Bad Advice: Basement Edition

These days, it seems there’s a YouTube tutorial for just about everything. If not, at the very least there’s an explainer, a forum, or fifteen webpages detailing how other people solved your exact problem. With some tasks this is fine - maybe you want to learn to knit or unclog your shower drain. But with problems like water in your basement, it’s mostly just a land of bad advice. Here are some of our favorites for the land of home improvement blogs.

Just soak it up with towels

Towels are great for spills. Exactly how many towels do you have? Even an inch of water in a 500 square foot basement yields roughly 311 gallons of water. An average bath towel can absorb about 2 ½ gallons of water. Do you have 125 bath towels? Do you have the time to dry out 125 bath towels for reuse every day this happens? Don’t plan on bath towels.

Make an aluminum foil barrier

That’s right, just tape aluminum foil to your walls to prevent condensation from leaking into your basement. Sounds foolproof, right? After all, aluminum foil is known for its durability and definitely not the fact that it tears every time you look at it wrong. And tape? Impervious to water. This wouldn’t work for a full night, let alone long term.

Apply ________ to seal cracks

There are all kinds of products that blogs recommend, and the one thing they all have in common is that they’re not a long term solution. Hydraulic cement, caulk, spackle, DRYLOK waterproofing paint, it doesn’t matter. They all come with a reasonable(ish) price tag and a lot of promises they can’t deliver on. If water made it through the concrete, what’s going to stop it from taking the same course right through some paint you got from Home Depot? Even with products that hold up a little longer, all the water will do is divert to a different part of the wall and emerge there, weakening your entire wall by creating new problems.

There are times when DIY tutorials are great. Dealing with destruction home problems is not one of those times. It’s important to leave some stuff to the professionals. After all, if you could permanently waterproof your basement with some towels, $50, and a trip to Home Depot, why would we be in business?