Exterior Basement Waterproofing in Macomb County, MI

On the first morning of an exterior job, the side of your house looks like a construction site. By noon there is a trench along the wall as deep as the basement, about three feet wide at the bottom and wider at the top, and a pile of wet gray clay on tarps on the lawn that is taller than our crew. Your neighbors will ask about it.

That pile is the honest picture of exterior waterproofing in Macomb County. It works, and on the right house it’s the best fix there is, because it stops the water on the outside of the wall instead of catching it after it gets in. It’s also the biggest job we do, and the clay makes it bigger than it would be in sandier ground.

Lots where we can dig, and lots where we can’t

The first question is whether we can get a machine to the wall. In the newer subdivisions of Macomb Township, Shelby, Chesterfield and Washington Township, side yards are usually wide enough for a compact excavator and a place to stack the spoil. Those houses were built mostly from the 1990s on, the walls are poured, and the backyard is open. Exterior work there is straightforward.

South Macomb is harder. A lot of Warren, Eastpointe, Roseville and St. Clair Shores is laid out on narrow lots with a driveway on one side and four or five feet to the neighbor’s house on the other. You can hand-dig a narrow side yard, but it’s slow, and the neighbor’s foundation is right there. When the leak is on that side, interior drainage is often the better call even though exterior would be the textbook answer.

Things built against the wall matter too. A concrete porch, an attached garage, a deck on footings, a paver patio, an air conditioner pad. We can work around most of them, and sometimes we remove and replace them. Sometimes it makes more sense to dig the open walls and handle the blocked wall from inside.

What we find when the wall is open

Before we dig, we file a MISS DIG ticket. Michigan law requires at least three full business days’ notice, and we hand-dig within a few feet of any marked gas, electric or cable line. Then the excavator takes the soil down to the top of the footing.

On a poured wall from the 1990s, we usually find a thin black coating that was sprayed on at construction. Builders call that dampproofing, and it was never meant to stop water under pressure. By now it’s often brittle, chipped where the backfill was dumped against it, and gone around the tie rods. On block walls in older houses there may be a layer of parging with tar over it, cracked along the mortar lines. The original footing drain, if there is one, is often crushed, full of silt, or was never connected to anything.

We look at all of it before we decide anything. A wall in good shape needs cleaning and sealing. A block wall with open joints or a bow needs repair first, and we’ll show you what we see while the wall is exposed. This is the one time anyone will see the outside of your foundation, so it’s worth a careful look.

Membrane, drainage board and new footing drain

Once the wall is scraped and washed, we patch cracks and tie-rod holes and apply a waterproofing membrane from the footing up to just below grade. Unlike the old dampproofing, a real membrane bridges small cracks and holds up when the soil against it is soaked for weeks. Over the membrane goes a dimpled drainage board. It holds the clay off the wall and gives water a clear path straight down to the footing, so the pressure that builds up in saturated ground doesn’t sit against the membrane.

At the bottom, beside the footing, we lay new perforated drain pipe in washed stone wrapped in filter fabric. The fabric matters here more than in a lot of places, because the fine silt in this soil will plug bare stone in a few years. The new drain runs to a sump or to an approved outlet, depending on what your lot and your community allow. You can read more about the whole process on our exterior waterproofing page.

The backfill problem

Here is the part most contractors don’t explain. The soil going back into the trench is usually the same soil that came out of it. Hauling in sand for a whole wall is possible, and sometimes we recommend it near the drain, but on most Macomb jobs the clay goes back in. Wet clay doesn’t compact well, so we put it back in layers and tamp each one instead of pushing it all in at once.

Even done right, backfill settles. A trench that’s level with the lawn on the last day will sink over the next year, and more after the first winter and spring thaw. If nobody comes back, that sunken strip slopes toward your house and collects water right where you just paid to keep it out. We leave the backfill crowned above the lawn, and we tell you to expect to add a few loads of topsoil the following spring. The grade should fall away from the wall at least six inches over the first ten feet.

How long it takes and what the yard looks like after

One wall of a typical colonial is usually a two to four day job, depending on depth, access and the weather. A full perimeter is a week or more. Rain slows it down because wet clay is hard to move and harder to compact, and we won’t backfill into a trench full of water. Winter digging is possible, but frozen ground and short days add time, so we’d usually schedule exterior work for spring through fall.

When we leave, the trench is filled and rough graded, and the beds and lawn along that wall are bare dirt. Plants we can save get set aside and replanted. Seed or sod is the last step, and it does best once the backfill has had a season to settle. For a year, that side of the house will look like it had work done. After that, nobody can tell.

When exterior is worth it in this county

We recommend exterior waterproofing when the wall itself needs work, when you are about to finish the basement and want water stopped at the wall, when the inside is already finished and you would rather lose a flower bed than drywall, or when a block wall is leaking through so many joints that inside drainage would just be managing a waterfall. We don’t push it on a house where interior drainage would do the job with a fraction of the disruption. If it’s a close call, we’ll lay out both options side by side. The excavation crew is ours, so the same people dig, seal and backfill.

Questions we get about this in Macomb County

How deep do you dig for exterior waterproofing on a Macomb Township house?

To the top of the footing, which on most 1990s and 2000s homes in Macomb Township is eight to nine feet below the lawn, sometimes more for a deep basement. The trench is about three feet wide at the bottom and sloped or shored for safety. We dig only the walls that need it, not the whole house unless the whole house leaks.

Our house in Warren is ten feet from the neighbor’s. Can you still waterproof that wall from outside?

Sometimes, by hand and with care for the neighbor’s foundation and their side of the yard. It is slower and harder, and on some lots the neighbor’s driveway or a fence makes it impractical. On narrow Warren and Eastpointe lots, interior drainage along that wall often gets the same result with far less risk.

Will the trench along my house sink after you backfill it?

Yes, some, and we plan for it. Clay put back in a trench never ends up as tight as ground that was never dug. We mound the backfill above grade, compact it in layers, and recommend topping it up the next spring once it has gone through a freeze and a thaw. If it ever slopes toward the house, fix it right away.

What happens to the old black coating on our foundation?

We scrape off whatever is loose and clean the wall down to sound concrete or block. That coating was dampproofing, not waterproofing, and most of it is past its life by the time we see it. The new membrane and drainage board go over a clean wall, so we don’t rely on anything that was there before.

Is exterior work possible in the winter in Macomb County?

It is possible, and we do it for emergencies, but frozen topsoil and short days slow the dig, and wet clay is hard to compact in cold weather. If the problem can wait, we’d schedule it for spring through fall. If it can’t wait, an interior repair or a temporary fix to get you through until spring is often smarter.

Do you handle MISS DIG and permits?

Yes. We file the MISS DIG ticket, which by law has to go in at least three business days before digging, and we hand-dig near any marked lines. If your city or township requires a permit for the excavation or for a new drain connection, we pull it and schedule the inspection. You don’t have to call anyone.

We have a well and septic up in Washington Township. Does that change an exterior job?

It changes where we dig, where we stack the soil, and where the new footing drain discharges. We find the tank, the field and the well line first and keep machines off the drain field, since a loaded excavator can crush it. Discharge goes away from both the field and the well.