Thomas Remodeling in Hinsdale, IL

Hins­dale, IL is an upscale Chica­go sub­urb with many homes dat­ing back to the ear­ly 1900s. U.S. Water­proof­ing recent­ly assist­ed in restor­ing one such home with a rub­ble stone foun­da­tion. The own­er was inter­est­ed in pre­serv­ing as many of the orig­i­nal fea­tures as pos­si­ble. For exam­ple, the old dec­o­ra­tive mold­ings both inside and out were stripped and repaired.

Parts of the old stone foun­da­tion were leak­ing like a sieve and there was also evi­dence of a hydro­sta­t­ic pres­sure prob­lem. Com­pli­cat­ing the repairs was a crawl space adja­cent to the mid­dle of the base­ment. The crawl space was built with a poured con­crete foun­da­tion but it was only five feet deep while the orig­i­nal base­ment was sev­en feet deep. There was no way seal the por­tion of the base­ment wall abut­ting the crawl space from the exterior.

The solu­tion was to put in two sys­tems as follows:

An inte­ri­or drain tile sys­tem was installed below the floor and along­side the wall that was adja­cent to the crawl space. This was to deal with any hydro­sta­t­ic pres­sure that devel­oped beneath the bot­tom of the crawl. The drain tile was con­nect to an extra deep sump basin with a sub­mersible sump.

The exte­ri­or was exca­vat­ed down to the foot­ings of both the base­ment and the crawl space. It start­ed at sev­en feet, rose to five feet and then back down to sev­en. At the start­ing point a hole was cored through the stone to the inte­ri­or drain tile and at the sump basin loca­tion as well.

The stones were very irreg­u­lar and most of the mor­tar was miss­ing. The entire exca­vat­ed wall was parged for addi­tion­al water­proof­ing and to pro­vide a suit­able sur­face for the mem­brane that was to be applied.

The cement plas­ter coat­ing nor­mal­ly requires a min­i­mum of two weeks cur­ing time before the mem­brane could be applied. The sched­ule would not allow this so a primer had to be applied pri­or to the appli­ca­tion of the bitu­men mod­i­fied polyurethane membrane.

MiraDRAIN®, a drainage board with a fil­ter, was fas­tened to the exte­ri­or foun­da­tion wall from grade to the foot­ing. This prod­uct does an excel­lent job of keep­ing water away from the wall and chan­nel­ing it down to the bottom.

Per­fo­rat­ed drain tile with a fil­ter sock was embed­ded in washed stone along­side the foot­ings. The tile was brought into the inside tile at the cor­ner and to the sump basin at the oth­er end. This was the only way to deal with the dif­fer­ent foun­da­tion depths.

Final­ly, the trench was back­filled and com­pact­ed and left ready for final landscaping.

Once again U.S. Water­proof­ing was able to come up with a solu­tion to solve a unique prob­lem. The cus­tomer has a dry base­ment that can be made into usable space.