His wish and suggested referral was for anyone needing a quote and to subsequently book a job to call Blackmore Quality Construction at 503-630-4453.

Learn what a real dry well looks like.

See what folks are talking about, when it comes to the clean successes achieved with a professionally installed hand excavated french drain.

AAA Home Drainage slide shows on You tube show many uses for hand excavated french drains, as they are being installed. A picture is worth of thousand words, they say.

See the difference in real day practice, through the eyes of a professional home drainage contractor.

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Protect your home from mold, mildew, and that seasonal wet basement or crawl space floor.

Insure you can sell a profitable and clean home, when the time comes, rather than be held hostage to a pest inspection report, delivered to your buyers too late, indicating you must pony up for some cash to solve the drainage problems, prior to closing of escrow, while the sump pump guys circle around you, asking for huge amounts of money to do their thing on you at the last moment.

Read more about this in this website. Step up to quality home drainage. Read and learn the difference. Or not.

This is published for home buyers who do not wish to download the entire e-book.

When it comes to assessing a home that you wish to purchase, home buyers need to… understand common home drainage problems that affect the livability of the home.

Homeowners need to learn how to look for signs that could indicate to the home buyers that a home drainage groundwater problem probably, not perhaps, exists.

Home drainage should be at the top of the inspection and due diligence list for home buyers, but it seldom is, unless a reader becomes aware of the power of this knowledge, when used as part of a preparation study in home drainage health.

Readers learn to value the knowledge here-in on home drainage in real every day use, when solving drainage problems, or when hiring a home drainage contractor in their part of the world.

Study this home drainage due diligence check list, which is written to teach home buyers how to assess the condition of the home they are thinking of buying, with respect to home drainage issues.

Learn which homes have groundwater problems that can be solved, as well as those homes that probably are a “pass”. Too much damage. Too large a problem for anyones budget. Structural problems etc.

When you want to raise the bar, and ask questions, just call us.

There are too many great homes on the market for informed home buyers to buy one of those home drainage pigs from non disclosing home sellers, without serious upside in profit potential becoming a motivating factor.

After the groundwater problems and structural repairs have been completed, a new era begins for the homes worth and health.

Look for a home with exposed river rock hand excavated french drains installed, as value added, only if evidence exists that shows it actually works. As in, no water in the crawl space or basement.

Hand excavated french drains are not a sign of weakness in a home, when professionally installed, they are a sign that the builder or homeowners have taken a value added step to install hand excavated french drains to prevent groundwater entry into the home, as well as to preserve the health and value of the home.

I have inspected hundreds of homes that were under 5 years old that had been affected by groundwater from the day they were built, due to home builders drainage attempts that were doomed by poor to zero home drainage knowledge and planning skills.

Groundwater drainage issues are often misunderstood and not dealt with correctly by the homeowner during their period of ownership. Many times they are just passed on to the next set of buyers down the line.

French drains are seldom incorporated into the overall design of the home when the home is built.

Once new homes are built, with groundwater problems destined to be part of their legacy, they soon turn into older homes with groundwater problems, made worse by procrastination, and owned by homeowners who really may not want anyone to even suspect they have a groundwater problem.

1. When you are considering a home on a flat building site, or one on the low lying, below grade type of building site, without hand excavated french drains, think twice, or budget for hand excavated french drain groundwater removal systems to be installed, and grade compaction work, as part of the move in costs.

2. Make sure the home has wide gutters with adequate downspout locations, and that they look newer and are in good condition.

Look for the proper sloping of those gutters horizontally along the roof line, sloping the roof water to the downspout location at the end of the gutter, most often. Not just flat.

Gutters are not meant to be installed flat. They slope to the downspout location cut in the gutter.

Gutter spikes popping out are the most common cause of roof water missing the gutters.

Gutters should be hung at a slight slope on the facia board running towards the downspout location.

Many gutter systems are hung wrong and overflow over the edge of the home causing roof water to pool next to the foundation and subsequently producing groundwater saturation, hydrostatic pressure, and leaking of groundwater, once roof or rain water, into crawlspaces or basements.

Gutter guards can make the cleaning process seem easier for the homeowners, but I am not a fan of the helmet type gutter protector, which reduces the size of the gutter opening and tends to run rain water, during hard rains, over the edge of the gutter, instead of in the gutter system designed to remove that rainwater. More plastic than air space. In hard rains it is like having no gutters at all.

Look for homes with multiple layers of roofing. If you stand at the edge of the homes overhang and step back a step or two, you will see that homes with many layers of roofing raise the height of the shingles relative to the edge of the gutters line of sight below it.

Presto. Rainwater sheets directly over the gutters. This will make a more severe groundwater problem than had existed to begin with, in many cases.

Line of sight on the roof line, over the top of the gutters, as mentioned above, is a smoking gun for home drainage problems caused by melting snow or roof water run off.

It does not have to be a home with gutter guards that are helmets either. Home buyers need to look at the way the roof height stacks up with the edge of the gutter system.

Faulty placement of gutters and lack of adequate downspout locations are smoking guns that lead to overflowing gutters which can cause wet basements and crawl spaces. The resulting groundwater damage is seldom noticed until inspected by someone professionally looking for such a problem.

Most likely discovered by the professional home inspector that will weigh in on the health of the home when it is sold. Unless the home is sold for all cash, or as part of a Irc 1031 tax deferred exchange, and like the other examples, did not require loans from a bank, and therefore was perhaps not even inspected. In those cases a home inspection may not have been ordered.

3. If you are a prospective buyer of a home, talk to the neighbors about the evidence of home drainage problems in that particular neighborhood, and naturally, specifically at the home at which you are looking.

Introduce yourself, and ask these neighbors if they know of any home drainage issues that the home you are looking at has ever had in the past.

Not all neighbors get along like two peas in a pod. Many homeowners will tell you the exact truth about the home, and do so in a more honest way than the sellers of the home would.

If the home is newly built, take the time to talk to the neighbors or former customers from a different subdivision, that the same builder was responsible for building, and ask about what they know of the builders methods, and any problems with drainage that any neighborhood owners may have encountered.

You will find out that neighbors often have lots of old world, down to earth, hand excavated french drain knowledge, and a seemingly rippin desire to educate you, with respect to what may concern you about the homes drainage strong and weak points, as well as the over all drainage health of the entire neighborhood.

I warn you however. Be prepared to hear stories about underground rivers and springs under the neighborhood and that this has been common knowledge for many years.

The story will go on explaining that they are the reason everyone has groundwater problems, and yes, you guessed it, sump pumps installed.

Do you understand what a hand excavated french drain is? Do you have one installed and engineered properly? Few will know about them, and less will have them.

So, there it is. The stories about these underground rivers only come up when the winter comes and groundwater is apparent again. As a result, in my opinion, over many years of installing drainage systems, that the stories of underground rivers penetrating everyones homes and springs, everywhere, are a bunch of suburban gibberish that got started over a pitcher of beer somewhere.”We’ll just tell them this, then”. Right? Sure you will dude.

While it does happen that a building site slips through the cracks in the approval process during the preliminary plat approval process, and is approved when geologic data and inspection indicate that because of the soil stability or springs that the area should be dedicated as common area to the subdivision and not granted lot status, very few sites slip through the cracks and are built on with geological rivers and springs under them, and coming to the surface under the home.

4. Ask the sellers and their agents about the existence of hand excavated french drains on the property. You can be sure that your buyers agent has never uttered the words french drain even in the most silent of ways.

That is the last subject that any realtor wants to have come up. What a deal breaker.

Come on home buyers, if you don’t take control of this process and turn looking into seeing, no one will be at the wheel when it’s too late to change everything back to re-do and start over, looking for another home.

If the homeowners profess that the home had french drains installed, did they specify hand excavated french drains, and when were they built? Are the sellers starting to fidget and scratch occasionally about their faces, when you keep your questions coming?

Body language will tell you most every time whether they need to be uncomfortable, because of your preparation asking pertinent questions, or whether they are just weasels caught with their tails in the trap.

Ask the sellers if they understand the distinction between a french drain and a hand excavated french drain installed in the old world way, with a hard finished engineered slope of 2″ per 10 lineal feet of grade, venting to a “green friendly” hand excavated dry well or day lighted vent.

Ask the sellers of the home to show you the placement of their hand excavated french drain, if they say they installed one. Ask the sellers to show you the rock exposed on the surface of the hand excavated french drain, and the grade work.

Was the clean river rock within the hand excavated french drain covered up with dirt, therefore rendering the effort fruitless. No french drain would function well in that condition. If the french drain was covered with dirt it would have been destined and designed for failure, unless used with weed cloth and dirt over lawn drainage, which is designed with sod or grass seed replacement over the dry well, if it is located in a yard, for example.

Lawn drainage engineered hand excavated french drain groundwater removal systems are an example of putting dirt back over the river rock on the surface, but in that case the river rock placed over the perforated pipe and sloped bottom are separated by a layer of weed cloth from the dirt and sod which keeps the hand excavated french drain from accumulating the type of debris volume that would cause the drainage system to not work.

Ask how old the french drains are, and where they are located, if the sellers say that they exist at all? They say every picture tells a story, and with home drainage this statement has never been more true. Thanks Rod Stewart.

5. If you are buying a one level ranch style home, without a basement in particular, look for the adequate placement of the foundation crawlspace vents.

Were the foundation vents poured so low in the foundation wall that the addition of soil and bark dust next to the home placed them even with, or below grade to the existing soil level?

Gravity takes that ol’ nasty groundwater and pulls it right into that hole about 8″-12″ wide and long. A huge hole on the ground that can fill up with groundwater caused by rain. Well duh. I guess one could suspect that there might be a groundwater problem. Perhaps not, but my money says, go look at the crawl space and use the list of inspections items included herein.

Look to see if the foundation vents have actually been completely or partially blocked, or filled in with barkdust, dirt, or leaves when the foundation was backfilled, or at the time it was built, or by the present or former homeowners.

This is a huge problem with ranch homes, ( 1 level homes with crawlspaces), and the problem does not exist with this type of home only. Ranch homes most often have minimum crawlspace distance from the floor joists to the floor of the crawlspace, and that makes for terrible working conditions if you need to work under there, and a dangerous place to go period if you live in the southern United States or western states, in places where snakes and spiders of not so friendly intentions lurk.

I personally would not like to trade the discovery of the occasional possum for discovery within the crawlspace of a rattlesnake, face to face, on my belly with no room to even sit up or turn around. You are so toast. Watch out.

You might want to call a home inspector professional in some of these types of areas and save yourself a lot of problems.

If hand excavated french drains are constructed and plumbed in front of these low grade foundation vents, most of the groundwater can be collected prior to it flowing into the crawl space.

If the foundation wall is very low, and the siding extends down the concrete foundation wall so low that a recommended splash block of additional soil cannot be installed, that is not fortunate for the homeowners. Making a grade change against the foundation alone can be enough, without the installation of french drains, to stop your groundwater caused home drainage problems. Most often both are required however.

6. As I have stated above, when you are examining the exterior foundation of the home you wish to buy, look to see if the siding on the home is too low to the ground level, or touching the ground, preventing the addition of soil compacted on the foundation to create a splash block which can run overflowing gutter water and rains streaking down the foundation wall of the home prior to saturation of the soil at the foundation.

Most building codes specify a minimum of 6″ between the bottom of the siding and any dirt or celulose debris, ie. leaves, bark dust, twigs, etc. along the exterior foundation wall. It is nice if a good drainage grade exists and the minimum clearance or greater is there or can be achieved.

If you are building a home from scratch and have a choice in the matter, design and work with the architect to get an additional 10″-12″ of concrete< foundation wall put into the plans that can be used to raise the grade with compacted dirt and clay at the foundation grade level for better runoff of rainwater from the side of your home or what overflows your gutters to the inside of your hand excavated french drains.

The french drain should be located about 18″ from the foundation wall to collect that rainwater runoff and dry out the border of earth between the foundation and the hand excavated french drain all the way down to the foundation footing in time by starving that area of groundwater created by the saturation of rain water on the surface of the ground or overflowing the gutters off the roof gutter system or groundwater bubbling out of the rain drain discharges installed at the edge of the foundation which accept the downspouts.

7. Look for the presence of concrete poured right against the foundation wall. This is seldom a good thing. These areas cause problems most of the time if the concrete is not floated, ie. sloped away from the home at an adequate grade to prevent the rainwater from running against the foundation.

If the grade at the foundation is flat, or slopes to the foundation, it should red flag you to check the basement or crawl space for signs of groundwater entry.

As the concrete cures it shrinks and forms an air space between the foundation wall and the concrete, it happens in dirt too, and the space in the crack may be enough in size to allow rainwater to start the bad habit of running right down the foundation wall during hard rains, flooding the basement or crawlspace.

Look under decks built right on the home as well. Determine if the slope of the ground under the deck runs away from the home or towards it.

What does the ground look like under the deck? Can you see holes, or grooves made where the rainwater drips through the cracks in the deck and runs to the foundation wall. Does it look like there is a slope towards the foundation under the deck

Are there french drains under the deck around, installed around 18″ from the foundation wall? You may think that these items do not matter. I assure you they do matter.

I have advised many homeowners to demolish or temporarily remove their decks, to allow the compacting and grading of the soil under the deck, as well as the creation of a splash block along the foundation wall for better rain run off, and the installation of hand excavated french drains under the deck to stop groundwater entry below grade.

Around 8-10 years ago I advised, and subsequently worked for, a very talented and educated current Oregon governor, to solve drainage problems at his home.

We had to remove deck boards so I could plumb a rain drain discharge and install hand excavated french drains, and replace two rain drains hidden under the deck and flooding the foundation wall. This and around 200 lineal feet of french drains installed to protect the basement from flooding. It had two sump pumps mounted in the floor in concrete and still flooded the basement. True story folks.

He and his builder probably thought me to be quite mad when I first advised it, but I got the nod anyway, and subsequently made a success of the endeavor, preventing the groundwater entry to his homes basement.

A true gentleman, friend, and a professional to work for as well, I might add.

The drainage groundwater problem in that case was that groundwater was rising up in cracks within the basement floor, even after two sump pumps had been installed by previous homeowners, many years before he purchased the home. This was due to five rain drains flooding the side of the exterior foundation, one sump pump recycling the same groundwater, pumping it out to the foundation wall only; as well as topography flat or sloping to the homes foundation, preventing rain run off.

8. Look to see that the downspouts are plumbed into black abs pipe discharges above ground, and not some other type of pipe like ads flex or solid pipe, or perforated pipe, or pvc pipe.

If the home is older, look for the presence of the old concrete or clay tile downspout discharge systems. You will see the top of them standing next to the foundation with a downspout in them.

These types of old style downspout to rain drain discharge systems, either in clay, concrete, or cast iron, are probably plugged and overflowing at the foundation wall due to the spaces that exist between the 18″ long tiles, in the case of clay and concrete tiles, and cannot be replaced or cleaned out.

Dirt plugs them because dirt is backfilled over them when they are laid and the entire system consisted of pieces of pipe with spaces between them to begin with.

In time these clay or concrete tile systems plug and fail.

Connect the rain drains with new solid black abs and ads solid pipe and vent them to a daylighted vent or drywell to protect your crawlspace or basement from groundwater damage caused by roof water running through downspouts unable to vent, and backing up along the foundation wall.

Look for a cavity in the dirt at the ground level of the foundation, behind the rain drain discharge, that has formed behind the downspout location and shows evidence of the overflowing downspout running water over the rain drain discharge, as it is plugged.

9. Look for a white horizontal chalk line along the base of the exterior foundation wall, and look for white horizontal lines in the basement or crawlspace as well.

This is called effloresscense, and it is the lime that was forced away from the concrete in the foundation wall, due to groundwater lying on the foundation or running down the basement or interior crawlspace walls.

The evidence of effloresscense is a direct result of groundwater damage that causes foundation deterioration and groundwater running below grade.

In time this effloresscense is identified by a white powder that comes off to the touch.

The loss to the concrete itself, of the lime strength in the mix, through the loss of lime as effloressence, will actually weaken the concrete in the foundation wall to the degree that, over decades, the foundation will crumble to sand literally.

Extreme cases of foundation damage like this cannot be repaired. If the condition is caught in time, and hand excavated french drains are installed, a home drainage contractor/mason can reconstruct the basement or crawlspace foundation without having to jack and hold the entire house up, while a new foundation is poured under it. This is very expensive work.

This may seem like much to consider about the home prior to purchasing it, but if a clean bill of health can be given to the home as a result of the satisfaction of these concerns, your money is likely to stay in your pocket in the future. This is especially true if the home has hand excavated french drains that are properly constructed and plumbed.

Many homeowners who become sellers are aware of the condition of their home in great detail. These homeowners know that there is a state required home disclosure that is required to be given to the prospective buyers of the home by the sellers. This home disclosure asks specifically if the homeowner is aware of any groundwater drainage problems. It also asks what was done to solve the groundwater problem.

Some sellers tell the truth and will offer the history of their procrastination that has brought the condition of the drainage to the present where it is evident that a groundwater problem has existed for many years.

Other sellers will not disclose these seasonally evident home drainage problems, and will swear to the bitter end that they know nothing about any groundwater entry at all.

The home inspection indicates groundwater evidence and these sellers dig in their heels and profess complete ignorance. These types of homeowner/sellers are the ones to watch out for.

They are easily discovered in the process of doing your due diligence.

Unfortunately there are lots of these types of non-disclosing sellers out there. Beware, be smart, ask questions, and make informed decisions. You can tell the sellers that do not disclose what they know, as they weasel around the issue and have answers to your questions that do not make sense.

This information is also offered on the web site, as a PDF download e-book, for those home buyers that wish to print it out and take it with on home showings.

Just keep asking questions, and the facts will come out. This information is designed to flush out non disclosing types of sellers, who have had a home drainage history with the home, and will not disclose it, even if the law requires it, and they know good and well they are legally responsible to disclose all issues, be it failed or succeeded.

Using the home buyers check list will leave you with a healthy home and produce a fun home buying experience, lacking any drama attached to home drainage issues during the closing of escrow on the home.

Stop home seller non-disclosure of drainage problems.

You don’t need to buy a home drainage problem, and these sellers don’t need to get away with it, and be taught bad habits.