Three Ways To Waterproof Your Basement From The Outside

As a homeowner, there are plenty of benefits to adding a finished basement to your home:

• It can give you additional sleeping space if you add one or even two finished bedrooms.
• It can also give additional space to add a bathroom, which is great if you’ve got a big family.
• It’s a great return on investment, and can give you as high as 75% ROI if you finish a basement.
• It’s a way to add space if your local zoning codes don’t allow for other additions.
• If you turn it into a living space, it can be a source of additional income if you rent it out.
• It can be a great way to add recreation space.

As you can see, there are many benefits to having a finished basement in your home. But for as great as finished basements are, what’s not great is basement flooding. It’s estimated that of all homes with basements, more than 98% of them will experience water damage. There’s nothing worse than walking downstairs to see your basement full of standing water or to be enjoying time in your new rec room only to see water spilling in during a big thunderstorm.


So how do basements flood? As the soil around your home’s foundation shifts, it can become over-saturated with water. When there’s more water than what the soil can absorb, the extra water goes wherever there’s an opening and for many homeowners that means the cracks in their basement walls.


Water damage is costly, time consuming and sometimes irreversible depending on what is damaged and the severity of the damage. Even the best basement remodeling jobs and finished basement jobs can fall victim to waterproofing, which can be a real bugger if you’ve just recently completed one.


So what can be done to protect your finished basement? Two words: basement waterproofing. This is absolutely essential to protect your basement and it stands to reason that effective basement waterproofing needs to be done on the outside of your house to protect what’s inside. What that in mind, here are three methods of exterior basement waterproofing to help protect your house:

• Water management: When it comes to basement waterproofing, one of the easiest things a homeowner can do is keep water away from the foundation. This can be done by keeping the home’s gutters clean and free of debris and sediment. Other step is to install downspout extensions, which will keep water runoff from pooling next to the foundation. Believe it or not, just an inch of rain can dump about 600 gallons of water on each 1,000 feet of a roof. Any way you add it up, that’s a lot of water and if you’ve got it pooled up by the foundation, it can spell disaster for your house.
• Crack repair: There are three common types of home foundations—finished basements, concrete slabs and crawlspaces. Slabs are some of the most commonly found foundations, but they’re also prone to flooding due to cracks in the basement walls. For unfinished basements, cracks can be filled from the inside with a urethane injection, but finished basements require exterior repairs with a special kind of clay.
• Using a waterproofing membrane: Another common source of flooding in home’s with concrete basements happens when water comes over the top of the foundation wall or through areas where there are holes in the concrete. Issues like these can be fixed with a waterproofing membrane, which is a coating of polyurethane that’s modified with asphalt and applied thickly to an exterior wall. This helps form a barrier on the foundation and keeps water from coming in.