showcrop
Well-known Member
When we bough this 1870s farmhouse in 1989 it had been rehabbed but still had a dirt basement floor and some water leaked through the dry stone foundation. It was impossible with the dirt floor to ID exactly where it leaked however. Once we got the concrete floor put in I could tell where. It was the worst where the new concrete foundation EL met the old stone. Over the years it got worse, and probing outside revealed the area to be very porous. I blamed it on poor fill material and lack of compaction, and formulated a plan to excavate down three feet, compact, put in a rubber barrier that would funnel into a drainage pipe, then fill with good gravel and compact. I decided to postpone this project until next year and do a major interior job as well as paint half of the exterior. In the course of painting I came across some holes which I probed and found that my bar would drop two feet. I soon realized that this was from a mole problem a few years ago when I neglected grub killer for too many years. I searched a fifty square foot area for holes and filled 8-10 of them. We had a very heavy rain yesterday afternoon and overnight and I found no water in the basement this AM for the first time in thirty years.