Hi all! In the center of one of our cement block foundation walls of our 1940s-built house there is a 1 inch outward lean (causing no leaking that we’ve noticed in nearly 3 years) with most of the lean occurring near the top of the wall. Not sure if it’s of any note, but right above that spot on the ground level is our door to the backyard with a small concrete patio connected to the house there. We’ve had two foundation repair specialists come out to inspect it. The first recommended installing steel beams to stabilize and the second recommended installing carbon fiber straps. From that limited information (I can provide more if it would be helpful), do those seem like reasonable recommendations? If so, is one or the other generally a better option? Or is there a different solution I should look into?
As for the separate leaking issue, we have had some very heavy rainstorms over the past few years of ownership and during those storms we’ve had minor leaking issues through our window wells and at a bottom corner of the wall opposite of the wall with the leaning issue. The same foundation repair specialists recommended grading + long gutter spouts & an interior drainage system + sump pump respectively. From the bit of reading I’ve done on this forum there are some pretty strong recommendations against both of those as actual solutions. We’d like to like to finish the basement, but obviously need to remedy these leaking issues even though they’re pretty rare and not much water actually gets in.
Any advice on either of these issues would be greatly appreciated!
And here’s a window well. Not sure if you can tell from the photo, but the well wall stops short of the bottom of the window itself, which is the case for all of the other window wells too. The bottoms of the wells are just below the windows, but there is no layer of gravel just soil.
your corner will have 1 or more exterior cracks or cracked ext-parging etc as the 2-corners in this video have - patching n painting the inside of a basement wall doesn’t do squat as someone previously did to your corner and if you hire a stinky ‘specialist’ terd to install an interior scamball drainage system then they will not stop further water from entering any exterior cracks or other possible ext-openings hence they will never stop-prevent mold or efflorescence
the B-window, the window itself may be the problem or part of the problem but more likely there are gaps, crevices somewhere AROUND the perimeter of window allowing water in such as in these 2 videos… and note the exterior-corner crack in parging (block walls). Where you see scrapers under B will, those crevices allow water aka rain INTO the hollow-blocks, that water stays inside the block wall and drops down through the lower blocks (staying inside the stupid fkkg block wall) where the water eventually comes out onto basement floor where the bottom of the block wall meets the floor
NEW window just installed cost over $4,000 and leaks, see where the water was ‘first’ entering, had NOTHING to do with a supposed need for vertical drain tile inside w-well or a supposed need for 3 1/2 mile long downspout ext other incompetent bullshtt
you do NOT need a stupid interior drainage system nor sump pump NOR 55 mile long downspout ext’s from the supposed pfffttt- ‘specialists’, much more like incompetent bubbleheads or frauds - FIND the exterior openings, cracks etc and fix 'em correctly as we have done for 43 fkg years, shttt lol if i can do that then wtf can’t these incompetent TWINKIES do it, think about it
and a shout out to Mike Bazzo Nachi inspector for taking lots of time and having much patience in helping a young Mother who has multiple problems with her home in Sterling Heights!
