Blue Collar Genius

07/02/2024

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05/28/2024

05/20/2024

05/14/2024

05/14/2024

Can crawl spaces or low clearance basements be dug out and converted into a finished space?

The answer is absolutely yes! Although, this can be tricky work and should involve permits and engineers. If not done properly, it can lead to major problems and even building failure.

This row house in Baltimore had an original basement from the early 1900’s that was more of a cellar. The ceiling height was only around 6’. A flipper dug the cellar out and put in a standard height basement. Sealed everything up, and our clients bought the property.

A few months after moving in they started to get water and soil entering from under the wall. The wall appeared to be original brick and at the bottom seemed to be concrete. Our homeowner decided to start digging around and discovered that the “concrete” was actually just a thin layer of mortar/concrete spread out and smoothed out directly onto the soil below the original brick wall. There was no original footer, and the flipper decided to smear concrete to the soil beneath the brick wall. THIS MEANS THERE IS NOTHING SUPPORTING THE BRICK WALL.

Eventually this could lead to a complete failure of the wall as the water that was coming in was also washing away what little soil was holding up the wall.

A proper conversion would have included a new footer below the slab, with some sort of a way to connect the existing wall to the new footer. This was all skipped.

I recommended a licensed engineer to look at basement and determine what would be needed to make the basement safe again. Once a concrete plan was nailed down, contractors would be called and fielded to complete the work according to the engineers specs.

We never like to break bad news like this to clients, but we are happy to be able to help make a nightmare situation easier and as stress free as possible.

Send a DM to set up a free 15 min call to see if we can help you!

05/11/2024

05/11/2024

This is a prime example of why having Blue Collar Genius in your corner, advocating for you, is so crucial!

This client came to me from NW Wash DC. She purchased this home 10 years ago and the basement was waterproofed by the previous homeowner. She had never experienced problems until recently. Her spouse was moving in and in preparation for that, she decided to get some renovations done on the house. One of those projects included painting the basement bedroom.

The painters noticed that some of the drywall was water damaged and they got permission to rip some of it down to inspect behind it. Behind the wall they found moisture, mold, wood rot, and termite damage. A nasty combo. They recommended calling out basement waterproofers in order to fix the problem.

That’s how she found us. We were one of 5 recommendations to come to through her property. 3 companies wanted to completely replace her entire waterproofing system to the tune of $30-45,000 (the other recommendation besides us didn’t send the client anything). All three of these quotes would have solved the problem, but were they necessary? Was it possible that they were taking advantage of the client and instead of fixing the problem they wanted everything replaced? Put another way, If your car battery dies, do you replace the battery or buy a brand new car?

During our investigation it was discovered that water was wicking through the 100+ year old brick and the exterior waterproofing (if there was any) had failed. In order to fix this, the previous homeowners paid for an internal drain tile and double sump pump system. I tested this system to see how it operated. BOTH sump pumps were dead. I could not get them to turn on. So this means that in 10 years with all the rain we’ve had during that time, not once did the basement flood even though the sump pumps were dead? And other companies wanted to replace everything without testing the current system?

To us this meant two things. She does not need a brand new complete system, and we need to address the moisture behind the wall.

*recommendation in comments*

05/09/2024

I regret that I didn’t get better pictures of this situation. It may be a bit difficult to explain, but we’ll give it a go.

Today’s customer hails from Alexandria, VA. Personally my favorite neighborhood around the DMV. The only problem, is the excessive amount of water. The home was a multi-level home. This means that they have a crawl space under half, and a basement level under the other half. (See diagram in pic 3). They explained that they had a crawl space with a grade that used to be roughly 2-3ft above the basement slab grade. But they decided to try and dig out the crawl space to make the grade the same as the basement in order to get more storage. This was a great idea, but as with anything else, there are second order effects.

Once they started the dig out (the red area on the diagram) they experienced an excessive amount of water that did not seem to drain. A sump pump was installed, but it still CONSTANTLY ran. They called us out to see what was going on.

We determined that the basement was suffering from a good amount of hydrostatic pressure, but not enough that the basement ever flooded. Once they cut the soil from the crawl space, they went just below the slab enough to give a place for that hydrostatic pressure to bleed out. So the crawl space dig out was now draining water that normally surrounded the basement.

Best case scenario, the client would waterproof their basement in order to drain the water before it gets to the crawl space and keeps the basement protected. But that was out because our client just recently paid roughly $50k to redo their basement. So we went with the next best option.

We recommended beefing up the sump pump situation to a more permanent and better installed method, running some drain tile along the crawl space/basement wall to more quickly bring water to the pump, and reroute the discharge to the front yard close to the curb to relieve the backyard which was already a swamp.

(Comment below with any questions as this was a bit hard to explain in an Instagram caption.)