Hi LWP,
I have found your comments to be extremely enlightening and thank God that I stumbled across your site. As my name implies, I seek out info whenever I have a question or problem. I wanted to seek your advice on a very serious problem we have. I will try to condense my story for the sake of space and your time:
We bought a bi-level home in Michigan. Previous owners failed to dislose that they had a water problem. Previous neighbor told us they knew of problem, told him, proceeded to have contractor out, never had any work done, then put home on market shortly afterwards. This home was built in 1986. It has a wood foundation exteriorly, concrete floor inside. We have had 2 major problems with water coming in during times of excessive rains. This past weekend being the worst of those 2 times. We seemed to find one major point of entry near the corner of laundry room. My husband literally extracted more than 160 gallons of water during this 2 day episode with his shop vac! The water was gurgling up from what appeared to be where a channel in the floor met the concrete floor.

Also, sump pump never went off during this time and it appears to my husband that the only time it works is when water is added from above, never from below!

Please tell me you have some advice to give us on what might be major cause and` who would be best for correcting this problem. Also, front and side of house never had gutters installed. Should my husband have this work done to help alleviate problem?

Thank you for your time!!!!!!

The first thing to do is also the most cost effective. - Make sure you control the drainage from the roof and your yard.

If you do not have gutters, in all likelyhood, more wil be a big help getting water away. Make sure you have long downspout extension (8' - 10' long) to carry the water well away from the house. After that, make sure your yard slopes away from the house. This will reduce the amount of water pooling around you foundation and under the slab. You do not know exacly where the water is coming from (above as in rain or from around/under as in a raided water table.

The fact your sump pump runs constantly means the gravel under your wood foundation has more water coming into it than it can handle. - That is the major reason for weakage inside.

A properly built temporary wood foundation has a gravel bed under the walls and slab to collect and drain water away or to a sump. The detail of a channel between the wood and the floor sounds a little unusual. The wood walls should not be sitting on concrete. The concrete is for a hard floor and to prevent the bottom of the walls from coming in.

You can do a lot of digging and chase down a single leak between the concrete slab and wood, but until you greatly reduce the water that is collecting around your foundation, you can expect some new points of entry. - That is the best and most economical place to start.

The best way to approach this is to engage the services of a site engineer with hydologic experience. The downside is that professional engineers are not cheap ($100-200/hr here in NJ). Often, the solutions they propose are not cheap either.

I am a land surveyor. I have often done the measurements and prepared the maps an engineer needed for problems such as yours. We need to know some specifics -

Is the water coming up through the floor or flowing in overland?

If you see water on top of the ground getting to your house is it flowing from far away, or seeping up out of the ground near your house?

Do you know what is underground - types of soil or rock? If you are on a hill, there may be rock a few feet down, and the water flows on top of it, but under the surface. That is the situation I have at my home. Same thing can happen with a clay layer.

Is there any kind of slope on your property? Most preferable would be to have someplace at least a few feet lower than your slab (the concrete floor). That way you can install a curtain drain (also called french drain) and it can drain by gravity. That would be a trench with a perforated pipe and 3/4" or 1.5" stone around it, all wrapped up with filter fabric and backfilled. You can leave a slight depression on top if you need to catch overland flow also. Then you direct the pipes to an outfall in the low area of your property. You have to have an outfall. Otherwise you'll just have the trench fill up and you'll be right back where you started.

Note - and this is important - if you direct a concentrated flow of water onto a neighbor's property, that could cause a new set of problems. Lawsiuts have been filed over that.

If everything is flat flat flat, and the water is coming up from below, then the sump may be the only answer. You may just need a new one.

Note also - if the water is flowing in overland from far away, you may still have an underground water problem. It just makes it easier to confirm that. You just do whatever grading you need to do to redirect the water, and if you still get it in your house, then it's an underground problem.

Some questions first:

1. Do I understand correctly that the house has a wood foundation? There is a method called "All-Weather Wood Foundation" which is recognized and can be reliable if done correctly.

2. Where in Michigan is the house? If you don't want to reveal the city, at least give us the region. I have a reason for asking...it is that LicensedWaterproofR does business in the Detroit area, and if you're in range, he would be the guy to speak to, and would be good to possibly remedy the problem, depending on exactly what it turns out to be.

3. You have a sump, and the water doesn't seem to get to it except from above, is that right? How far is the sump from the corner where the water enters?

4. Are you in a city where the storm and sanitary sewers are combined, and if so, do you have a "house trap" or "clean-out"? If so, try having a plumber snake out your pipe for you, because perhaps there is a blockage. If you don't have such a thing, forget that I asked. =)

I need to know more information about the exact foundation type, and particularly if it is a wood foundation. Meanwhile, I will do some research and refresh my memory about how they are built.

Gutters may help, or may not matter much. If it is ground water entering through the foundation, then the foundation in that area needs to be excavated and waterproofed, and that is relatively inexpensive, but we don't know that yet. First things first...let's get all the information we need together and try to analyze it, and maybe then we can at least narrow down the possible causes.

Hey Everyone,
Thanks for you valuable information. I will try to address each of you with the following info:
Wood Foundation
Sandy Soil
Yard slopes away from house and goes downhill
Sump pump NEVER runs unless we add water from up above- the leads running into it are capped off
Shoddy foundation work- No dampproofing whatsoever (no plastic, tar, etc.)
Live west of Metro Detroit area
Water was coming in between where the wall and the concrete floor meet. Wood wall base drops below where the concrete floor edge is (floor is edged by wood)by about 1 inch. It was in this corner location where water was gurgling up (between where the wooden wall floor and concrete floor meet)

I think that's it.

You don't need an engineer, you need someone familiar with waterproofing, and that man is LicensedWaterproofR. He is in your area and if he's busy, he can probably refer you to other reputable waterproofing contractors in the area. I see you left a message for him in another thread...one of you will have to leave a way for the other to get in touch. I know his name, but since he hasn't put it in his profile, I assume he wants it to be confidential, so I won't reveal it.

I will just say that I don't think you're screwed at all...you just have a little problem, and I doubt that it will be expensive to fix. Good luck!

Thanks so much Richard! Yes, if you have contact with him, could you pass along that we could use his expert advice? I will say that we discovered why the sump pump wasn't running...the crock was never opened up with piping placed in it to allow water to come in!!

So, last night my husband drilled several small holes in the circles where piping should have been placed after feeling that it was lumpy from the pea gravel behind it, and the water started gushing into the sump. It ran all night long.

As we are trying to sell our house, we want to make sure that we do everything in our ability to correct these problems so the next prospective owners will not have to deal with the heartache, time consumed, and countless phone calls we've had to make in this debacle. And unlike the previous lying/deceitful owners, we will disclose that there was a problem and that we corrected it.

Thanks for your help, and blessings on your day!

Richard he has listed his phone number here several times in the past so I don't think he would mind.

Richard,
Our sump pump is located in the opposite corner from where we had the gurgling geiser. We do live within city limits. When you asked about the city/sewer line...we do have what appears to be a plug in our laundry room floor (same room where our sump pump and most of our leaking was coming from). It is a circle with ~ 4" diameter, and has a square shaped knob sticking up from the middle of it...would this be what you are referring to? If so, it is located along the same wall as our leak, but in the opposite corner. So, if you drew a line from the sump pump to this plug in the floor, you would have a triangle with the plug, leak, and sump pump being the 3 corners of the triangle.

Also, I think Licensedwaterproofr took his private info off the message boards because people where calling him and harassing him.

But thanks for trying to help Jay!

Email me at: rhetzel@ptd.net and I'll email you his name.

If your selling the home you have several methods of fixing this issue.
1. Do nothing and provide a credit to the seller at closing to have the company of their choice come in and fix it.
2. Install a interior drain system that has a transferable warranty to the new owner. (I know guys not the right thing to do, but will control the water and will make the new owners happy unless they read these posts.
3. Dig the outside and fix it once and for all the way it should be fixed.

The 4" plug your referring to is the drain for the sewage system. You can open this and see. The water your getting is traveling along the edge of the pipe and coming through the foundation at this point. It continues to travel until it reaches the plug and comes up around it. You can dig the outside of the house at this point and re-seal this area with cement if you wish. This will help this area.

If it was me I would get the servies of a water proofing contractor that the real esate agent your using (assuming you are) and use them to at least provide you with an estimate to do the job. Stay away from those larger companies that over sell and price their jobs. You do not need them. There are many smaller guys/gals out there who do exactly the same job for a whole lot less.
Remember your selling the place. As long as you have this water under control and can provide a warranty your good to sell.

one last thought. If you have not already done so get a pre-sale inspection done on your home. Let the experiance of the home inspector tell you what you need to improve and what you should not worry about.

Experiance tells me that a pretty picture when you stand in the front of the house will bring people into the home. So be sure to work on the curb appeal.

Thanks again to everyone who contributed helpful advice and suggestions. After having a WP contractor come out and see that we made holes in the sump crock to allow water from underneath to flow in and after speaking with Licensedwaterproofer, they both agreed that relieving the hydrostatic pressure along with installing gutters on a few sections of roof that should have had them, we should be good to go and have no further problems.

Wishing you all a fantastic week, and many blessings for your kindness and willingness to help others.