Historic Cellar in Jerome, ID
Challenge
One fall we came across a family who had a large leak in a root cellar under their house. We have worked with a few root and potato cellars before but the location of this one was a bit different. In order to reach the cellar you would have to go down into the basement and then crawl through a narrow crawl space type hallway before the basement opened back up. The owner told us about how her great grandfather had built the tunnel and room during prohibition times, and then later converted it into a cellar. They didn't use this area or the basement any longer but when they notice an odor coming from the cellar is when they found the leak and about 3 feet of water. After removing the water we inspected the walls and found a large crack that was letting ground water in.
Solution
Because the cellar was not part of the foundation we decided that our main goal was to prevent water intrusion. We also had to work with products we could fit through the narrow crawl space hall way. We first wanted to address the crack so we installed FlexiSpan this would seal the crack and it has a built in drain strip just in case water did manage to drip through the seal. We then installed WaterGuard along the one side of the cellar where the crack was, this would keep the water off of the floor. Last we installed a Triple Save Sump Pump this would insure that if water did drip down into the WaterGuard that it would be pumped out of the cellar. Because of the size of the crack and how much water was once sitting in the cellar we wanted to take every step possible to insure this would never happen again.
