When I was a kid- I could remember my mom singing” rain, rain, go away- come back another day” As I was driving to work on Monday and saw the Chattahoochee flooding several local businesses I found myself singing it in my head.

GA was in drought,now we are in a flood. A friend of mine owns a rain harvesting business. Even his green clients are not in the mood to talk about collecting rainwater until their basements and crawlspace stop collecting rain.

Let’s not beat up the rain harvesting guys right now- they are part of the solution. Water is still a huge problem. There is either too much or not enough and we are on watering restrictions. If you manage your own reservoir, you could eliminate the peaks and valleys.

Since my company deals with energy efficiency, we tell people the same thing. You cannot control prices of energy from your provider, but you can control how much you use and will not be affected as much if their is a price swing if you home uses less energy.

All this talk about rain gets me on a rant about basements. As a home performance contractor and owner of a design/ build firm, I cannot see how any contractor would build out a basement without dealing with water. If you had a basement that flooded recently, I am truly sorry. Some of them would have flooded no matter what, but most of them could have avoided flooding it designed and built properly.

Here are some considerations that we do on every basement design:

Address bulk water on the outside of the house- most of the water comes from runoff from gutters or improperly sloped yards. Gutters should discharge at least (if not more than) 5 feet from the house. Most gutters dump the water on the foundation. The code for the grade on the house is that for the first 10′ the grade should drop at least 6″. Gutters can be easily fixed with extensions that you can do yourself, or that you can buy at your local hardware store. Fixing the grade is not as much fun.
Water proofing- not damp proofing. For some reason GA thought that it would be OK to dumb down the building code, and allow damp proofing for many years, instead of water proofing. The last few days here we did not have “damp” we had “water”. If your basement flooded- thank the State of GA for not requiring (in the past)- water proofing. If you are building a new home- insist that your contractor waterproof. Here are some of the products that we have used in the past: Delta Dry
On an existing unfinished basement- water proof from the inside. Water will always find a way in. Either through humidity or cracks in the foundation. As a good contractor- I need to give the water an opportunity to “get out.” On our basement specification, we always insist on water proofing the basement before finishing it. If we don’t do this and the basement floods- there will be mold, rot and other unpleasantness that will come about.
Pre-treat for termites, mold. Seems obvious, but why not just make the conditions not so friendly for what we don’t want around. We vaccinate our kids so they don’t get sick. Why not vaccinate your home to prevent a sick home? We prefer to use non toxic chemicals that do not make you sick when they “off gas.”

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