Brick Foundations, Unusual in St. Louis
Hi, Stephen here with Waterproof Solutions. It’s been awhile, but I wanted to show you a neat, old basement in the 116.
Take a look over here guys. This is brick. You rarely see brick foundations in St. Louis. You see a lot of these over in Belleville, but I can’t imagine this is great, or they’re in really good shape. I can’t hardly believe it.
The Foundation Problem
But what’s happened with this house is that it has a wood main beam and wood posts and water’s starting to come up. Cause this house originally probably didn’t have a floor in it. It was probably just cinders from a coal chute. They wound up putting a floor in it. I say that because you don’t see the pier legs coming up around the wood. You start to see that one.
So, when you see the pier leg coming out of the ground and you see the wood sitting on it, it’s starting to rot out this post. So, before that happens, we want to collect this water.
With a block or well, brick foundation like this, the size of these bricks are like this, there’s a very good chance there’s no footing at all. So, we have to be very careful to not get too close to those walls without exploring what’s going on there.
The Waterproof Solution
The good news about this house is that it’s just coming up here. So, we’re going to run what’s called a lateral down the center of the home 30 feet long and we’re gonna come in and make sure we’re collecting this pocket that’s here, we’re gonna miss this drain, we’re gonna set our pump here, we’re gonna put a radon style basin in.
Not all basements are the same. Different basements require different solutions. Not all systems are the same either. When somebody puts a dirt-cheap system in, you’re getting a dirt-cheap pit, a dirt-cheap pump, a dirt-cheap everything. And that is not how you want to handle your foundation.
Using a Dry Well
So, it’s really important we collect this water and then we get it at least ten feet out into the yard to a dry well. The dry well will collect the water and basically that’s just a T that goes out to the ground.
You know, pop ups don’t pop up when they come time to pop up, so what we do is we put a T out to the dry well and the water goes to the bottom of the dry well which is just a big old tomb of rock and the top of it looks like a drain. So, it looks like the water would be draining in, but in essence the water comes back out when the well’s full.
Just thought I’d show this to you folks. If you have questions about your basement, feel free to call us with your questions.