HOMECHECK The  Home for Home Improvements

Water Problems
By:  Patrick Mahoney Owner/Operator of SHERLOCK HOME INSPECTOR

    Recently I was asked to inspect a vacation home in North Carolina.  The owners said that the garage had suddenly developed a mildew problem which had never occurred in the 100 plus year life of the house.

   What I found was that water was running under the walls of the garage and collecting in the storage closet area.  Since the garage had been closed for about four months, the mildew problem was quite severe.   The owners said that they had never had this problem before, so I started by asking them what, if anything, they had done to alter the lot drainage.

    It turns out that they had hired an architect to design a screened porch on the flat roof of the garage, and had hired a local contractor to build it.  My first question was; did the original garage have gutters?  They said that it had some kind of drain in the flat roof which drained the water off the back corner of the structure.

    The original garage did indeed have a scupper feeding into a downspout which drained the water downhill from the structure, but this was abandoned when the porch was built.  It didn’t take me long to realize that all the water falling on the gabled roof of the new porch was draining along the sides of the garage and running under the old walls.

    They solved the problem by installing gutters along both sides of the garage with downspouts to channel the water away and downhill from the structure.  Gutters can sometimes be difficult to keep clean, but they do a very good job of keeping water away from the house.

Article: Water Problems by Patrick Mahoney Ó 2004