Damp Basement in Spokane

The general diagnostic order for a wet basement, cheapest causes first, is on damp basement after rain. What follows is what is different about an older Spokane property.

Most of these houses have no footing drain

Perimeter footing drains became standard practice well after most of Spokane's older housing went in. On a pre-1950 house there is frequently nothing at the base of the foundation at all, which means water that gets into the backfill has no engineered route away and simply stands against the wall until it soaks in or finds a joint.

Combine that with a rubble stone or early block wall that was never waterproofed on the exterior, and you have an assembly with no drainage and no barrier. It works fine as long as water never reaches it, which puts the entire burden on what happens above ground.

The buried downspout tile problem

A lot of older Spokane houses have downspouts that disappear into the ground. Somewhere under the lawn is a clay or early plastic line that once carried roof water to the street or to a drywell.

Decades later, a large share of those lines are crushed, root filled, collapsed, or disconnected at the top. The homeowner sees a downspout going into the ground and assumes it is handled. What is actually happening is that roof water is discharging directly into the soil two feet from the foundation, through a broken pipe, with no way to tell from the surface.

One inch of rain on a 1,500 square foot roof is roughly 935 gallons. A failed buried line puts a meaningful fraction of that into the backfill every storm.

Worth knowing: you can test this. Run a hose into the downspout at full flow for several minutes and watch. If it backs up, or if you find a wet spot appearing in the lawn, the line is not working.

Grade that has moved since 1948

Backfill settles over the decades and the ground around an old house frequently ends up sloping toward it rather than away. Add seventy years of accumulated mulch, raised beds, new sidewalks poured over old ones, and a driveway that has tilted, and the original drainage intent is long gone.

The other common Spokane finding is grade that has risen above the top of the foundation, so that soil is in contact with siding. Water then enters over the top of the wall at the rim joist rather than through it.

The mature tree factor

Older Spokane neighborhoods have large established trees, which is part of what makes them pleasant. They also fill gutters with needles and leaves faster than anyone keeps up with, and pine needles pack rather than wash through. A clogged gutter dumps an entire roof plane at one point, usually a corner, which is why so many of these basements are wet in exactly one spot.

Roots also find and enter the old buried drain lines described above.

Where the water gets in

In older Spokane basements, most often through the mortar joints of a block wall or through the face of a rubble stone wall, which produces damp bands rather than a single leak. Next most often at the cove joint where the slab meets the wall. Then around penetrations, including the abandoned coal chute. Water coming up through the slab is less common here than people expect and indicates genuine pressure from below.

The damp-but-never-wet version

Most Spokane basement calls are not about standing water. They are about a basement that is never visibly wet and is always slightly damp, with a persistent smell.

That is vapor moving through masonry plus evaporation off a slab with no vapor barrier under it, because vapor barriers under slabs were not standard when these were poured. A hygrometer over a few weeks tells you more than a look after a storm, and a dehumidifier that runs constantly without ever satisfying is telling you there is a continuous source.

When to call us rather than a gutter contractor

Water on bare concrete that dries in a day is a drainage job. It becomes our question when it reached something organic: carpet and pad, drywall, the bottom plate of a framed wall, fiberglass in a cavity, furring strips against the masonry, or stored cardboard. Or when the smell outlived the water, which reliably means something in a cavity never dried.

Coal chutes, oil tank lines and openings nobody remembers

Houses built here before the 1950s were heated with coal and then with fuel oil, and almost all of them still carry the openings. A coal chute that was bricked up with whatever was on hand. A fill pipe that was cut off at grade and capped, or not. A vent line through the rim joist that used to serve a tank that was removed in 1972. Each of these is a hole through the foundation, at or near grade, filled with mortar that is now eighty years older than the wall around it.

Water finds these first because the patched material is more porous than the original and the joint between them is a crack by definition. On the inside, they are usually behind a workbench, a furnace, or a wall somebody built in the seventies, so they do not get looked at. When we find a damp reading that does not match the downspouts or the grade, an abandoned opening is one of the first things we go looking for, and it is often the whole answer. Sealing one properly is a morning of work, not a foundation project.

Stairwells, areaways and the drain at the bottom

A lot of Spokane houses have an exterior basement entrance, a set of concrete steps down to a door below grade. That configuration is a bucket. It collects every bit of rain and snow that falls in it plus whatever runs off the roof above, and it holds that water against a door and a threshold that were never designed to be below the waterline.

There is a drain at the bottom. It is usually original, it is usually clay or cast iron, and it usually ties into something that has been abandoned or crushed. Leaves and grit fill the grate every autumn. By the time water is standing, the threshold has been wicking for years and the framing around the door has taken on moisture that never fully leaves. We look at the door frame, the bottom of the jambs, and the wall on both sides, and we test the drain by putting water in it rather than assuming. If it backs up, that is the finding, and a new drain line is a far smaller job than what people fear when they see a wet basement wall.

Pricing

Why an independent tester

Neither Washington nor Idaho licenses mold assessment or mold remediation. The Washington Department of Health states plainly that there are no certification requirements and that anyone can call themselves a mold specialist. New York made it illegal for one company to both assess and remediate the same job under Labor Law Article 32. Nothing like that exists here, which means the company telling you how bad it is and the company selling the fix are frequently the same company.

We test only. No remediation, no reconstruction, no referral fees from the companies that do that work. The report reads the same whether the answer is that your house is fine or that something needs to be opened up.

Frequently asked questions

How do I know if my buried downspout line still works? Run a hose into the downspout at full flow for several minutes. If it backs up at the top, or a wet area appears in the lawn along the line, it is broken or blocked. Many older Spokane lines have failed without the homeowner knowing.

My basement has always been damp. Is it too late to fix? No. Most of these respond to exterior drainage work: downspout extensions, regrading, and clearing or replacing failed buried lines. Interior dehumidification handles the residual vapor coming through old masonry.

Does an old Spokane house need an interior drain system? Sometimes, but it is rarely the first step. Correct the roof water and the grade first, because those are cheap and they resolve a large share of cases. An interior system is warranted when water is entering under genuine pressure after surface drainage is right.

Do you charge extra to come to older neighborhoods? No. There is no trip fee anywhere we travel, in the city or outside it. The standard inspection is $425 including one indoor air sample and an outdoor control.