Licwaterproofer- i have been reading your posts which i have found very helpful and was wondering if i could ask a few questions- we just bought a house ( undisclosed mold/water issues)...it seems that the mold is limited to one wall with a water stain at the bottom...we do not see it on any other wall...the issue we have is that the home is 80-100 yrs. old with a stone foundation...I have been doing a lot of research and agree with you that external waterproofing is the way to go...however, I have read that excavating around an old stone foundation is a very very bad idea. Apparently it upsets the compacted soil that has been there for decades and can undermine the foundation causing way larger problems...so I dont think that is an option for us. What I did find is that using Sodium Bentonite/ Bentogrout injection..which doesnt require excavation...may be our best option...what do you think of this? i saw your comment on injection techniques but what other options do we have with this kind of foundation? Can you recommend an honest/not crazy expensive company in the NJ area? Thank you!

Awhile back I sent this info to another poster but there was no response so I don't know if this product is available in the U.S. In any event the product is called XYPEX High and Dry and works through a crystallization process. I had used it in the basement of my last house , built in 1918, and it was wonderful ! I had a lot of cracks, some large, some small. The larger ones I cleaned out and patched with hydraulic cement, the smaller, hairline ones , I used the High and Dry , end of story ! End of leaks ! Their website is www.king-products.com Good luck.

This is a really old thread, but for anyone that finds this (like me), let me share my recent experience. We had an unfinished basement for 10 years. Over those years, we had seepage through the walls due to improper drainage outside (this was a brand new house). I agree with the poster above that suggests you fix your landscaping. We had spots where water was pooling, and water just...finds a way. It's what it does. Anyway, also during that time, I worked down in the basement on top of some old carpet and pad that we tore out of a room we put hardwood floors in. Never had any issue with that just sitting on the floor. We recently had our third child, and decided it was time to finish the basement. We decided that we would waterproof the north side of the house that had most of the water seepage in the past. For the flooring, we put down linoleum in the bathroom, laminate in my office, and carpet in the main part of the basement where the kids would play. Lowe's sold us on the VERY BEST (their words) carpet pad for basements. It's this newfangled crap that has a "breathable" vapor barrier. So water can escape from underneath but not penetrate through it from above. That's the claim. Well, fast forward LESS THAN ONE YEAR... The whole area where that carpet is smells musty and gross. If you are going to use a pad, DO NOT, PLEASE, GOD, DO NOT buy anything with a vapor barrier on it, even if they swear it is breathable. It may be breathable, but not enough. The crappy 6 pound rebond stuff I had sitting down there for probably 7 years never did this. The moisture from your floor needs to be able to escape, not get trapped underneath there. Lowe's is now sending out somebody to look at it, and they will decide how to handle this problem. It is going to be a huge nightmare. Even if they are super cooperative, and offer to replace everything, I still have to move all of our stuff out of there, have it all tore up, clean up whatever mess is there properly (somehow I don't think Lowe's will do this part for me), and then get it reinstalled again. From other things I have read, if you are going to put anything over top of the concrete, you shouldn't try to seal it. Walls are one thing, especially if you have functioning drain tiles that will drain the water that has nowhere to go. I'd be interested to know if anyone has opinions on the laminate I put down in my office. Underneath that is the foil covered pad, which is...a vapor barrier.. Every video you watch on the internet says this is how it's done in basements. I get stopping the vapor from hitting the laminate, but worry now that it's just trapped and will try to creep up the walls. Home ownership is so much fun!

Maybe think of your porch floor a little more like a roof ... I, too, have an old house with incorporated porches (front and back) that sit over top of a full basement foundation (brick with original stucco.) We restored the back porch as a "sunroom" (it was closed in some time in the 30's) and I noted that roofing tar paper was used between the sub floor (plank) and the original T&G porch floor. There are shreds of roofing tar paper hanging on the edges of the bottom of the front porch floor where I can find it, but the old wooden floor was replaced with plywood and then the porch floor was tiled by POs (a bad DIY with 1 inch grout lines that leak like crazy, making my repair job that much more difficult.) The pitch on both porches is good (away from the house) There are low shingled walls all around the porches so water would be trapped without some sort of system to remove it. The front porch uses a pitched trough with 2 exit tubes at the foot of the short wall but I found no evidence of this on the back porch. These 2 devices (the roof paper and the trough) surely would have worked well if they were maintained, alas, the metal trough is rotted thru and leaves/critters were getting into the basement till I discovered the holes and band-aid-patched them till I can address repair of the trough properly. (interestingly, the front porch foundation was hidden behind a finished wall in the basement and was only found when we had a termite inspection done.)