The Cost of a Wet Basement

It’s easy to avoid waterproofing your basement - even when you know there’s a problem - because it’s difficult to convince yourself to spend money on a home improvement project that doesn’t have any real visible benefit. After all, if it isn’t finished, how much time do you really spend down there? It costs too much.

But what does it cost you to not get the work done?

Keeping Yourself Healthy

Water in your basement generally leads to mold problems, as mold grows on wooden beams as well as any organic material in the basement (think furniture, wood paneling, even cardboard boxes). Mold is known to cause and/or exacerbate everything from rhinitis to bronchitis to asthma.

So you’re looking at co-pays for your doctor and the trusty inhaler you’ve been prescribed to take care of the asthma that hasn’t flared up since you were a kid; an uptick in Kleenex consumption for that pesky runny nose; and, conservatively, a bottle of cough syrup a week for that cough you just can’t seem to shake.

There’s also the non-monetary cost. The time you spend rearranging items you have stored in the basement. The lost sleep when you stay up all night, working in shifts bailing water during a bad storm. Every bit of mental energy you expend thinking about the basement.

All of the above, for as long as you live in the house.

Replacing Your Stuff 

What’s the point of having a basement if you don’t take advantage of the storage space, right? I moved into a townhouse two years ago and promptly took advantage of the basement by filling it with stuff that had been stashed in various other people’s houses for years.

Then the basement started leaking, and we entered a strange dance of moving everything to the middle of the room. 

Anything wooden is immediately at risk, both for direct water damage and secondary mold damage. That means warped chair legs, ruined bookcases, and don’t even think about the piano you’ve got down there until you have space for it upstairs. Metal is similarly in danger due to rust concerns.

And I hope you don’t have anything important stored in cardboard boxes. Books, paperwork, photographs (from back before everything was digital, and therefore impossible to replace)? Gone.

Selling Your House

So you don’t waterproof your basement, and you save that money.

Then you decide to sell your house.

The first three potential buyers are scared off because your basement looks like something from a horror movie, with the mold and the water-stained walls. Then the house sits on the market for just a little too long, so anyone looking at the listing wonders what’s wrong with it.

You reduce the list price to drum up some interest, and it works! But the buyer is wary of the basement, so they come in below asking price. Your choices are to accept the lower offer, or let the house continue to sit on the market with low interest, so you accept the offer. Then, when the inspection turns up mold problems and a leaking basement, the buyer asks you to cover the cost of the waterproofing as a condition of buying the house.

So now you’re paying to waterproof the basement after all. After years of paying for health problems, replacing or losing possessions, AND making less money on the sale of your home, you’re still paying for it, in addition to everything else you could’ve avoided by taking care of it when you first noticed the problem.

It costs money to waterproof your basement. But it costs more not to.