Bryan Baeumler
Advice about eavestroughs, porch stairs, burst pipes,
Life is not without its cold, hard truths. For instance, this one: Summer is over. “We’re going to see the leaves come down soon,” says Bryan Baeumler. “It’s going to get cold and wet and windy and then we get into that big freeze. A lot of rain comes in the fall, so it’s a good time to have a look at your eavestroughs and downspouts to make sure they’re not plugged, so that any water that’s coming down will drain.
“Chances are that people aren’t going to clean their eavestroughs in the fall. If they’re full and we get that freeze-thaw in the winter, you’ll get ice dams that’ll cause damage and possibly allow water into your house.” Together with the host of HGTV’s Leave it to Bryan and co-host of
Disaster DIY, you can get through the onset of autumn and winter. This week, he answers Star readers’ questions on uncovered construction projects, frozen pipes and errant front steps.
Hey, Bryan. My husband and I are building our first home, and our contractor seems to be doing things in an unusual way. So our question is: How smart is it to leave a house unprotected in the weather conditions that Ontario gives us? The outside of the house isn’t fully wrapped and protected with the TYPAR wrap — it’s bare wood in most spots and we don’t have a roof on yet. The basement floor isn’t poured. My husband has a bad feeling that the wall wasn’t protected properly when it was laid in the ground and we’re worried that in five years or so, we will be digging and redoing it.
Rick and Kim, Toronto
Hi Rick and Kim. When new houses and additions are built, obviously it takes time to get the foundation in, get the roof on and get it waterproofed. When we’re talking about building a new house or doing an addition, we talk about getting to the watertight stage — that’s when the roof is on, the windows are in and you’ve got TYPAR wrapped around the house. All houses sit out, to some degree, in the weather. It’s going to rain, it’ll get wet and it’ll dry out again. That’s pretty standard. Typically, if a foundation is done, backfilled and waterproofed properly, it’ll be OK.
The good thing about building this past summer is you’re digging and exposing that soil underneath the house and it doesn’t freeze, so it doesn’t expand. There’s more of a concern in the winter, when the soil does freeze and expand, because when it warms up in the summer and melts, that soil will compact. So the summer’s not a major concern.
It’s standard practice for buildings to have some lumber exposed. In order for there to be rot, mould and mildew, you have to have continuous moisture. From what you’ve told me, it sounds like what your contractor’s doing is fairly common practice. You don’t bag and cover the whole house during construction.
Hi, Bryan. We have a bungalow that was built in 1971. The front porch and stairs were all one piece, with the cold cellar below the porch portion. In the last few years, the stairs have broken away from the porch. Last year we had someone come in to pump concrete under the stairs to try to lift them but this didn’t work. The stairs are continuing to come away from the porch portion leaving a very large crack. Any ideas on what we can do to repair this?
Susan H., St. Catharines Susan, your home’s definitely got some age to it. Over time, with freeze-thawing, concrete is going to crack. Cold cellars under the front steps are fairly common in 1960s and ’70s housing, and you even see them in younger homes. The problem is when you had someone come in to slab jack — where they drill a hole and bump either concrete or foam underneath to lift that slab back up into place — that’s not going to take care of the crack.
If that crack isn’t moving around consistently every spring and winter, fill it with hydraulic cement so no active water can get in there and freeze during the winter. Now’s the time to do that.
But if those stairs are moving around, unfortunately the only way to really solve it is to possibly pull those stairs off and install a new set on a proper footing. Probably not what you want to hear; and that’s a fairly heavy-duty job.
Hi, Bryan. I have a client who has an ongoing problem with frozen pipes in the winter months. Their house is 80 years old with radiator heating and an addition to the back was put on sometime later. The addition has no insulation but does have a laundry room and sink, as well as an entrance that leads to a basement kitchen. In severe winter temperatures like -25 C to -30 C, they have experienced frozen or burst pipes. We would like to fix the problem once and for all, without tearing down all the walls of the addition and rebuilding. Can you suggest a solution?
Frank L., Thornhill Well, Frank, first of all, the hard thing here is that it’s an 80-year-old home. There’s very little insulation in homes that old and they’re usually built with double-brick; the walls are strapped with three-quarter-inch strapping and there’s lathe and plaster. So there’s very little room behind those walls to insulate. We see a lot of older homes like this with really bad additions that aren’t insulated properly and causing many issues.
The goal here is to protect those pipes from the cold, so if you can access the pipes, put on some pipe wrap, which is basically a foam insulation that goes over top of a pipe and has adhesive in it that sticks them together. That would be the first line of attack.
The second thing you can look at is doing an EFIS — that’s an exterior insulation finishing system. You may want to just take a good look at that addition and find portions of that area where you can afford to open up the walls and insulate properly. Make sure none of that plumbing is installed in an exterior wall — you want that plumbing on the inside of the vapour barrier in a warm part of the house.
If the area where the pipes are getting cold is a crawl space, you may need to insulate the exterior wall of that space and put a heat source down there, possibly adding a heat run from the furnace. It’s something you may want to call an insulation specialist about and possibly get an HVAC professional in there, as well, to look at adding that heat run.
Hello, Brian. I recently purchased a rain barrel to catch water from the eavestroughs. I am looking for a downpipe diverter to the rain barrel that automatically shuts off when the barrel is full and switches back to the down pipe. Any suggestions? Murray R., Wiarton To be honest, Murray, I don’t know if there is such a thing that would automatically divert the water. My mechanical mind is thinking of some type of float system that you could jury-rig, almost the opposite of a toilet filler: as the water comes up, maybe a float moves an arm.
You might want to look at something like a sump pump, which has a big metal float, so when the float comes up it actuates a diverter. This might be something for you to invent! I can almost see how it would work.
But more likely, what’s probably a better and simpler idea, is to have that drain go directly into the barrel. From the top of the barrel, attach another drain, so once that barrel is full it overflows into the new drain. Or you can attach a downpipe to the very top of the barrel and drain the water that way. That’s probably an easier solution.