Thanks Doug

Hello, I have a drain tile question. My house is about 35 years old and it has a full basement. I bought the house a couple of years ago, so I don't know how the drain tile is arranged. I have a basement door that is half below grade. There's a sloping sidewalk up to grade, and at the bottom of the sidewalk at bottom of the door is a 2" floor drain. The drain was made by busting the clay drain tile and re-mortaring it back together with the drain hardware installed. There's no protection for this area, so plenty dirt and leaves collects in and around the drain. When I bought the house, the drain was completely plugged. I used a shop vac to clean it out, then snaked it about 12 feet. It works, but slowly, and I know I will have to repeat the cleaning. The original door was rotted from water damage, and heavy rain would back up into a small room there. Fortunately, the drain in the floor of that room works good. Recently I decided to determine if in fact the drain tile went anywhere, and if so, where it went. The drain in question is about 4 feet from a corner of the house, and I had noticed that the water in the drain flowed towards this corner. This corner is also the shallowist of the house, with the footer about 4 feet below grade. So, I dug a hole at the corner down to the drain tile to see what I could see. Well, it doesn't drain anywhere! At the corner are just the two clay drain tiles, one heading towards the door, the other heading along the back of the house. The one along the back of the house is clogged with dirt. So I have no idea where the water goes, and there is a further complication. The part of the basement behind this door is a small room. The floor of the room is two cinder blocks above the rest of the basement. This little room was a retrofit, since it used to be a cawlspace under a small sunroom. This floor is at the depth of the footer, which is 4 feet down. The rest of the basement is deeper, so can I assume that the drain tile for the rest of the basement is also deeper? I don't know yet if the drain tile that heads from the corner of the house where I dug continues on to the rest of the basement, or if it ends at the step in the footer. I'll find that out when I snake it soon. So, does anyone have any ideas what happens to the drain tile at the step in the footer? To add to this difficulty, I need to make a place for the water to go from that sidewalk drain, and also make it so that I can clean it out once in a while. Before I realized that this drain tile is probably not connected to the rest of the basement drain tile, I was going to install an outside cistern and sump pump to bring the water back up to the surface and dispose of it that way. But if this drain tile is only for a small area and not the whole house, then I'm not going to bother. I am currently considering just building a cinder block cavity at the corner and just burying it. I won't be able to clean it out from that end, but I suppose it would be better than what I have now. I would also like to appeal to any wisdom on this forum about drain tiles in general. I thought that normally, the drain tile either extends away from the house until the ground slopes down far enough for the tile to exit at the surface, or the tile empties into a pit of some kind, either with or without a pump. My lot does not slope fast enough to allow the first alternative, there is no pump, and have doubts that there's a pit either. We are on well and septic, so there is no storm drain for this purpose. The reason I doubt that there's a pit is because most of the basement is about 6 feet below grade, and any pit would have entailed a huge amount of digging. The basement has a history of water problems, none severe. There are also a couple of floor drains that don't drain. I've snaked one of them and it just went to gravel. So, anyone have some spare time to waste on answering my questions? Any help is appreciated.

As any self-respecting male home owner... (at least ones without kids), I'm putting a bar in my basement. I'm playing with the idea of a glass block front to the bar... think it'll go very well with the glass block windows and partition walls. Anyone have a good source for bar plans? A book, magazine or even online source would help a lot when designing this bar. Thanks in advance. -scott