We had a deluge here overnight, over 4" by our rain gauge, and I just got a call from my wife that water has entered our basement. There is a patch of wet carpet extending about 3 feet in from the exterior door. The tile floor just inside the door is dry (no standing water), so it looks like the water is either coming up through the floor or, more likely, through the door.

This had happened in times of heavy rain in the past as well, but in our unfinished basement, it was not a major concern. Now that the basement is finished, it's a big problem. Nothing is in the HT (different room in basement), so the Axioms are fine, but I gotta take action!

Lesson learned - take care of problems before they get big.

Anyway, my wife's on her way to Home Depot to get a Shop-Vac and some kind of drying agent. She's gonna put fans down there and keep the dehumidifier running. I offered to come home and help, but she wisely said to stay here and earn the money that we'll need to fix the problem, that she'll take care of the basement water. She's a trooper, my wife.

I've called some waterproofing companies to get someone out to the house to see what we have to do to prevent this from happening in the future. Also, I've hit the web for info, as I'm not that practical/knowledgeable about home repair. What I have learned is:

* most likely we have a drainage problem, i.e. rainwater/groundwater is not being driven away from the house as it should.

* this probably is a consequence of

1. our gutters needing a cleaning so that they'll not overflow and dump water over their edge
2. our gutter spouts needing to be run further away from and downhill from the house
3. the area around our basement door needing a better-defined slope away from the house

What I worry about is the water under the carpet; i.e. will I need to replace the whole thing? Also, on the other half of the basement, there may be water under the hardwood floor.

Anybody been through this kind of thing and/or have any advice? Any info is much appreciated.

I can't offer much advice as I've not had this specific problem. One of the few things that hasn't happened to my home. As someone who's had several roofing issues, however, I hate water problems. HATE. I feel your pain...

I'm not an expert in this by ANY means. I'm not the handiest with home repairs either, so take my opinions very lightly. I'm sure others with far more experience will chime in.

The options that the basement people recommended sound reasonable to me. I'd think that the important thing would be to figure out how the water is getting in. Not knowing the topography and layout of your home, it's hard to say. If there's a large standing pool of water on the other side of that door, and your basement is lower than that pool, that's a problem as the water will find a way in. IMHO you need to figure out whether it's seeping ground water or if it's a drainage issue. Drainage might be solvable by simply checking your gutters. Maybe one has separated from the house and letting watter pour against the foundation. Or full of leaves and twigs, as you mentioned. Something simple like that. Seepage might be more difficult to track down, if it's truly an issue of ground water seeping in.

Mold can be a bad thing. You've got to be really sure that you get everything as dry as possible. Otherwise you'll never get rid of the 'mildewey' smell. Worse, there can be health concerns as well. At the very least, I'd do a really thourough shampoo job on the entire area. Rent one of those powerful rug-doctor machines if you don't own a good steamer vac. I don't know if you'd really have to replace all of it or not. If you can get it clean & dry in a reasonable amount of time my guess would be that you'd be ok, so long as it doesn't become a chronic problem.

I don't know what to say about the hardwood flooring. Mold is also an issue there but I'd think that warping would be a problem too. Is there any way you can pull up a strip or two to check for moisture? Easier said than done, I imagine. My fear would be that a thin layer of water could get trapped under the boards and spread out over a huge area. Leaving that damp is a welcome invitation for future problems with warping, mold, maybe even termites.

Seriously, good luck. You'll figure it out. These sorts of things always cause me a lot of stress and grief when they happen. But I have learned that it will all be ok in the end. You just have to keep a cool head and have some patience.

The main thing, is to know where ALL the places that got wet are.
I do know that anything that does not entirely dry relatively fast, could cause mold.......now THAT'S a big problem.

We had issues at our old place. There was a crack coming down from the windows and we had water streaming thru, so it looked as if the wall had a stream of pee coming out of it (just not yellow of course!) We also had some seepage along the floor. They came in and fixed the cracks, redid the drainage system, and put in a drain so water in the window well would go down and out to the sump pump as well. It was fine ever since. Cost was a bit over $2k if I recall.

Bad luck, man. Hope you guys get it worked out.

--Ken

Thanks, everyone.

Peter is right - the aggravation is the worst part, now! I hate being at work where I can't even see the problem. Hopefully it won't be as bad as I'm picturing. Then again, it may be worse.

We've got a water removal company coming out to zap it all with their equipment, and give a look-see to try to pin down the source.

Will keep you guys posted.

Weeping tile and a sump pump are usually the first calls to arms here... if it's coming up from the slab, then maybe your weeping tile is plugged or has some other issue.

As for water on a carpet - just so happens my first job (as soon as I could pass for 16 - when I was 12 or so) was working with my dad and his carpet cleaning business. For clean water, just get the carpet and underlay as dry as possible, it dries without mold very well by itself (after all, steam extraction cleaning leaves it wet, too)...

You may end up with a water mark where the puddle was... or a slight... not musty, but that kind of smell. Water marks can be cleaned by hiring a carpet cleaner to come out and do the carpet, and the best offense against the smell is any of the N*Odor products (Nilodor, N'Odor, etc)... failing that, Febreze is actually a pretty good (if more "consumer") backup.

The main problem is getting the water out of the underlay... the big commercial vacs we used did it no problem, but they also looked like a taller version of R2D2. With a shop vac, take any attachments off, and use the end of the hose perpendicular to the carpet and suck the living hell out of it... it's got to pull that water up through the carpet backing and carpet yarn from the underlay.

Bren R.

Hey, thanks, Bren.

We have a sump pump, and as far as I can tell, it works (no puddles around it). The weird thing is that it looks like a HVAC condensation drain empties into another area that is not connected to the sump pump, and that is an area of puddling. Stupid contractors. We'll get that fixed.

Yeah, I figured that the carpet would be a tough one. I wonder if I should pull it up and vacuum from the underside?

No worries - Mister Flood is on the case.

JP, I feel for you, I had American leak detection come to my house yesterday because my wife thought she could hear water running somewhere. Looks like I've sprung a leak in a hot water pipe under the slab. My weekend will be spent with a jackhammer trying to get to the pipe and repairing it. Really ruins the whole day.

Whole weekend, too, sound like. Sorry to hear it, man.

Do you have any idea as to whether the sump pump kept up with the drainage? I have two electric sump pumps in my house (one to kick in if/when the other fails or fails to keep up. It's in it's separate sump hole). I also plan on putting in a battery backup sump pump in case the power goes out. This thread just gave me some incentive to actually get it done. Glad you didn't have any speaker damage.

Yeah, the sump pump works; the water just seeped in a different direction.

Just got word that my wife had to dismantle my audio/video cabinet and move the components because now that carpet's wet, too.

That'll be fun to reassemble. *writes off weekend

HomieDad, this emphasizes the need for us to meet for beer one day.

I've never seen Anaheim's version of Disney, so I'm thinking that'll be the way to do it, if Tuttlefest doesn't get us together first.

I wholeheartedly agree.

An FYI on that. A friend of mine recently built a new home and his backup sump-pump can be water-driven. It hooks up to the water line. If the pump wants to run and the power is out, it uses the house tap water pressure to drive the pump. The tap water is simply expelled with the rest. Even with an extended power loss his basement won't flood.

I thought that was a pretty cool idea. Maybe something to look into?

The same thing happened to our basement. Our problem was that our old main sewage line was blocked up. Since it was an old clay pipe and they couldn't get it routed...we had to have a 10 foot deep hole dug in our front lawn to install a PVC access point to route it out.

If you've had runny toilets in the basement or they are not flushing the best that they could, you may have a drainage problem.

Essentially...we had a lot of rain...at first we thought it was the sump pump because one of our two died. So we had to replace the one WHILE water was rising in the sump pit about 1 inch every 2 minutes...that was exciting while I was the one to empty it out with a bucket while my dad was buying a sump pump.

Once we got that fixed, we figured out we had leakage coming through the wall...and at the same time our water softener started leaking. So, essentially, our basement was all soaked, all the carpet had to get ripped up, and most of the drywall had to get the bottom 16 inches cut off of it.

Yep...my parents were very lucky it happened when I was home so I could move all the stuff into the garage while they were at work...and this all happened over Christmas...what a week.

Peter - I thought about one of those water powered backup sump pumps. My brother has one in his house, but on very hard rains he says it doesn't keep up (his has to pump up 8 ft high). I bought one of those battery backup pumps that is actually supposed to be the primary pump also. But I will use it only as a backup. This particular model requires two 12V batteries for power so I hope if the power goes out it would run for quite a while. Maybe I should have a water powered pump as backup for the battery pump? Or would that be overkill?

Just saw this on the Toolmonger blog... $220 battery operated sump pump/water alarm.

Bren R.

I think most people have covered off the basics here.

Sump pump, make sure it works and empties away from the house.

Sump pump alarm (or high water alarm) to let you know when that sump hole is filling too fast.

Suck the water out of the carpet with professional help, powerful vacuums.

Use a dehumidifier on high, or several, to get the humidity out of hte air and hence from the carpet back into the air. Dry out that basement completely!

Lastly, if the Axioms took a hit, below a certain line, we've had no problems (speaking from personal experience as with Bren, we live on a flood plain!).