Basement Waterproofing

As with TySticks's post I am also in the process of coating the interior of our basement walls but this is being done after having professional waterproofing performed on the exterior front wall of our home last summer. The waterproofer excavated down to the footer, cleaned the face of the foundation wall, coated the wall with a cement base morter product, followed by a coating of tar. New drain tile was laid and backfilled with gravel. I should point out that our home was built in 1920 and the foundation is made up of I believe two courses of red clay tile. The front interior wall is straight and true with no bulges but has quite a few stains from water seepage and scaling paint. I have just spent all morning scraping off all of the loose paint with a wide chisel and a putty knife. There appears to be three coats of paint and a coat of some type of cement based product. Aproximately 50% of the wall is free from all paint and coatings. Quite a few of the tile also have the glazing missing from the face probably due to my scraping. I know that preparation is the key to any paint job so my question is what other prep work can or should I do before I recoat the interior wall. Do I have to etch the wall with muriatic acid and if so how? Is it necessary to remove all of the old coating? Should I scrub the wall with a bleach solution? And the coating itself. Should I use a cement based waterproof paint or can I just use a semigloss interior latex paint since the exterior wall was recently waterproofed?

 

drbeard,

You have been busy! I guess I would try and use a good acid or the bleach. First, I would suggest using DryLoc, knowing that the product does work well even though it does cost more than others. It might be an overkill but nothing worse than surprises. The latex paints may not hold up as well if there is any moisture underneath. Read the instructions regarding preparing the surface before proceding further. With what you have already done exterior speaking, you have almost assured yourself of a dry basement.

Hope this helps!

 

What you have done to the outside of the basement walls is the best thing you could do to prevent water seepage into the basement. However, you should not take what you did for granted. The ground that you excavated and filled around the basement walls are not nearly as compacted as the ground around this area. The problem with this is the less compacted ground will retain more water than the ground that is more compacted. This usually leads to heaving and sinking of this ground. Heaving is caused by water that is above the frost line. When water freezes it expands about 12% in volume. This pushes the dirt away from the area that is freezing. The area where the dirt goes causes the ground to rise or heave. Sinking is caused by the thawing out of the area that froze. This usually leaves a void in the ground and dirt drops into it to fill it.

What can you do to stop this? Nothing! This is a natural process and will lead to the compacting of the ground that was not as well compacted as the ground around it. What you must do in order to keep a good grade around your basement walls is keep adding fill or dirt to this area until this process lessens and the ground becomes well compacted. Failure to do this will lead to having a poor grade around the basement walls and that will lead to water in your basement.

 

drbeard i have not tried it myself but am setting up to do so. a product called sanitred.look it up. very interesting "stuff".