Like most things in your life, your home relies on a solid foundation. The basement and foundation of your home support it and prevents it from serious damage. Maintaining your foundation is one of the most fundamental tasks of every homeowner, and you should routinely check for any damage to your house. So, when your home’s foundation is at risk from leaks or cracks, you cannot afford to put off a repair. But, how do you choose whether to patch the hole or consider the repair of your entire foundation? The following information will help you decide on the best method to protect your foundation and your home.

Why Leaks Happen

Leaks in your foundation can come from any number of causes including structural damage, foundation cracks, poor drainage and water in your crawl space.

Patch vs. Repair

When you are considering a repair to your foundation to prevent leaking and instability, consider thinking about it similarly to how you would repair your roof. Doing a patch repair will solve your problem for the short term and prevent immediate damage. However, like your roof, when you find one leak, you can usually be certain that another leak will appear in near future. If you begin to find damage to your foundation or water in your basement, you should contact a professional organization who have the experience and skills to assess your basement. In some cases, a simple patch will work, but in other cases, the leak you have discovered is merely a symptom of a larger issue.

The Source of the Damage

If you begin to notice that your basement floor is damp or wet, the first place you should look is outside your house. You need to identify the water’s path from outside your home to inside your basement. You will want to check a variety of places around your home including your draining systems. Your drain systems are designed to be sending rainwater away from your home, so you need to make sure that your roof drainage system is doing its job. If your downspouts and gutters are working poorly, this can cause problems not only for your foundation, but for your roof as well. You will also want to check the soil surrounding your house. Sometimes, soil stops absorbing water the way that it should, and this lets the water run back towards your house. In these cases, you need to consider not only waterproofing for your basement but your landscaping as well.

Age of the Waterproofing

You should also consider the age of your foundation when you are deciding whether or not to patch individual cracks. If your foundation is very old, and you don’t know if it has been waterproofed, or you can’t remember the last time it was waterproofed, it may be best to consider protecting your entire basement.

Process

In cases where you are unsure of the cause or how to proceed, you should contact your local waterproofing and foundation repair experts. They will have the skills and tools necessary to be able to successfully diagnose the issue with your foundation as well as suggest a solution. By getting an in-home consultation, the experts will be able to thoroughly look at your basement and discover many things you may have missed. It may be that your problem is not serious and that a simple solution can protect for years against serious damage. However, they can also find a tricky problem, and then work to protect your foundation from serious damage before it happens.

Your foundation is one of the most important features of your home, and as the saying goes, wise men build their homes on rock, not on the sand. Regular inspection and maintenance is essential to keep your home from leaking. Ultimately, however, it is very important to discover the source of any damage so that you can diagnose the problem correctly and come up with the best method to fix your foundation to prevent further damage. The cost of fixing your foundation leak is often less than the cost of losing your home to a poor foundation.