Imagine making your unfinished basement into your favorite room! There's no more economical, quicker way to add valuable living space to your home than finishing the basement. Careful planning, followed by expert coaching from a Frugal DIY Pro can have you relaxing in your new home theater, or playing pool, or working in your home office space! The uses are limited only by your imagination!
One of the benefits of working in the basement is not having to deal with the weather, or the dust all over the house. With a few sheets of plastic and some careful planning, we can keep the mess confined to the work area.
Very often accumulating water in a basement can be rectified by simply diverting rainwater away from the house. When your home is built, the earth is excavated a few feet beyond the dimensions of the basement, then backfilled once the foundation is completed. The disturbed soil is now much more porous and less resistant to water penetration than virgin soil is, and so the water takes the path of least resistence and runs down the outside of the foundation. Once the water runs into the virgin soilt at the bottom of the foundation it finds the next path of least resistence which may be through the block, through a crack, or under the footing and into your home. Remember seeing a 4 inch black plastic pipe run around the footing of your foundation? That pipe is there to relieve static pressure, not specifically to drain water as such. Water is heavy at about 8 pounds per gallon. Put a few inches of rainfall into the mix and you have literally tons of water weight pushing is every direction but up, and trying to find a way out. This pressure is called static pressure. If there is enough of it, and your basement wall has was constructed improperly, the pressure can cause a collapse of your basement wall. The 4 inch pipe is there to releive the pressure and to give the water another place to go rather than to kick in your basement wall. So, the first review of a potential solution is to determine if you can keep the rainwater from getting to the backfilled areas around your foundation. Sometimes all that is needed is to add extensions or underground pipes to your gutter system to channel roof drainage away from your home. In once case, we could have spent $3,500 diggin up the front yard and installing a sump pup, or we could have added an 8 foot wide porch to the front of the house for about $4,800. The homeowner opted for the porch and his basement has been completely dry since. We spanned the non-virgin soil with the porch, and ran underground pipe to get the roof drainage away from the house. Waterproofing companies won't give you such as option, it's not what they do!
Finish Your Basement &
Keep it Dry!
Adding value and enjoyable square footage to your home couldn't be more economical than finishing your basement. When properly constructed, a finished basement can quickly become the favorite room in the house!
Keeping your basement dry can be a challenge, but it's not hard to accomplish of you do the hard work! As your professional 0n-site coach and instructor, your Frugal DIY Pro will guide you every step of the way.
While there are certainly materials costs to finishing or waterproofing a basement, both projects are also labor intensive, giving you a bigger savings potential! Expect to save over 50% off contractor prices when you do the job yourself with a Frugal DIY Pro by your side!
Give us a call today at (434) 202-4198 or use the contact form above to get started. Our initial consultation is only $88 and we'll credit that back to you in full when you hire us to coach you though the project.