Hand excavated french drains keep your home on solid ground
Keep your home on solid ground. The installation of hand excavated french drains is serious business for the homeowner. Hand excavated french drains are not like lawn flamingos or the color you paint your home. Hand excavated french drains are not an option, they are a necessity.
The subject of home drainage is very important knowledge. Learn or suffer, that is the reality of home drainage.
The unfortunate reality of the neglect of groundwater removal on your foundation culminates in foundation spot footings sinking, wet basements and crawlspaces, your post beam structure that holds up your home turning to dryrot, your doors and windows jamming and cracking, your sheetrock cracking, your foundation walls cracking, and in time crumbling, and many other results of bad home drainage that make the installation of hand excavated french drains a matter of urgency.
One of the most important consequences of poor home drainage is the impact on the value of your home and the ability of the home to qualify for financing. Don’t be so sure that just because you bought the home without the home drainage issue coming up that the next home inspector will not find and disclose the home drainage problem when you sell the home, making your home unable to qualify for the financing your new buyer wants. Perhaps you have already bought a new home as well at that point and are counting on the money from the old home to buy it. That is called being between the rock and the hard spot. You may even lose your buyer.
After all, your home is your most expensive possession. It is where you live, isn’t it. Do you want to live with dryrot, mold and bugs? Do you want to protect your investment in your property and health? What about the health of your children?
Unfortunately many homes in the Portland, Oregon area and other areas around the world are victims of poor home groundwater drainage. These homes always lack properly installed hand excavated french drains. The homes with groundwater drainage problems have failed home drainage systems or no home drainage system installed at all in almost all cases. The removal of groundwater is essential for foundation and interior home health. Home groundwater drainage was formerly one of the last issues to be noticed until the last few decades when lenders started to get homes back from foreclosures with critical home drainage problems that prevented these homes from being financed.
There is currently a world wide backlog of damaged homes with home drainage problems. You can find these homes in the U.S., Europe, Asia, Canada, South America, Australia, Russia, the Baltic states, Africa, and everywhere. I know this because I receive hits on this website monthly from these areas. Literally thousands of hits from people searching the internet for home drainage solutions.
These are folks looking for home drainage solutions to solve their home drainage problems.
The fact is that no matter what kind of home you have, be it a tent or a castle, you must hand excavate a french drain to run groundwater around the home instead of in it. Never build or buy a home in a hole and expect to not have home drainage problems. If you buy the home at the back of the cul de sac and groundwater slopes from all sides to your home site, you will have home drainage problems. This is not a possibility, it is a certainty. You will be swimming in your own bad judgement in no time at all when the floods come.
Build or buy a home on an above grade site with hand excavated french drains and a compacted/raised splash block against your foundation and you will most likely be high and dry, assuming the site was approved as a geologically stable building site prior to building.
When a building site is approved, whether in a subdivision or on a spot lot acreage, it is already a matter of fact that the jurisdiction approving the building site did not find any evidence of springs or underground rivers on or below the building site. The rest is up to you and your understanding of home groundwater drainage.