[av8rix]

Hi. Hope someone can help me. (though I have a feeling things are pretty BAD here)

I bought my house a little over a year ago. The first winter the basement was relatively dry, though we did have some flooding due to a broken drainage pipe outside.

There was an addition put on the home in 1997 apparently. They called it a 'sunroom' in the permits. There was also a basement dug out. There was no heat vents run to the new addition at all. (live in northern Ontario, Canada). There is a gas fire place in the 'sunroom', so I guess that was what they were planning on heating that room. There was also what appeared to be a make shift 'vent' from the furnace directly under the thermostat for the fire place.

In the fall we discovered that this was not connected, and was actually pumping hot air into the work shop (new basement area) all last winter. We had crazy heat bills, so we obviously reconnected the line.

Shortly after the new part of the basement began to flood. As we began to look harder it was obvious that there had been LOTS of patching done on the floor, and there was drywall in certain places but not others. We had thought he just ran out or was too cheap. HA.

It has been flooding continuously since beginning of Dec 2007. We have to shop vac out the water many times a day.

I have a feeling that due to the 'sun room' designation of the room that they may not have put any drainage in the new addition. And removing the warm air allowed things to get cold enough to mess any patch jobs the former owner had.

So basically I am asking, what do you think is the problem? No weepers? No sump?

Oh, and this mould was hidden. I found it. *sigh*



And here you can see where there was patching on the floor.


Oh, and I DID have a home inspection. What a waste of money. *sigh*

[rtw_travel]

Well... I'll start on this one.

Can you give an idea of the topography (i.e. slopes) of your lot around the existing house and the addition - particularly close to the addition walls.

I assume the basement under the addition is connected to an existing basement? Any water problems in the existing basement?

Was the addition built under permit? The inspection reports and the drawings should be available at your local building department. They will show how it was built.

There's probably no saving your addition basement walls. We had water damage in one of our houses and it caused allergies for my wife. I ended up ripping out the stud walls, washing and then painting the poured concrete foundation before building it all back up again.

[av8rix]

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly!

Yeah, the area around the new addition is built up from when they intstalled the inground pool (which leaked all summer as well, and of course sellers said it was PERFECT when I bought house in winter... yeah riiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.)

The new basement is 'connected to the old basement via a doorway, but otherwise is not tied in at all. There is a sump for the weepers in the old part. But nothing that indicates they thought of drainage at all when they built.

I am in the process of getting the plans, etc. Hopefully that won't take too long. Though I am scared at what I may uncover here. Lol.

[rtw_travel]

The water looks like it is coming down that wall (rather than up through the floor). I think you have to bite the bullet and take down the mouldy wall. At least that will show exactly where the leakage is coming from... which will make it much easier to diagnose and fix properly.

Don't panic... there's lots of grunt labour involved but it should not be that expensive to repair.