Seeking Foundation specialist in Milwaukee

[Tony Blessings]

One of my units in Milwaukee has some drainage foundation issues(leaking) and i am looking for someone who has had similar challenges and who they used to fix the issue. Please share your experiences.

Tony

[Marcus Auerbach]

@Tony Blessings basements are not built to be waterproof - the whole idea of "waterproofing" with special paint is missleading. It's not a ship or a submarine, which stays dry if submerged: there are many water entry points between the floor slab and the wall system, expansion joints and relativley normal hairline cracks. A basement is a whole in the ground and it naturally wants to become a pond, so I think "water management" is much more apropriate.

Most houses are built on a bed of gravel and any water that accumulates between the stone is then being drained. If your house is built after WW2, you probably have a drain tile system (=pipes with wholes that allow water to enter) leading into a sump, from where it gets pumped out by an electric sump pump, that turns on every time the water has risen high enough in the sump. If you house is pre-WW2 you probably have a palmer valve, which was the non-electric solution back in the days to drain the gravel bed into the city sewer down in the street. Typically these houses sit quite a bit higher than the street, with steps leading up to the front door. The basements are shallow - they were hand dug, because they did not have hydraulic excavators back in 1920s. 

The gravel bed is your second line of defense, for water that already made it down there. Your first line of defense is to shed water away from the house and make sure as little as possible get's introduced to it in the first place. Ever wondered why roofs overhang walls? It's like an umbrella for your house. So if your basement wall is leaking, the root cause is almost always unmanaged surface water.

• Gutters: take a look at a downspout during a thunderstorm - it looks like a firehose! Hundreds of gallons of water in a few minutes, make sure that water goes where you want it to go - at least 10 feet away from your basement and then preferrably further downhill and away from the house. Almost every house I see has downspout issues.
• Driveways and concrete walk ways: Milwaukee city properties are often built cose together and the water that get's collected on the large concrete surface needs to be managed. The concrete needs to be pitched away from the house and then into the front or back yard. If it is pitched towards the house and suppling your basmeent with a few hundred gallons every time it rains, have a mudjacker correct the pitch of the slabs.
• Grade. Your hosue should sit on top of a little hill, so that all rain water is flowing away from the basement and not towards it. Often times the original backfill has settled down over the years and instead of on top of a little mound the house is sitting now in a little whole, like a bowling ball on a mattress - water flows not towards the house.  Check the grade and have a landscaper bring in heavy clay soil if necessary to build up around the foundation.

After you have done these three things and you still have problems it's time to call a basement contractor and have the drain tile system looked at. It may have collapsed or filled with dirt. Sometimes the can be snaked out, sometimes they have to be replaced. There are many different ways to deal with this, before you have to have full blown basement surgery.