The main issue with this house is keeping it dry. Water seeps through our back walls from the high ground on the other side of them. This water needs collecting and sending safely away. So, before we install anything that will concentrate the water, we have to have somewhere to send it. Otherwise we’ll just end up with one very damp corner of our house!
The easiest place to make exits low enough in the floor structure would be through the new foundation for the new wall in place of the garage door. We had booked the concrete pour for the foundation for 3 days time, so needed to put pipes through the trench in place before this – setting us up for a very enjoyable bank holiday weekend.
The bulk of the water comes through the back wall in one place, and is collected in an existing drain at the back of the garage. The previous owners told us there was a pipe taking this water under the garage floor and out the front of the garage, which we confirmed during the foundation digging. This had apparently been carrying away the water for years; we had seen it flowing throughout the buying process (10 months, including over winter) and so believed it to be fairly reliable. Presumably this pipe went on to join some public infrastructure, taking water away from the property. Our plan is to connect all of our new drainage to this outflow.
We will be adding channels at the edges of the new floor slab to collect the rest of the water coming through the walls (that doesn’t end up in the garage drain). We need to ensure there is always a way for the water from these channels to drain, or our whole damp-proofing plan falls apart! We decided we would keep the existing pipe connecting the garage drain to the public infrastructure at the front, but unfortunately, we were about to pour a concrete foundation in the way. We also decided that the only sensible (and maintainable) way to route the water from the slab channels was through two new pipes through the foundation; this would result in everything being rod-able should anything block. Three pipes to go through the foundation, join together outside in an inspection chamber, then join to the existing exit point – easy.
Having a plan, we bought the pipes, connectors and inspection chamber, and began to install. On digging a hole in front of the garage for the inspection chamber, we discovered that the original exit pipe just… stopped. It didn’t seem to be connected to anything, but simply be depositing the water into some bricks and stone underground; technically a “soakaway”, but that would be a very generous term. It was as we were having this realisation that we noticed something else; the water level in the “soakaway” was rising. As it turns out, digging a foundation trench next to a soakaway has a tendency to block said soakaway, as all the loose soil and silt is washed into it, filling all the little drainage holes emptying it.
The water level was already quite high, only a couple of inches below the bottom of the foundation trench. So we dug, hoping to discover some hidden, more capable water-drainage mechanism – surely this tiny soakaway hadn’t dealt with all the water for all these years! The water was cold, and the hole was full of stones and bricks and horrible silty gunk. We dug some more, hoping to clear some blockage and see the water disappear. The deeper we dug, the deeper the water got. The hole got closer and closer to the edge of our property, both in the direction of the road and our neighbour’s front patio; we had to stop before we collapsed either!
We tried poking the depths of the hole with various instruments – including the garage door locking bar. Multiple times our hopes were raised as the bar slid deep into the surrounding material – surely we’d found an exit point, and the hole would empty as soon as the pokey stick was no longer embedded – but no change. Whatever was down there was not taking the water away very quickly at all. It was maintaining a fairly consistent level below the of the foundation hole, so we tried to convince ourselves this was how it had always been. Maybe it had been at that level for years now. Then I decided to have a go at clearing some gunk… the level got higher, and higher and started to fill the foundation trench…
Whoops.
By this time it was Monday evening, with the foundation being poured on Tuesday morning. We removed more and more gunk but eventually we admitted defeat, hoped for the best overnight and planned to rent a pump the next day.
In the morning, the water was even higher, threatening to come all the way into the house. Thankfully, the local plant hire had some ridiculously over-specced pumps, complete with fire-engine style hoses; we almost felt silly for all the panic when the one we rented emptied the entire trench in less than a few minutes.
With the pump standing guard, the foundation was poured. Thankfully, instead of trying to assign blame for the additional blocking, Ethan came up with the idea to order an industrial wet and dry vacuum. We thought it was a long shot, but maybe if we could get some of the silt out it would start draining and we could finally see what was going on, rather than scrabbling around in muddy water.
We looked crazy spending our evenings hoovering our front garden, right next to the road so every passer by could watch us. But when that water started flowing away – what a feeling. That hoover is the new love of my life – sorry Ethan. I was so happy, our house wasn’t doomed to flood.
After we had cleared up, Ethan’s dad happened to pass by, and I was still so excited I dragged him over to see it exclaiming “LOOK AT THE HOLE! LOOK AT THE HOLE!”.
So:
More realistically, this is likely not the last chapter in the saga of the silty soakaway.
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