This is the view looking from the road across the rough driveway cut. On the right side of the photo in the shade is a giant pile of slash - tree branches - that will be removed next week. Copyright 2018 Tim Carter

Geology and Soils

We interact with the Earth everyday. We really don't have much choice since we must move about on the face of this glorious planet. However, most of us pay little attention to the ground we walk or build upon. This can be a big mistake. The soil under your feet can change dramatically in type, quality, strength, fertility in as little as 500 feet.

Bedrock Geology & Soil

Soil in the simplest sense is a combination of small weathered pieces of rock, organic material, water, and air. The small pieces of rock determine, for the most part, the overall makeup of the soil.

For example, here in Cincinnati, we have 3 to 4 primary soil groups. These are directly related to the bedrock rock formations. Two of these formations and some of the glacial rock and soil material cause massive land slippage headaches around town. In fact, Cincinnati has the highest per capita damage per household in America due to landslides! I'll bet you didn't know that!

I was fortunate to learn all about this in college since I was a geology major. The trouble is, 99.95 percent of the home buyers in Cincinnati don't have a clue as to the dangerous soil conditions that face them everywhere.

You can almost always obtain free information about the soil conditions in your area from your county agricultural offices or building departments. Even counties that have lost all of their farmland to development have soil information. You simply have to make one or two phone calls to the county headquarters. Be persistent until you find the soil office.

Once you locate this division of your local government, ask for a county soil map. Usually these are books that are filled to the brim with useful information. The books often contain aerial photos which help you locate your street and often your house! The photos contain lines which create boundaries between the different soil types. The soil in a given zone has a symbol. You use this symbol throughout the book to find out all types of different positive and negative qualities about the soil.

For example, the actual description of the soil type tells you how thick the soil might be (in other words, how deep before you hit solid rock), color, depth to certain features within the soil such as perched watertables, etc. Deeper within the book, you get information pertaining to septic system suitability, strength of the soil for roadways and building, shrink/swell characteristics, and much more.

The best part is that this soil map/book is almost always free! Our tax dollars pay for it to be developed and distributed. Don't buy land without one!

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Selecting a New or Existing Building Lot

When my wife and I purchased our first house 22 years ago, I didn't give one ounce of consideration to the lot that it sat upon. I simply walked into the house to see if it was beyond repair. I was oblivious to the 15 steps it took to get to the front door. I didn't know exactly where the property lines were. There was a fence along the two sides and the rear, but I couldn't tell you if it belonged to the house or to the next door neighbors.

My wife and I were young and just out of college. We had no experience in dealing with real estate. Playing Monopoly had been my only previous exposure to deeds, mortgages and utilities! Let me tell you, there is no comparison to the real thing!

Now Tim is helping his daughter start the lot selection for her new home. Click here to read about this adventure.

"Real" Estate

When you own land, you have a real asset. More often than not, land tends to appreciate in value. Improvements upon land such as houses, barns, fences, etc. all tend to lose value immediately after construction due to depreciation. That is, they immediately start to wear out.

Of course, some building lots are worth more than others. They will appreciate faster. Why? Because the lots that grow in value at the fastest rate tend to have the highest number of positive qualities. A lot may have a great view. It may be in a desirable neighborhood. A lot may have mature trees. There are numerous positive qualities. Some of the qualities are subjective. Things that appeal to you may not appeal to me. Most of the qualities are objective. Things like utilities, zoning, flooding, etc. are a concern to just about everyone.

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! ! ! See Author's Notes at Bottom of Column ! ! !

Make a Model Of Your Lot

If you take some scrap cardboard and trace the different patterns of a topo map onto the cardboard and then cut out each pattern, you can make a 3D model of a building lot or piece of land. You take the cut out patterns and stack them on top of one another. One of the things that becomes very apparent when you do this is the fact that topographic lines that are spaced closely together indicate a steep hill or a cliff in reality. When you build a model, you will find this out in a hurry! If you have kids and are looking for a neat science project, see if their teacher will let you create a 3D model from a topographic map.

Coastal Lots

If you live or are relocating to a low lying coastal area, you know that the land is usually very flat. Try to see if you can raise up your house 12 or 18 inches from the normal level that everyone else builds. Have some extra dirt brought in and use this to taper the soil away from your foundation out towards your lot lines. The end result will be a very gentle slope that offers you lots of protection if a heavy rain floods all of your neighbors' houses.

Drainage solution- trench drain.

Soggy Lots

If you have a swampy or soggy lot now and need relief, then you need to look at this drawing.It is a plan or side view drawing of a linear French drain. These simple drainage devices can dry out wet soil in a big hurry.

Keep in mind that water likes to take the path of least resistance. It will flow through gravel much more quickly than through soil. As water migrates from the soil into these trench drains, the water is wicked from adjacent soil towards the drains. The net effect is that your lot dries up.

The backyard of my lot was a swamp each spring. I installed a single linear French drain on the high side of my lot to intercept all of the water that was coming from the land above me. It worked instantly and continues to keep my lot dry as a bone while my neighbor's lot above me is soggy and wet! I keep telling them to install a linear French drain, but they don't seem interested. What was that saying about leading a horse to water?

Drainage issues are critical and they can cost you huge dollars after you move in. It takes some detective work and some thought to figure out what will happen after you move in. Study the land and look at existing subdivisions to see how land forms and shapes affect drainage.

Click here to order Tim's Streaming Video with the step-by-step procedure for installing a Linear French Drain and keeping your basement dry.

Author's Notes:

You may wonder if my advice is worth anything. Well, read what Jim Sanders wrote to me when he was at the end of his rope:

"Hi, I just wanted to write to give you the results of my "Trench Drain". I have had a wet crawlspace for 15 years. Water would fill the crawlspace at times, so we actually had to drill weep holes at the base so that it would enter the basement and eventually, the sump pump.

I have tried everything. Several contractors said that the only thing we could do was to bring the water into the house via drainage tile and let it enter the sump pump. That would work, but because I live on a 6' elevation, there is no reason that I should have water problems. It became like clockwork...when it rained, we would rush home from the lake or wherever we were vacationing so that we could be prepared to start the backup generator, in case the power failed. We even had our alarm company put a sump alarm on our system, so they could notify us if we had a power failure. Battery backup was not an option, because sometimes we lose power for days and during any rain, our sump would run every 7 minutes...just like clockwork.

I found your site and read the article on the trench or French drain. At first, it sounded a bit like "holistic healing" to me. I failed to understand why a 2 ft. deep trench, 4 ft. away from the house would do any good. How could this simple thing correct an extreme water problem that has plagued me for years, cracked my foundation, settled my garage floor and ruined almost every vacation?

The Linear French Drain trench running from the house. PHOTO CREDIT: Jim Sanders

I decided "what the heck". I had to dig by hand using a trenching spade and a pick-ax, because the builder back-filled our property with brick and blacktop. It took quite a bit of time. Because the ground level varies so much on that side of the house, I was not able to achieve exactly 2 ft. deep. It varied from 18" to 30" in spots, but the slope was downhill. The trench is about 80 ft. long. At times, I thought about filling it all in, because I just didn’t believe that it would work.

I stoned it, put tile in, and filled it with #1 round stone. I socked the pipe just for safety measure and I also used geotextile fabric on top, so I could cover with dirt and grass. I also ordered some clay and pitched from the house to the drain.

After a short rain, water is running away from the house. PHOTO CREDIT: Jim Sanders

Result? For the last month, we have had 7 or 8 torrential rains, the worst of which was last night. It rained so hard, that our lawn washed out in spots because of the high clay content. Our sump pump, that normally ran every 7 minutes during and after rain, has not turned on for 4 weeks. The silt at the bottom of the sump well is now dry and cracking. Our crawlspace has not shown a trace of water or even moisture.

Since I couldn’t see correcting the foundation cracks or the garage floor settling and tilting until I corrected the problem's source, I waited to see if the trench drain worked first.

This week, I had a company come in and perform sort of a "mud-jacking" technique on the garage floor, which worked perfectly. Also, during the past few weeks, I parged the cracks in the foundation.

A dry sump pump. PHOTO CREDIT: Jim Sanders

I just wanted you to know how this worked. I stressed for many years over this issue and the solution was nowhere near as difficult as I thought it would be.

As a side note, I went to the end of the drain tile during a hard rain to see what was happening. Water was running out of the drain tile in about the same exact volume that it previously ran out of the weep holes in my crawlspace. This winter will be interesting, because last year, the ground next to the house was so saturated that during a thaw, my sump would run constantly. I'm guessing that the ground between the trench and the house will probably be drier now going into this winter."

- Jim Sanders, Upstate area - New York

CLICK HERE to get FREE & FAST BIDS from local drainage expert contractors.

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Click here to order Tim's Streaming Video with the step-by-step procedure for installing a Linear French Drain and keeping your basement dry.

Learning to understand a topographic map that shows elevations will be worth the investment of time.

Back in the early 1990's we had a huge 24 hour rainstorm in my village. I had a rain gauge set up and it indicated that we received about 5.75 inches of rain in that 24 hour period. We had widespread flooding of many houses in my village. Many people couldn't believe how small creek beds that usually only have a trickle of water in them turned into virtual rivers.

Numerous houses had extensive basement flooding caused by streams that overflowed their banks and crushed garage doors and even basement doors in a matter of moments.

The point of the story is that just about everyone of these people never thought they would have a problem. Their houses and building lots didn't seem to be in a danger zone. After the storm and flooding were over, it was obvious that the damaged houses were in low spots or near the bottom of shallow valleys. It took a 100 year storm to point out the problem. This is why you need to think ahead when you buy a lot.

Bathtub Ring

Have you ever notice rings inside of bathtubs? If the tub drains slowly, you will see a number of rings that stair step down toward the bottom of the tub. Each ring represents the level of the water within the tub at a given moment in time. The ring also represents a perfectly level line as standing water in a tub, bottle, pond or lake is level due to the forces of gravity.

You can use this same principal to help you understand the funny crooked, curved and squiggly lines you see on a topographic map. Each of these lines is like a ring in your bathtub. They represent a layer of land or earth that is the exact same height above sea level.

Topographic maps allow you to get an idea of the three dimensional (3D) configuration of the land while looking at a two dimensional piece of paper. It is that simple.

This is a topo map from Google Maps. You just select the Terrain option from the menu to see it. Note the red arrow pointing to the gray lines that have numbers on them. Any point on that line is the same distance above sea level as the number.

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