The continuing saga

[unixronin]

We were told that when the water damage along the bottom of the front wall was "repaired" (more on that later), a proper French drain was put in to carry water away from the front of the house.

This, by you, is a French drain?

A French drain is supposed to be a trench a foot or more deep, with a perforated pipe at the bottom, a mesh screen on top of that, then filled with crushed rock.  This thing was just a couple inches of crushed rock on top of a sheet of roughly folded plastic.

I'm beginning to believe more and more strongly that the previous owners of the house were cheated by the contractors who "repaired" their water damage.  They didn't "repair" a damned thing.  They slapped up a piece of poor-quality interior-grade strand board up against already wet and rotting wood, stuccoed over it, scabbed a few joist ends, threw some cosmetic chunks of board in between them to hide the rot, tacked up some styrofoam insulation to conceal what they'd done, put down some plastic sheeting at grade level and threw two or three inches of crushed rock on top of it, and called it done.

Comments

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

A "French drain" doesn't have to contain a pipe, but should be deeper than a couple of feet in our northern climate. Should be crushed rock, should have filter fabric wrap to keep silt out, should extend below local frost depth, should lead to "daylight" at grade.

Or, if you have gravel subgrade, may not be needed at all . . .

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

True, it doesn't have to have a pipe at the bottom. But it needs to be adequately deep, needs to be silt screened, and needs — as you observe — to open to "daylight" downhill. This meets none of those. This is cosmetic.

To be fair, we don't know what we're going to find when we dig deeper. There does seem to be a lot of crushed rock in the soil below that, but it's mostly just packed earth. And there is theoretically a real foundation drain down there somewhere.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

One other thing I infer from your descriptions of what's going on -- I think your house is set lower to grade than it should be. There's a reason why our 1850s house has floor levels more than three feet above grade, with brick or granite exposed below the sills.

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

Jim, oh hell yes. The landscaping is at the TOP of the foundation wall. Stupid gits. This sort of thing is why I don't want to do residential construction and wish industrial construction would pick back up.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

That. They should have put AT LEAST one more full course of cement blocks, perhaps even two, on the foundation wall before they laid the sill plates.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

I'll note, just for useless advice, that your home-inspector might have mentioned this in the report. *That* is visible without tearing anything off.

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

The home inspector called it a poured foundation...

Jim, we've dug down about 4'. I think it would be good enough to power wash the foundation, put a rubber blanket on it, put in the retaining wall, fill trench with sand up to 3' then put the perforated pipe, filter fabric, crushed rock and call it good.

The contractor (he lives across from us) walked with me down the side yard looking for where the foundation drain came out. We didn't see it. We did however found a section of perforated PVC pipe (about 3" diameter) that was laying out in the yard but unconnected to anything.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I don't know how he came to mistake it for a poured foundation. When you look around the crawl space or under the lower deck it's fairly obvious that it's a cement-block foundation.