Be Prepared to Address Water Problems when Selling a Home

If this is the year to sell your home, better check the sump pump and test the septic now, before they drown. There’s an unusual amount of snow on the ground this year. It’s all going to melt and run whichever way is down. Down is in your crawl space, or the trench of your septic system.

Give first thought to the crawl space. If it fills up with water before you can get to it you will have a mess that’s easily avoided. The idea is to avoid excessive moisture in the air down there. Moisture and untreated wood don’t get along. There’s untreated wood in the rim joist above the foundation sill plate. There’s the floor joists. There’s the floor itself. There’s the vertical supports from the piers of footings down the center of the house.

If it stays damp there all the time these structural elements will rot. You would first see excessive cracks in the walls, then a list here, a tilt there. Eventually the whole works falls down. Not a good idea. Especially since the fix is so simple.

Every house built on a crawl space should have visqueen covering all the dirt. This will keep the ever-present ground moisture under it and out of the air. Every house should also have vents through the wall of the foundation, above the cinder block. More is better than a few. They let the moist air out of the crawl space, reducing further the risk of rotting the structural members.

You can usually open the vents from the outside. Just push on the lever that pokes through. Go down in the crawl space and be sure there isn’t insulation pushed up against them. Keep the vents open all spring through the summer and fall. After freeze up it’s OK to close them and keep your floors warmer.

If this is your first spring or you aren’t sure whether the crawl space gets wet, go down this week and take a look. You should be able to see evidence of standing water. Look for dried up puddles of mud on top the visqueen and water level lines on the foundation walls, the foundation piers and the vertical posts. If this is a new experience you may discover a sump pump that’s been there all along but has never worked. Fix it.

Sumps aren’t supposed to drain into the sewer line. If you have a septic system you are taxing the drain field unnecessarily. If you are on the public sewer AWWU doesn’t want all that dirty water, either. They just want the good stuff. Without a backflow preventer you could even invite the sewer water backwards into the crawl space via the pump. You wouldn’t like that.

The pump should be in a bucket that’s lined with permeable cloth so the dirt doesn’t plug the pump. You should have trenches under the visqueen that direct all the water toward the pump. The pump should have a float switch on it so it comes on automatically. The electrical circuit should have GFCI protection. The drain line should extend far enough from the house toward the storm drains in the street. Otherwise you might just be pumping the effluent where it just comes back into the crawl space. Put a thaw wire against the drain line.

Houses on slabs or split entries with a concrete floor below grade can have water problems, too. With any house you have to do the logical things to keep water away from the foundation. Gutters with down spouts that extend out into the yard. Positive drainage away from the house. Proper damp proofing material against the foundation walls. If all these don’t resolve the problem you have to jack hammer a hole in the concrete and lower the sump into it.

If you are planning to sell, get an engineering opinion of the methods you adopted to address water problems. If you implement the engineer’s recommendations get a signoff letter. Give these letters to prospective buyers to make lemonade out of the issue; let buyers have confidence that you are a responsible home owner. This may discourage a buyer from trying to discount your price because they think something is wrong.

If you are selling in the summer or later this year, get the septic system tested now. All this snow is going to make for high ground water levels. The key test which systems sometimes fail involves dumping water into the drain field and measuring how fast it leeches into the ground. High ground water will inhibit this action, even to the point of indicating a failure of a system that is otherwise fine for at least 50 weeks a year.

This adequacy test is good for six months. You can wait on having your engineer submit the results to the Municipality to obtain the heath authority approval that your buyer’s bank wants. After you have signed a purchase agreement get the engineer to complete the paperwork and you will only be paying the Municipality’s fees once. Get the engineer to give you a copy of the positive test results to give to prospects.

Be prepared before water problems become a headache. You will save time, money, frustration, and get a better price for your home when you sell.