Installing Foundation Drain Around 60 Year Old House (Part 1)

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Here is the beginning of digging for the foundation drain replacement around one of my rental properties with a failing 60 year old original foundation drain.

[@kirkyorg7654]

hope the wedding was a big hit, Digging out and waterproofing a70+ year old foundation is a cracker of a honeymoon!!! lol please give your new wife a big high five from an old contractor ha ha ha! she is one heck of a gal LMAO lol seems these days there is no time to stop and smell the roses remember balance is important & burnout is real good health can be fleeting. P.S. That is a big job best of luck with it

[@RealEstateRehab]

The wedding was great! Tons of fun. She is definitely patient with all the jobs but you can see her in this video when she saw it for the first time and realized the size of the project haha. It's definitely a bigger job then I thought it was in my head but we'll get through it and protect the house from flooding anymore!

[@TamakiRocks]

Are you planning to pour new concrete for the driveway that was cut out or are you going to try to reuse the removed sections? The spinning of the drone footage was making me a little dizzy, too 😵‍💫

[@RealEstateRehab]

Yea... Definitely didn't think about the dizziness until after I watched it and realized speeding up drone footage like that is not a good idea haha. Lesson learned! Original plan was to reuse the driveway pieces. New plan is to possibly use crush and run instead until I can get a whole new driveway. But the plan is still up in the air! The driveway pieces were a little heavy for the tractor so I'm not sure how easy they'll set back in place

[@joeshmoe7789]

Did you try to channel the water away from your house while it was still above the ground? Looks like a lot of your water came from your roof thru the downspouts at 13:25. Why do you want the water to have an easy path down at the base of the structure? Any above ground water should kept above the ground and sent away from the house. It looks like you're building a french drain. French drains at the foundation are used to collect ground water, areas with a high water table. I think your rocks and pipes should be about 4' out from the foundation, not against it. My first step would've been to get the roof water out away from the house to a place where it can't come back. From your description of the problem and what I saw at the end of the video, there's a 99% chance that would've solved your basement flooding.

[@RealEstateRehab]

Hey Joe! Thank you for the detailed comment and questions. Let me try to see if I can answer and explain everything thorough enough over text. The downspouts on the front of the house all went into an underground drainage pipe that channeled the water to the end of the house, around the corner, and down the hill that the house is built into. The pipe ran a good 20 feet past the back of the house and into the creek behind the house. I dug this entire drain system up to get down to the original foundation drain of the house and I plan on putting the same system back in place when I put the dirt back to divert the above ground water around the house and never get it a chance to get down to the foundation drain. I've read a bunch of different write-ups where some of them supported spacing the foundation drain away from the house and others that said it should be right next to the footer. I went with this route to minimize the amount of dirt I had to move because I needed to re-seal the entire foundation wall below grade so I had to dig down next to the house regardless. If I had put the drain another 4 feet away from the foundation, then I would have had to dig A TON more dirt and was not really wanting to do that. And I agree with your step one! After I confirmed that the gutters were all flowing around the house and a good distance from the back of the house (down another hill), I determined it was time to just dig around the foundation and install a new foundation drain. The existing foundation drain sat ON TOP OF the footer which I do not agree with, so I'm replacing it all together with a new foundation drain that sits just below the top of the footer so it becomes the lowest point in the system (which is where the water will go). Hopefully this answers your questions! Again, I'm no expert at this and not claiming to be one. I'm just an engineer that someone let drive some earth moving equipment after I received my google degree! (bad jokes... sorry)