I'm not sure how to approach it in an efficient and formal way.
I don't think there's a single educational track that addresses everything you want to know.
An architecture degree would give you the background to address most things related to construction, but that's a 2-6 year commitment and is overkill if you just want to build your own house.
I'm not aware of any formal tracks that address household maintenance. Most of this tends to be learned through a combination of reading permanent appliance manuals (e.g. if the manual for your water heater says 'do X every six months,' you do X every six months.) and googling how to fix stuff when it breaks.
There's not a lot of non-obvious maintenance needed on the structure of a house. If stuff looks broken, you just look up how to fix it, or hire someone to fix it for you. There's not really much of an equivalent to car oil changes where something non-obvious has to be done regularly or the building turns to scrap.
For electrics - Rex Cauldwell's "Wiring a House" is written in an accessible manner that shouldn't send you to Google too often. A copy of the NEC helps if you want to really understand everything (or being willing to dig through contractor forums to understand oddball situations) but is overkill for most. The book is mostly about thinking about how to wire a house than prescriptive "this is how it must be done."
I've worked with lots of electricians over the years and the majority of the things in that book reflect the best practices I've seen. Things that don't go out of style like making choices that are respectful of the next person who will work on something. The thing that does go out of style is the NEC it is based on as the latest edition is from 2014 so some specifics may start to be incorrect but by and large it is still applicable.
The Build Show on YouTube is pretty good. Matt Risinger builds a lot of high end homes and puts a lot of attention to details in the construction that the mass manufactured homes don't have.
There's a lot of good info free at https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/ . It's a Taunton site (Fine Woodworking, etc.) and they'd like you to buy a Prime subscription but there's many knowledgeable builders and building science people who really know their stuff. There's much good advice in the Q&A.
I neglected to mention that all the roof water was collected into pipes that went downhill into the storm drains. Having it dump out next to the house is asking for trouble.
> I had contractors quoting me tens of thousands of dollars to dig up the entire basement to install French drains
That's criminal! Before I bought my first house, my realtor would show me how some of the houses we looked at either already had, or would have foundation/basement issues due to land grading and warned me to always make sure the ground slopes away from the house. And that was free advice from a guy who just wanted to sell me a house and get his commission!
These guys clearly knew better but just wanted to get more work.
Pains me to read this since I know that this is 100% the solution for my basement problem, but due to my site context, it's impossible for me to adopt this solution. My ancient house sits pretty much directly on the lot line next to the paved lane. The house is slightly below the grade of the lane and some runoff is bound to just go directly into the house. Of course I have basement water problems!
The true solution of doing what you've said is not possible unless I managed to convince the city to regrade their lane. Unlikely!
I had contractors quoting me tens of thousands of dollars to dig up the entire basement to install French drains, put in more sump pumps, seal the concrete walls, and re-drywall everything afterwards, but all of that would've just been expensive band-aids over the real problem, which was that water was falling on the lawn and flowing towards the house instead of away from it. Fortunately I already had good gutters that drained to the street, but if I hadn't, the home inspector definitely would have recommended that too.
I have more money now so if I were to do it again I'd just hire a guy with a bobcat to do the grading instead of doing it all by hand with a wheelbarrow, shovel, and hand tamper. With the right tools it would only take half a day (and cost $1k or less).