KGCI: Real Estate on Air - Waterproofing Your Home: Keeping Water Out for Good

Episode Date: July 31, 2025

Summary:Discover the essential strategies and proactive steps to protect your most valuable asset from costly water damage. This episode provides a comprehensive guide to keeping water out of your home, from exterior grading and foundation waterproofing to interior sump pumps and smart leak detection. Learn how to address the most common causes of water intrusion and implement a layered defense that safeguards your home's integrity, value, and your peace of mind.Bullet Point TakeawaysMaster Exterior Drainage: Learn why proper yard grading is your first line of defense, with a minimum slope of one inch per foot for at least six to ten feet away from the foundation. Discover the importance of regularly cleaning and extending gutters and downspouts to direct rainwater far from your home.Fortify the Foundation & Exterior Walls: Understand how to identify and seal cracks in your foundation and basement walls using appropriate sealants or hydraulic cement. Explore more robust options like professional exterior waterproofing with membranes to create a powerful barrier against water seepage.Implement Interior Safeguards: Discover the crucial role of a well-maintained sump pump, especially with a battery-powered backup, to remove excess water from your basement during heavy rain or power outages. Learn to use waterproof sealants on interior walls and floors for an added layer of protection.Be Proactive with Maintenance & Technology: Learn to routinely inspect roofs, pipes, and appliances for leaks. Explore the benefits of installing smart leak detection sensors and automatic shutoff valves that can alert you to water issues and stop the flow before major damage occurs.Prepare for the Unexpected: Understand simple yet effective emergency measures, like keeping sandbags on hand and knowing the location of your home's main water shutoff valve. Learn why elevating major appliances and valuables in the basement is a key step in mitigating flood damage.Topics:Keep Water Out of HomesPreventing Water DamageHome WaterproofingBasement Flooding PreventionFoundation Water SeepageCall-to-Action:Ready to protect your home from water damage? Listen to the full episode on your favorite podcast platform for a complete guide to keeping water out for good!

And welcome to another edition of the nerdy agent podcast. I'm your host, Luke Patterson, with my brothers and fellow nerds, Josh and AJ. So yesterday I was running outside because it hailed here in the Minotonk area. You're running in the hail? Oh, yeah, because the cars were in the driveway because we're doing the deck project. And so there's crap everywhere. So I had to get to my truck to get it into the barn. And so I was running outside and I was getting pelted by hail.

And as I was coming back inside, I noticed that none of my gutters were working because the hail had filled them up and was not melting. So none of my gutters could drain. So I was out in the hail with my hands getting hail out of my gutters. So they would drain properly because it was going to continue raining and be pretty bad. And so I thought that today we would talk about water because last week of the team meeting, AJ ran over what causes water damage in basements, specifically in the Minnesota area. This is a big thing. So if you're down south, obviously you might not even have basements.

But that would run over that to give people an idea on what causes water in the basements. What's the best way to mitigate it and kind of one of the steps to go through that? Do you want to just take it away and we'll chime in as we go? Yesterday, when the hail started, we were actually at AJ's house. That's what I heard playing wiffle ball. And AJ's comment was, guys, it's okay if it rains because wiffle ball gets way more fun in the rain. And then about 14 seconds into it when the hail started, it was like, Whiffball does not get more fun in the hail.

My favorite story, though, I texted Ryan and Jeanette about. This is Holden's best buddy. And his name's Dan. And Dan was batting and it started hailing. And everyone except Holden on deck, Dan at the plate, and Brody at shortstop ran into the house. Straight into the house. And so Brody's whole team had abandoned him on defense. All of a sudden, Milo just grabbed all of his stuff and ran into the house.

I'm pitching to Dan. And he just keeps swinging and missing and swinging and missing. We're just getting pelted by hail. And Dan just smiles at me. He's like, I can't even see the ball. He probably hit the hail and was like, did I hit it? Oh, it was so, so good. I was wondering if Caitlin took a video of that, look.

That would have been really entertaining to watch you, scooping hail out of your gutters. It was rough. I got a video of our back, our back little patio with the hail, but I just posted online basically said, if you're ever curious as to why insurance is getting so expensive in Minnesota, here's why. That probably wrecked a lot of roofs.

I would imagine. Hopefully wrecked my siding. We'll see soon. Yeah. for sure. Let's do a claim. But anyhow, yeah, water around houses is a common culprit of problems. And the reason I brought up at the team meeting is it's an easy way to add value for clients is knowing about water, knowing about maintaining the outside of your house so that the inside of your house stays as dry as possible. The one line I always give to my clients is water is

really great when you're boiling it to cook, when you're drinking it or when you're showering in or brushing your teeth, when it's coming out of your faucets mostly. When it is coming into your basement, it's not as great. So the best way to avoid that is a few different things. And actually, I helped a really good friend yesterday who texted me and said, I've got this little low spot. Do you have a concrete guy that could fix this sidewalk? And I said, well, so I just called him.

And I said, the concrete's not your problem, man. Like, if you fix the concrete, but you don't fix the water, the new concrete's just going to get wrecked as well. So the key starting point is if you do not have gutters, is looking at your roof constructively and understanding if someone were to, this is what I told him, if someone were to pour a very large bucket of water on top of your house, where would the water want to go?

Yep. Where would the water want to go? If someone, if it was raining really, really hard, where would that water congregate? Kind of what would you need to do with it? And if you do have gutters, like Luke was talking about, go outside when it's raining. People are like, that sounds so crazy. It's like, well, no,

if you don't want water in your basement, the best way to avoid that is to go outside when it's raining and see if the gutters are capturing that water. And further, once it captures the water, where does it put it? So we see a lot of houses that have really nice gutters, really nice downspouts, and then the little, the little kickout piece at the bottom of the downspouts just removed. well now you've effectively taken all of the water that that gutter is taking on and that that downspouts taking on and you're just dumping it into one corner of the house, which is worse than not having gutters at all. So what we did at our house being that we have a walkout basement is when we re-landscaped everything, we had them run Schedule 40, which is a really thick piece of PVC in the ground all the way down to the bottom of our property, which is probably like 200 feet deep, I think, the property. And so we ran two of them parallel to each other on the left side of the property and the right side of the property. We have two of the largest gutter runs and downspouts running into the one that's on the left side of the house.

And we have, I think, four or five. They're about equal amounts of water if you were to look at our roof. And they happen to just run all the way down to the park in our backyard. And it gets pretty wet down there. But if you were to walk around the outside of our house, it'd be significantly less wet around. the foundation than the house next door just because we do that. So you talked about the gutters. I just want to make sure we make this as simple as possible.

That's a little bit complex. That's really cool. Ours are dug in the ground too, which is super fun. But so to start, three ways to keep water out of the basement. The first one's the gutters. Gutters are the first one for sure. Second one would be the grade. So, you know, you've seen houses if you're an agent where you walk up.

up to it and you can tell that the earth moves towards the house, let's just say. And it is a, I guess, unencumbered path towards the house without anything stopping it from getting there. That is obviously not great. Which would be called poor grade where it's pitched towards the house. 50% of homes on inspections. At least have poor grades. More than that. 50. 80 to 90. And the way to fix that is on every single inspection report. That's what he says every time. I do. It's on every report. It is. I loop under the drain. I didn't.

Poor grade. I didn't have it on my Zenwood house. Neither when I sold it nor when Josh's buy or bought it. That's true. That's the exact conversation we have every time we talk about water. It's phenomenal. Josh said it's on every single inspection report. AJ says he didn't have it on when he sold his own.

Not on mine. Yeah. And so just making sure that you have a quarter inch per foot running away from your house. Sometimes people put plastic underneath their mulch. That's one way to ensure all the water gets caught. The one issue you run into there is if all the water gets caught, and then your grade becomes bad. Now it's, again, just like having a gutter with no extender.

It's just dumping back towards your house. So I'm going to make this like really simple. Like I actually love this conversation because I feel like it's one of the only things that a person that has like no idea about how houses work could figure out. Because if you think about water, everyone can at least look at it and be like it's going to go that direction. Right. So like imagine where it would run. And if you look outside, you can always see where it's going to run for, Like my house is down. My neighbor's house is up probably 20 feet above my house. So any water that's

coming out of, I look, they have downspouts that pour that then would run straight in towards my house, right? So I have to find a solution because I know water's going to run down that hill and towards my house. So you can at least look at any house, like anyone can look at any house and be like, if it rained right now, where would the water go? Right. You could look at the roof and see like the water will run to here, then it will run into that thing, then it will run out there. Okay, that's going to be okay. Or it's going to drop right next to my house and that's bad. So I think having at least a keen eye of like, if I am, I told me, we just had a, I just had a walk through the client and they have a rain barrel. And like, this rain barrel is so great. I'm like, it is. But right now it's full and it's not

emptying. And so if it fills and overflows and dumps, it's going to fall right next to the corner of your house, which will be bad. So I opened the rain barrel for them so the water could start pouring out of the rain barrel because it was literally just like about to overflow. And like, oh yeah, that makes sense. And just think of everything with water that same way of like, if it's going to rain, where is it going to go? And if you don't know, this is another one of AJ's lines, the first time it rains at your new house, go outside and watch where all the water is going moving around. And anything that's coming towards your house, look at it and say, why is it coming towards my house? Where is my problem point? Is it that the ground just rolls towards my house? Is it that

I have a downspout that's just dumping water next to my house? Like, what is the reason for it? And then figure out a solution for that. The solution part is more complicated. AJ's point about like how gutters work and how downspouts work and buried downspouts and drain tile and some pumps, right? But like the general gist of like, is water going to run into my house or not going to run into my house? It's pretty much something anybody can figure out, regardless of if they have knowledge about how houses work. So Josh pointed out the next two things I want to get into. So AJ mentioned having gutters being clean and clear for getting water away from the house and making sure you have another thing to think about. Depending on the situation, gutter guards can be bad.

They can be, but they can also be great. It can also be good. 30 foot root. So gutters which are clear, which have the downspouse Outstanders going off of them. The second thing that leads into the third is the grade around the exterior of the house. You have the initial grade around the exterior of the house. That needs to be going away from the foundation. Then Josh brings up the point that you need to look for outside of just that couple feet around the foundation or where the houses are around you.

Because regardless of if your gutters are good, regardless of if your grade could solve some of this. But if the next door neighbor and you're in Minneapolis is 10 feet away and they're 10 feet above you, that water is going to run and pound on your foundation. And so typically in that situation, the only other solution is going to be the drain tile with some pump system that Josh just brought up. Essentially how the drain towel with some pump system is, how it works is they cut the concrete around, usually like 12 inches off of the foundation floor. They drill holes in the block underneath the foundation so that water is accepted into the house, into, I call it like a gully with rock and

piping that's pitched into a sump pit where the water is then funneled into this pit. There's a float in that pit. Once the float gets high enough with enough water in there, it triggers the pump to turn on, pump the water out of the house. That sometimes, I usually tell people don't just go to that because a lot of contractors will say, oh, let's just put a drain towel system in right away when you can literally just fix it with the grade and the gutters like they said. But there are a lot of houses, a lot of situations where your only solution that you're far enough away from that house. so you're probably fine. But if that house was way closer to you,

that might be the only solution on that side of your property. Yeah. And the one thing I make sure I tell on my clients when we comes to sump pumps because the general, this is a podcast for agents, so make sure you're doing this.

The general belief is a client will walk into a basement like, oh, there's a sump pump, I'm good. Right? Like that means that the water's going to go there and then it's going to go out of my house and I'm going to be fine. The one thing that people don't always think about

is where is the sump pump going to empty and how is that going to run? Right. So if you imagine a sump pump, it's going to feel. fill up with a whole bunch of water because everything's going to sit in that one spot. And then at some point, it's going to eject all of that. And so when it ejects a large quantity of water, you should go outside and find out exactly

where that's going to come out. And then once I can go back to the initial conversation I had as, how is it going to flow from there, right? So when we did our addition, they did it. And then they had like a little pipe coming out. And I was like, it's going to run right into the corner of the new addition if you don't do something here. So now we have a longer hose that's going to run out and then it's going to run down a hill.

So down the hill and out of the way of my property, it's not going to get in my house anymore. But the biggest thing people I think misconset, like there's been people who have water in their basement and they have a sun pump. Like, why the heck is this happening? It's like, well, because water came into your house and then you dumped it right outside your house. So then it came back into your house. And then you dumped it right outside your house. And then it came back into your house. And eventually the sum pump wore out because it was working too hard.

And then it backed up into your house. So you need to be thoughtful about all of these components in terms of how you're going to, expel the water out of your house? Get rid of it. Discharge. Or the other fun sum pump story. If you haven't dug your sum pump line, like your tube's just running on your property,

most people mow their grass. When they mow their grass, they got to move that pipe out of the way, and then they don't move it back. Yep. And the pipe is just flooding the basement over and over again. That happened to our inspector, Todd. Can you believe that?

Our inspectors will admit that their grade is bad. That's the fun. He even had that issue. If you're at a showing, again, to recap, unless you guys have anything else with water. No. The biggest things to look at with water are going to be the great around the exterior of the house. If there are gutters, where the gutters are sending the water, if there's a sun pump where the sun pump is sending water. Also, if you have an older house and water starts coming into your basement, there's like a 50-50 chance it's the sewer line and that needs to be cleaned as well.

Yes. That's one of the first things we check. Depends on where it's coming in. Depends on where it's, but even it rained that one time at one of our properties. And we thought it was for that, but it was still from the sewer. Yep. We had to clean the sewer line. So one of the first things you check on that typically too, but something to pay attention to you in the basement.

That's all we have this week on the nerdy agent podcast. And as always, remember, be better. Bye-bye now.