Waterboarding?

Although it feels like torture, it's self-inflicted. We decided to save money by waterproofing the basement ourselves. With the guidance of our builder, Carol, Pam and I performed the required (and very labor-intensive) multi-step process as follows (most steps seen in the below photos).

• Scrape the the outside surface of the block walls to remove any unwanted features (9' tall along the back walls)
• Prime the walls with a blue mastic
• Apply the rubber sheeting (the 67' long roll was pretty heavy to work with)
• Cover the rubber sheeting with a fiber board to protect from damage when back-filling with dirt
• Lay out a drain pipe all along the bottom (this pipe has holes in the bottom and is laid below the slab grade to drain away the bulk of any water that will accumulate during rains)
• Cover the pipe with gravel
• Cover the gravel with landscaping fabric (this keeps dirt from working its way into the gravel)
• Cover the landscaping fabric with gravel
• Cover all with back-fill dirt

A simple recipe, but one quickly becomes aware of why you might choose to pay someone else to do this work. After a good dose of Advil, I slept pretty well each night.

In with our builder's instructions on how to do each step, he warned me about the rubber sheet's tendency to form wrinkles. We worked intently to keep the finished surface wrinkle-free. So much so, that we had comments from both our builder, and the cement block crew chief that they have been in construction for many years, but have never seen a waterproofing job of the precision and quality as we performed. I attribute this high praise to a healthy dose of paranoia, and my faithful family working along side me to make sure our house is done right, to the best of our ability. But please--never again.