Standing Water 101


Home / Blog / Standing Water 101

In our last blog post, detailing the best ways to determine if your home needs reblocking, we mentioned standing water as one of the major red flags. In the next few Extreme Reblocking posts, we’ll do a deeper dive into a few of these red flags and what you need to know about them. Today, we’re focusing on standing water.

What is standing water? By dictionary definition, standing water is “any sort of body of stagnant water, including puddlespondsrainwater, drain water, reservoirs etc.” As you would assume, most of those don’t apply to your home, but stagnant is the keyword here. It’s not going anywhere and over time, it can wreak havoc on your home. It tends to accumulate in areas beneath your home, or at least below the main areas of the home that you use on a regular basis.

It happens when water pressure builds up around your foundation and basement. When the water pressure increases, you tend to see a lot more gaps and cracks and dents. That allows the water to push through. Fun (or not so fun) fact – a high humidity basement can be just as detrimental as standing water can be.

Frequently, we don’t like to venture into our basements and that’s why they go so unnoticed. It only takes one leak to serve as the catalyst for many more major problems.

These include:

  • Mould and mildew stains – A color of gray or white is never a good sign, green or black is even worse. This isn’t something you should ignore; it can cause health issues.
  • Rotting wood – With excess moisture, you’re negatively impacting the wood around your windows and doors. You don’t want to replace that on top of the work to mitigate the moisture issue.
  • Peeling paint – We’re guessing that you’re partial to your current paint color and goodness knows that’s a job that can take a long time to get done. Standing water, humidity, any sort of moisture will cause it to peel. The same thing goes for wallpaper.
  • Negative effects to your drywall – As you might assume by the name, drywall is not meant to get wet. When it does, it can ultimately lead to bowing walls. This is because the moisture is encouraging it to soften and grow mold.
  • Air quality – This is a side effect that you can’t always see. It’s also something that you may not notice at first, but over time, there will be associated odors and potentially health issues as well.

The bottom line is a commitment to both proper sealing and the correct drainage system for all areas of your home – but especially your basement and crawl spaces. The Extreme Reblocking team can help you start this conversation and ensure that you’re working with the right people. You want someone to survey your home as soon as possible to get ahead of the problem – saving you money and saving you stress.