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If anyone's following along, I did tonight find one local Structural Engineer on the net. Absolutely no reviews listed anywhere, and this is just the beginning!
With a walkout and drain, you probably can get away without a sump pump. Just tie the french drain into your existing drain (probably replace it too). Ditto on the structural engineer first as you don't want to do anything until your certain you don't have a foundation problem that needs fixing. Also, the engineer may be able to give you leads on who to hire next.
With a walkout and drain, you probably can get away without a sump pump. Just tie the french drain into your existing drain (probably replace it too). Ditto on the structural engineer first as you don't want to do anything until your certain you don't have a foundation problem that needs fixing. Also, the engineer may be able to give you leads on who to hire next.
Thanks! If I can get the basement floor to drain properly, even if it means ripping it up and repouring it, I agree that the sump pump might not be needed. Ok with me-- less expense!
Good idea on the referrals. I am having a hard time finding people as it is.
Hello again! Just in case anyone is wondering what happened to my basement floor, I finally found a structural engineer who referred me to a geotechnical engineer, and that person came out and assessed my situation.
Now I have another engineer who runs an excavating business coming over here today to see which solution would be best for my water intrusion problem. Wish me luck!!!
There are not a lot of structural engineers working on single houses, they work on bridges, dams, pipelines, office towers, hotels, hospitals, and the like. What you are looking for is probably a civil engineer not structural anyway.
There are not a lot of structural engineers working on single houses, they work on bridges, dams, pipelines, office towers, hotels, hospitals, and the like. What you are looking for is probably a civil engineer not structural anyway.
Hello and thanks for the input. I sure am learning a lot from this one problem.
The fellow who came today was, as I was told, an engineer who owns an excavating company.
He thought the first thing to do was to investigate whether there are drainage pipes at the outside foundation. The structure of the house means that there are three sides under the earth and one side open to the driveway, which is a walk-out or around here is called a bulkhead.
That sounded reasonable to me since it would only involve digging a small area on the back and probably front of the house (at the outside) to see if there is any piping near the base of the cement walls.
If that fails, he thinks digging a trench all the way from the surface to the bottom of the basement wall and installing proper drainage may be the way to go. We also talked about cutting the cement of the basement floor along the front and back walls and installing a drainage pipe there, but he was not very enthusiastic about that, since it might create more problems (as in giving ground water a place to well up) than it would solve.
So I will wait until he can come and do the initial work and go from there. This is probably going to be later this fall, since his schedule is full.
I'm going to have to look up and see what a civil engineer does. That is something I have not thought of as yet.
Thanks again for the comments.
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