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Spring basement waterproofing checklist

Posted Jul 01, 2024 in Waterproofing, DIY Center

The begin­ning of warmer weath­er brings with it many chores – some cos­met­ic (like cut­ting the grass and pulling weeds), and some more prac­ti­cal (like clean­ing the gut­ters and chang­ing the screens on your win­dows). When it comes to spring clean­ing, we encour­age home­own­ers to focus on func­tion over fash­ion and ensure that their home sys­tems are work­ing well and ready for the change in sea­son, before tend­ing to their gardens.

Spring is usu­al­ly a rainy sea­son, and this one will be on par with typ­i­cal pre­cip­i­ta­tion trends. As the skies start to dark­en and the air becomes more humid, con­sid­er the fol­low­ing items and make sure they’re checked off your spring clean­ing check­list before it pours:

Get the dirt and leaves out of your gutters

If your gut­ters are full (of dirt, leaves, garbage, twigs, etc.) then water can’t pass through them, caus­ing it to build up and pool over onto your roof. Tak­ing the time now to clear your gut­ters can help to decrease the fre­quen­cy of roof leak­age and keep your shin­gles in good shape.

Make sure your down­spouts are doing their job

Gut­ters and down­spouts go hand in hand, or at least they should. When you’re clean­ing your gut­ters, check the sta­tus of your down­spouts. They should extend all the way down to the ground and then at least 6 feet away from the home. A downspout’s task is to direct the water that has col­lect­ed in the gut­ters away from your home. If your down­spout exten­sion is not long enough or fac­ing the wrong way, that can be the dif­fer­ence between a wet and a dry basement.

Keep your home on high­er ground

Hav­ing a prop­er­ly extend­ing down­spout is one thing, but your lot has to have the grad­ing to back it up. If your down­spout directs water away from your home and your lot slopes towards your home, despite the downspout’s direc­tion, the water is going to fol­low the slope of your lot – back to your home. To com­bat these grad­ing and drainage issues, make sure your lot slopes away from your home.

Ensure your win­dow wells are more win­dow, less well

Like your gut­ters, win­dow wells can get clogged with all sorts of debris. And it’s sim­i­lar­ly impor­tant to make sure that you keep your win­dow wells clean. How­ev­er, unlike gut­ters, win­dow wells don’t have a down­spout. They drain from the bot­tom and should have sev­er­al inch­es of grav­el to facil­i­tate this. If you are con­sis­tent­ly hav­ing dif­fi­cul­ties with win­dow well drainage, con­sid­er installing a drainage pipe. This pipe, filled with grav­el (to pre­vent it from col­laps­ing, but still allow­ing water to pass) will extend down to the drainage tile around the perime­ter of the foot­ing (if one exists). Alter­na­tive­ly, you could install a clear plas­tic dome to keep water and debris out of the win­dow well altogether.