Basement Waterproofing Case Studies

Mr. and Mrs. Wetmore had a home with a wet basement. For many years they chose to add optimism to the problem, saying it would go away due to various factors that the gods would put in their favor. Several times each year the air wa filled with the sound of their wet vac, and grumbles of another "freak" situation.

Some years later when trying to sell their home, the Wetmore's found that once a potential buyer liked their home and got to the basement or inspection stage, they walked away, notwanting to inherit someone else's problem they viewed as unsolvable. Hence, the Wetmore's couldn't sell their home.

Mr. and Mrs. Rainwater's basement flooded once. They cleaned the gutters just like their cousin told them to. After all, he was a builder and he knew about these things. They didn't see any more water in their basement for a good six months. They soon forgot about the incident and put all their stuff on the basement floor.

There was holiday stuff, tax records, a record album collection, personal effects — even Mrs. Rainwater's preserved wedding dress — in a cardboard box like most of the other items. Beginning one otherwise peaceful evening, the sky opened up, as it does once every year or two, and two months of rain fell in two days. All the Rainwater's belongings were lost in the flood that resulted in the unprotected basement.

Mr. Gill wanted some space to call his own. The kids were getting older and taking up lots of space and making lots of noise upstairs. So he hired Billy Doright, carpenter extraordinaire, to finish the basement. "Does the basement ever leak," Billy asked? "Not really," said Mr. Gill. So Billy hammered and dry walled, and painted for weeks, finishing just in time for the Carpet World guys installation date. Mr. Gill was so proud.

One crisp morning Mr. Gill decided to run down to the basement to gaze at his new sanctuary for inspiration before going to work. He never made it to work. Instead he spent the day on the phone with his insurance company, only to find that his newly finished, and even more newly ruined finished basement was not covered by insurance. "Groundwater leaks are never covered" — the words echoed in his head for weeks.

Mr. and Mrs. Spore moved their three small children into a new-to-them home. They knew the basement "had some issues," but felt they could deal with that later. After some time, two of the children began having asthma-like symptoms. When they went to school, they were better. When they came home they puffed up again, and stuff leaked from their faces. What was in the home that was causing it?

After hiring an Indoor Air Quality consultant, they found the cause — mold in the basement from the slight but chronic seepage. "We can get rid of the mold," the expert said. "Will it grow back?" asked Mrs. Spore. If the basement still leaks it could grow back the expert said. And so it did. Mrs. Spore dealt with the mold issue by having her pediatrician prescribe these great allergy drugs to feed to her children to keep the symptoms at bay.

Mrs. Soker lived with her basement water problem for all of her forty years in the home at 14 Elm Street. She just couldn't see spending more than a few hundred dollars to fix it, and all the "experts" wanted much more than that. "Don't do it Ma" her concerned son advised by phone from Seattle. "They're just trying to take advantage of you, being a widow and all." So she lived with it. Years later, when her surviving son Mr. Soker flew in to handle the executors duties, he was told by the real estate agent that the only way that the home could be sold was to fix the basement properly. So he did, using the funds from the estate. Poor Mrs. Soker. For 52 years she had to put up with a wet basement.

Mrs. Soker's neighbor, Mrs. Wright, took a different road. She had her basement properly fixed long ago, and she was spared the financial and emotional cost that became the fate of her dear neighbor. "If I knew about this before, I'd have fixed it 15 years ago" was her only regret.