How often should you check your foundation grading?

Why bother

Water at the wall is how foundations crack. This is an essentials-tier job. Skip it and you're inviting the expensive kind of problem, or the dangerous kind.

What the job involves

1. Wait for a heavy rain, then walk the perimeter and watch where the water goes. Pooling against the walls, or soil that slopes back toward the house, is the whole problem in one look. Lay a long level or a straight 2x4 along the ground to find the low spots.
2. Check the drop. The ground should fall at least 6 inches over the first 10 feet away from the foundation (that's the code standard, roughly a 2% slope), and the dirt should sit 4 to 6 inches below the siding. Less than that and rain has nowhere to go but down the wall.
3. Where it's wrong, pull the mulch and soil back off the walls, tip grading soil into the low spots, and rake it into one continuous downhill slope. Tamp it firm so it doesn't just settle back where it came from.
4. Re-check with the level board run a full 10 feet out, and make sure the downspouts and gutters dump well past the patch you just regraded, not straight back onto it.

Do it yourself, or pay someone?

DIY for the look and for minor regrading: a level board and a few yards of topsoil is a weekend, usually under $1,000 with a tamper rental. Hire a pro when the whole lot slopes the wrong way or the fix needs a swale or a French drain; professional regrading runs $1,000 to $3,000, drainage work $2,000 to $5,000 and up. If the basement's already wet or the foundation's cracked, get a foundation contractor to look before you add dirt.

What skipping it costs

$2,000 to $15,000 is what ignoring a bad slope eventually costs, and the spread is wide because it depends how far the water gets. Ground that tilts toward the house funnels every rain and snowmelt against the foundation, where it sits, soaks in, and pushes through cracks into the basement. The cheap end is the water-damage and foundation repair you invite, foundation work averaging around $4,544; the dear end is full basement waterproofing, which runs into five figures (one 1,000 sq ft job came to roughly $13,640), plus mold removal on top. Regrading the dirt first is often under $2,000. A few yards of soil and an afternoon with a rake is the cheap end of that range, by a mile.

Signs it's overdue

• Water pools against the foundation walls after rain, or you can see the soil leaning back toward the house instead of away from it.
• A damp, musty smell downstairs, white chalky residue (efflorescence) on the basement walls, or actual damp and leaks in the basement or crawlspace.
• The soil has slumped into a trench around the foundation, or there are new cracks in the foundation wall or the floor.

When to start thinking about it

Give yourself about 7 days' notice. That's when Grumpty starts grumbling, so it doesn't land on you the day it's due. Mark it done and Grumpty sets the next one, every 12 months, so you can go back to forgetting it exists.

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