remodel basement that has wall drain ditch
My son wants to build a basement room. This is a full basement with a sump pump and an overflow ditch around the walls.
How do I construct stud walls around these channels?
I don’f know if I’m using the right words. to describe the wall channels as overflow drains.
The house is 37 years old. It is planned to do the whole basement.
The sump pump overflowed once due to a faulty switch.
The basement walls and floor appear dry normally.
Are we headed for a nightmare here?
Replies
>>an overflow ditch around
>>an overflow ditch around the walls.
That could mean a bunch of different things:
How old is the house?
Does the sump appear to have been added later?
"Overflow" ditches? Hmmm.............
The main issue is: has the basement leaked before? If so, that is a bad spot for finished rooms.
I've seen a number of houses with this "ditch". Generally it's in an older house (pre-1950), often one that started out with a dirt floor basement and it's been "modernized" over the years. Sometimes the floor's been lowered, etc.
The "ditch" is generally 4-6 inches wide and 2-4 inches deep, running around the perimeter of the basement, and emptying into a sump. And for some reason these are always painted blue or blue-green.
Generally the presence of this feature is strong evidence of past water problems, but the problems may (or may not) have been corrected since, by tiling the outside of the footing, regrading, etc.
I've seen a variety of "aftermarket" drains.
There is one builder in my area, however, that uses some sort of form board around the perimeter which he pulls , leaving a 'drainage channel.
Never seen that, but I can see it would be easy to do. A lot of homes from the 60s-70s have Beaver style "baseboard" drain systems.
But code now (since roughly 1990) requires tiling the footings, inside and out, so most such systems are no longer needed.
I think that is called a French drain ... pretty common for some areas/houses.
I guess I'd have concerns in that if there is ever water that drains to it ... there will be some moisture that potentially ends up in the wall and collects where you don't want it. Assuming the pump always works, the bulk water will be taken care of, but there may be the moisture issue.