Yard drainage, water in basement, and hydrostatic pressure

[Jeff7]

Hello, AT forum...it's been awhile since I've been here, probably since we migrated away from, oh what was it, vBulletin? Whatever came after Fusetalk I think.
I've had a new development in my life: I bought a house awhile ago, and am still deciding if it was a good thing or not, which seems to be fairly common. It seems like I'm now in servitude to the house for the foreseeable future.

What brings me here is drainage. If it rains for 2+ days, I get water seeping through the base of the basement walls on one side of the house. The walls are cinder-block, with a poured-concrete slab. (Hopefully I'm using the right terminology here...) The trickle of water goes right down a floor drain, but I've since learned that that can be a bad thing due freeze/thaw damage, and something I hadn't known about before: Hydrostatic pressure that can actually be enough to cause severe damage to the foundation walls. (I've been repeatedly astonished by some of the problems houses can have, as if they were never expecting them to be outdoors in the rain. I also learned that sewer backups are fairly common in the US, and given that, that backflow-preventers are not standard equipment; I suppose both things were unfathomable to me, because I never would have considered that either would have been so readily tolerated, or even permitted by building codes.)

Here's a basic diagram of the house and yard.

To the east of the house, not shown, the ground slopes down and away from the house, a drop of at least 6 feet total, down to the street. On the north side, the small strip of grass shown is flat, and then slopes downward away from the house.
But the yard slopes gently toward the house. The orange oval is the highest portion, almost a ridge running along the south end of the lot. To the south....driveway, and the neighbor's house.
The red line shows the section of the basement where water seeps in. The basement floor is roughly 6 feet below ground-level.

I've gotten estimates on two options so far, but there seems to be a bit of bias:
The guy selling an indoor French drain system says that it'll take care of the problem.
The guy selling an outdoor curtain/French drain right next to the foundation says that'll take care of the problem.
And I don't know what's best to do.

I've considered a lot of options here, including some longer-term goals at the same time.
- Rent a Bobcat and try to re-grade the yard myself to slope it away from the house, after I find some information on what attachment is best for that. I could use the dirt out front; I'd love a 2-3ft-high, well-drained retaining wall on the front slope.
Part of the regrade would include replanting the yard with something that either requires much less mowing, which some types of grass can allegedly do, or look at some "no-mow" types of lawns.

- Regrading: I don't know if I should then also replace some of the soil with something with sand or gravel so that it drains better. At one point I dug a hole in the yard during a light rain. It immediately started filling with water. I left it there for more than 2 months, and never once saw its water level go down by more than about 2" below the surrounding dirt. The water just doesn't want to go anywhere. The back yard squishes when walked on. (I bought the house in the winter, so the yard was frozen at the time.)

- I also don't want to regrade it and dump water into a neighbor's yard, so maybe it'd have to be graded and then piped out toward the street with a curtain drain: Slope it toward one side, and put a curtain drain there to catch the water before it can go anywhere else.

- Call 811 or the utility companies to come out and mark underground pipes and such, and either pay a contractor for the outdoor curtain drain, or even give it a shot myself. The part of that that concerns me the most is the time it might take doing it myself: If I get a nice trench dug and it starts raining, I might get stuck with a moat.
Hell I've even thought about buying an old used front-loader/backhoe for this and a few other projects here. That'd be fun to use one of those things again. Even old ones are expensive though.


tl;dr: Bought a house, the previous owner was evidently not as focused on "infrastructure" spending as I am, so I'm trying to remedy some of this stuff, starting with drainage of the back yard.
Too many options....don't know where to start.

 

[pmark]

Regrading is the best choice if you can. Check your building codes to see if you can dump the water into the street though. If regrading isn't an option then the outside drain would be my next choice. You want to stop the water from getting in instead of dealing with it after it is inside.

Sent from my Nexus 6P using Tapatalk

 

[Jeff7]

Regrading is the best choice if you can. Check your building codes to see if you can dump the water into the street though. If regrading isn't an option then the outside drain would be my next choice. You want to stop the water from getting in instead of dealing with it after it is inside.

Sent from my Nexus 6P using Tapatalk

South: Neighbor's yard.
West: Easement, then a neighbor's yard. (I first saw the word "easement" when looking at the property's survey diagram.)
North: Neighbor's yard.
East: Street.
So if it doesn't go to the street, where can it go?

I also thought it'd be best to keep the water from getting inside. I've also been looking at various contractor videos on Youtube, and there's a variety of opinion there as well: Stop it outside, or deal with it inside, or do both.


(I'd also honestly really love an excuse to put down the money for a loader/backhoe, but then I'd be financially obligated to do the work myself, which may not be a bad thing. One posted on Craigslist recently, about 20 years old but looks in decent condition, for a bit over $6k. Damn tempting.

What I'm probably really asking is, is it crazy to buy or rent a front-loader/backhoe and do this stuff myself? I think I want to buy one.)

 

[pmark]

Well the correct answer (at least for my building codes) for where should you put the water is suppose to be back into the ground. New constructions around me need to install an underground tank to store run off water that will seep back into the ground. With saying that my sump pump drains out into my driveway which then goes into the street...

 

[Jeff7]

Well the correct answer (at least for my building codes) for where should you put the water is suppose to be back into the ground. New constructions around me need to install an underground tank to store run off water that will seep back into the ground. With saying that my sump pump drains out into my driveway which then goes into the street...

Yes, now I remember reading about those. I assume they have to be dug below the frost line so that they don't freeze and push up the ground?
Just this past winter had multiple freeze/thaw cycles here; the potholes were worse than usual because of it.

And of course, how big does something like that have to be made to handle the water from a few days of rain over about 1/8 of an acre?

Another restriction I've got: I can't fit too much equipment into the back yard, at least not without destroying some fencing and a piece of the neighbor's yard. The limit's about 5.5ft of width, so a small backhoe would make it.

 

[boomerang]

My advice would be to sell the house this coming winter.

The water not draining out of the hole is concerning. I am most definitely not well versed in such matters as this and therefore have no idea how much clay soil would have to be removed and replaced with permeable material. If you get too close to the foundation with your equipment you can create far bigger problems for yourself. If you end up shunting water onto a neighbors property you have created potentially a far bigger problem for yourself. Does the city, township whatever have to get involved?

Sell it and hope you can find a buyer. But with disclosure forms and the inspection process I don't know how you're going to come out of this with your shirt still on.

You want to buy this piece of equipment and you're going to regardless so what you're looking for is support for your decision. Do whatever makes you happy. Just make sure that that happiness is not going to be fleeting when you've got a huge mess in the yard. If you start the job, you'll have to see it through, One way or another.

 

[pmark]

one more thing to think about about purchasing the equipment, if you are regrading then most likely you will need to add fill, which will need to be delivered. You might need to hire someone anyway...With the water not draining from that hole that you dug probably means that you need to raise your water table if possible.

 

[Jeff7]

My advice would be to sell the house this coming winter.

The water not draining out of the hole is concerning. I am most definitely not well versed in such matters as this and therefore have no idea how much clay soil would have to be removed and replaced with permeable material. If you get too close to the foundation with your equipment you can create far bigger problems for yourself. If you end up shunting water onto a neighbors property you have created potentially a far bigger problem for yourself. Does the city, township whatever have to get involved?

Sell it and hope you can find a buyer. But with disclosure forms and the inspection process I don't know how you're going to come out of this with your shirt still on.

I'm feeling that I bought something of a lemon here in some regards. It's only been about half a year now.

You want to buy this piece of equipment and you're going to regardless so what you're looking for is support for your decision. Do whatever makes you happy. Just make sure that that happiness is not going to be fleeting when you've got a huge mess in the yard. If you start the job, you'll have to see it through, One way or another.

I asked for advice, not attitude. I see some things haven't changed while I was on hiatus.

If it's not a reasonable thing to get, then I won't do it, simple as that.

one more thing to think about about purchasing the equipment, if you are regrading then most likely you will need to add fill, which will need to be delivered. You might need to hire someone anyway...With the water not draining from that hole that you dug probably means that you need to raise your water table if possible.

I was thinking to be removing dirt if anything.

Water in the hole: Looking at the back yard by itself, the ground to the west and north of it slopes down and away from the yard. On the other (east) side of the house (I know, a barrier to water), the ground slopes down toward the road. So the overall lot, going from west to east, slopes downward. The house is roughly in the middle of it.
So I'm on an elevated piece of dirt that insists on retaining water for some reason.

 

[pcgeek11]

It seems to me ( If I am understanding and from your drawing ) that the lot drops from the highest point ( west side ) to the street ( east side ) and the house in in the middle of this flow path. Blocking the flow and seeping into the basement along the western wall.

It seems to me that the obvious answer is to have a french drain installed along the western side of the house and leading the water to drain towards the eastern side and run off towards the east.

Your western side of the house is like a big dam preventing natural drainage that is why the water just sits.

 

[Jeff7]

It seems to me ( If I am understanding and from your drawing ) that the lot drops from the highest point ( west side ) to the street ( east side ) and the house in in the middle of this flow path. Blocking the flow and seeping into the basement along the western wall.

It seems to me that the obvious answer is to have a french drain installed along the western side of the house and leading the water to drain towards the eastern side and run off towards the east.

Your western side of the house is like a big dam preventing natural drainage that is why the water just sits.

That had been my thought as well.

I've just been seeing various opinions on this online, and from the one contractor who does the indoor French drain thing, so I'm also asking around here.

I also think the deep outside French drain would do the trick: Pipe and gravel against the house, plus a rubberized coating, should allow surface and underground water to fall down and flow away before it can have a chance to get under the footer or push against the foundation.
Though I might need a surveyor to figure out exactly which is lower, the street or the footer; I assume that if the footer's lower, I'd need a pump.


One contractor on Youtube, Daniel J. OConnor of HydroArmor, shows video where cinderblock foundation walls are effectively rotting away after prolonged exposure to water, something to do with acidic water interacting with lime in the cinderblock.
For real? Cinderblock can't handle prolonged water exposure? Why are we building houses out of materials that can't tolerate being outdoors for an extended amount of time?

I still wonder too if I should eventually have both systems: Something to mitigate water from the outside, but also something to deal with water that does manage to get inside the wall.

 

[lxskllr]

I'm not an expert, but I like the idea of taking care of it outside. I'd look into french drains, and some kind of stormwater facility. Either dry wells as already mentioned, or what we call "rain gardens" here, which is basically a small wetland that allows water to seep into the ground more slowly. I kind of like the rain garden concept, and would look into making a little habitat with native wetland plants.

edit:
btw, good seeing you again :^)

 

[Micrornd]

One contractor on Youtube, Daniel J. OConnor of HydroArmor, shows video where cinderblock foundation walls are effectively rotting away after prolonged exposure to water, something to do with acidic water interacting with lime in the cinderblock.

Very true, if directly exposed to acidic water or acidic soil over time.

Acidic soil or water also affects electrical wiring, enough so that depending on the acidity of the soil, direct bury of cabling/wiring is not allowed and the required buried electrical conduit is required to be (tested to be) not only watertight if pvc or metallic, but also the conduit must be coated to prevent deterioration if metallic.

Even ductile iron pipe, used for water mains, requires a coating or encasement if laid in acidic soil to make its life span reasonable.

For real? Cinderblock can't handle prolonged water exposure? Why are we building houses out of materials that can't tolerate being outdoors for an extended amount of time?

Acidic conditions are not the norm and are unusual in most areas, but nevertheless should be checked for when building. The bigger concern with cinderblock/concrete block laid below ground level is that in addition to wicking water, it can allow water to pass through the block itself and its mortar joints over time, especially if continuously exposed to water without an adequate drying period between exposures.

Where water is present below grade the accepted practice (at least in my area) is placed concrete, rather than concrete block, for both foundation stubs/walls and basement walls.

 

[Jeff7]

I'm not an expert, but I like the idea of taking care of it outside. I'd look into french drains, and some kind of stormwater facility. Either dry wells as already mentioned, or what we call "rain gardens" here, which is basically a small wetland that allows water to seep into the ground more slowly. I kind of like the rain garden concept, and would look into making a little habitat with native wetland plants.

edit:
btw, good seeing you again :^)

And hello again to you.
I might have to venture over into OT again and see who's still hanging around there.

I thought about the rain garden thing, but one word keeps coming to mind whenever I think about that: Mosquitos.
Right behind that: Maintenance, if I have some manner of pump and filter in there to help deal with insects and muck.

Very true, if directly exposed to acidic water or acidic soil over time.

Acidic soil or water also affects electrical wiring, enough so that depending on the acidity of the soil, direct bury of cabling/wiring is not allowed and the required buried electrical conduit is required to be (tested to be) not only watertight if pvc or metallic, but also the conduit must be coated to prevent deterioration if metallic.

Even ductile iron pipe, used for water mains, requires a coating or encasement if laid in acidic soil to make its life span reasonable.

Acidic conditions are not the norm and are unusual in most areas, but nevertheless should be checked for when building. The bigger concern with cinderblock/concrete block laid below ground level is that in addition to wicking water, it can allow water to pass through the block itself and its mortar joints over time, especially if continuously exposed to water without an adequate drying period between exposures.

Where water is present below grade the accepted practice (at least in my area) is placed concrete, rather than concrete block, for both foundation stubs/walls and basement walls.

And I don't know if the water out there in the yard is acidic or not. Hopefully not.

The good news is that there's no visible sign that the wall is being pushed inward by hydrostatic pressure, at least to my untrained eye. The inside walls were also coated with Drylock, or maybe a generic version, likely in a vain attempt to keep the water out. Unfortunately, this means I can't see the blocks or joints directly.


I'll be talking with a contractor this week about options for waterproofing this basement wall properly, and maybe even regrading the yard, or something so it's not so waterlogged. Money money money...

 

[NoCreativity]

You probably need to do a combination of things. You absolutely need to do the french drain on the exterior with the rubber barrier on the cinder blocks. You probably also need to figure out some way of getting the water away from the house by regrading the yard. The interior french drain is a bandaid for the problem.

I'm no expert but I had a similar situation with my old house and the fix was the exterior french drain (the old one had collapsed).

 

[Murloc]

I'm not a practical person and to my eye what seems a small amount of dirt or water ends up being huge, so I'd think a lot before digging holes on your own. You seem to have experience with digging though so you know better.

Mosquitoes are not a problem if it's constantly deep enough to put fish like mosquito fish or something in there (idk about winter temperatures where you live, but if it freezes over during the winter it's not a problem, it's just a question of how much vs water depth), or you can even just use anti-mosquito chemicals (idk about price and frequency).
I have a pond with koi carps and turtles and there's less mosquitoes there than in other urban places where there are just parks with plants and grass. No pumps and no filters, freezer over every winter for a relatively short time, it's now about 50 cm water and 1 m mud after 15 years or something and everything still survives the winter.

 

[Muse]

Hey Jeff7, nice to hear from you, you are one of my favorite Anandtech Forum contributors. Good luck with this. Yes, French drain on outside... It's been recommended to me too! I have drainage problems, but no basement, just a crawl space. I am planning to personally install a sump pump on one side (outside) of my house, BEFORE rains return to my area (after the rainiest winter on record here).

Yep, home ownership versus renting, it's something I contemplate a lot. Used to rent this place, now own it, and own its problems, and it can feel like I'm tethered to a property. I hope if you are getting professional advice/help that you are dealing with person/people of unquestionable talent and integrity.

 

[Jeff7]

You probably need to do a combination of things. You absolutely need to do the french drain on the exterior with the rubber barrier on the cinder blocks. You probably also need to figure out some way of getting the water away from the house by regrading the yard. The interior french drain is a bandaid for the problem.

I'm no expert but I had a similar situation with my old house and the fix was the exterior french drain (the old one had collapsed).

One bit of "comfort" is that the house is about 60 years old and the foundation walls still look fine, at least on a simple visual inspection on the inside, so I'm hopefully not on the edge of collapse. So then the question becomes, should I prioritize it as an expense to try to push through this year, or wait until next summer..... don't know.

I'm not a practical person and to my eye what seems a small amount of dirt or water ends up being huge, so I'd think a lot before digging holes on your own. You seem to have experience with digging though so you know better

Some experience, but not a lot. I had access to the front-loader/backhoe for about a full weekend if I remember right. That might have been 8 years ago. I dug out and leveled an area for a short cement walkway, tore up and re-graded a small section of lawn, and dug out a short ditch roughly 5' down in order to expose an exterior crack to fill it with hydraulic cement. (The latter project was a band-aid fix, I'm sure.) But it was a decent little Kubota backhoe, and it was pretty easy to be nimble and careful with it, particularly when digging near that foundation wall. I think it was their BX23 or BX2370 series, basically a nice riding mower with some fancy accessories, so nothing close to a true excavator. It sure beat digging by hand though.

Mosquitoes are not a problem if it's constantly deep enough to put fish like mosquito fish or something in there (idk about winter temperatures where you live, but if it freezes over during the winter it's not a problem, it's just a question of how much vs water depth), or you can even just use anti-mosquito chemicals (idk about price and frequency).
I have a pond with koi carps and turtles and there's less mosquitoes there than in other urban places where there are just parks with plants and grass. No pumps and no filters, freezer over every winter for a relatively short time, it's now about 50 cm water and 1 m mud after 15 years or something and everything still survives the winter.

Roughly where in the US are you?
What kind of maintenance does that kind of pond require?
I've had an interest in koi since I was a kid, and I like some aspects of Japanese gardens.
I'm in northern Pennsylvania, USDA zone 5a. This past winter was quite warm and relatively snow-free. But a previous winter some years back saw >130" of snow, and it stayed very cold, so it just piled up everywhere as the season dragged on.

Hey Jeff7, nice to hear from you, you are one of my favorite Anandtech Forum contributors.

Oh, well...thank you.

Good luck with this. Yes, French drain on outside... It's been recommended to me too! I have drainage problems, but no basement, just a crawl space. I am planning to personally install a sump pump on one side (outside) of my house, BEFORE rains return to my area (after the rainiest winter on record here).

Yep, home ownership versus renting, it's something I contemplate a lot. Used to rent this place, now own it, and own its problems, and it can feel like I'm tethered to a property. I hope if you are getting professional advice/help that you are dealing with person/people of unquestionable talent and integrity.

Attitude of the post aside, Boomerang is right that I would like a small backhoe/front-loader of my own. But I still don't know if it's a wise idea. There are certainly things to consider with earth-moving projects.
Yes, I had already thought of things like permitting and where to dump the runoff water, possible effects of regrading on neighboring yards, if any, and logistics of getting in raw materials, removing demolished concrete patio material, transporting in pipes, connecting pipes and above-ground clean-out fittings; shoring up trenches against cave-in due to rain, getting buried pipes and cables marked before-hand, and learning about the tools available for grading land. (And for replacing a fence, even having a surveyor mark the property lines so there's no future conflict over that.) This isn't trivial stuff to think about, and some of it, like the actual waterproofing of the foundation, I don't think I know enough about to tackle myself.

Water and sewer hookups are in the front of the house, but I would still verify to be sure the back yard is clear.
I know that there's a natural gas line in one corner of the house that goes somewhere, which would need to be marked, and the main electric feed is underground as well, leading away from the house toward a utility pole. Phone and cable are above-ground....conveniently running straight through a tree's branches no less.

 

[nathanddrews]

...I've had a new development in my life: I bought a house awhile ago, and am still deciding if it was a good thing or not, which seems to be fairly common. It seems like I'm now in servitude to the house for the foreseeable future. What brings me here is drainage. If it rains for 2+ days, I get water seeping through the base of the basement walls on one side of the house....

Welcome back, sorry to hear about your house. Not sure where you live, but I'm in Minnesota (USA) in an area with nice thick clay soil. When it rains, the water table fills up quickly and very slowly drains, so the hydrostatic pressure in my basement was enough to permeate the cinder block walls from all four sides. I have a standard 50s-era rambler, 26x42 foundation. Basements back then were built to be tornado refuge, laundry spaces, and workshops, not fully habitable parts of the house. But that's not why we're here...

We bought our house in 2011 and for the next 2 years we got up to an inch of standing water in our basement after every hard rain or long rain. We got sick of it and invited a few contractors over in the Fall for some brainstorming. A family friend/contractor suggested the "cheap" option of regrading around the house, removing old trees/shrubs with roots that hold water against the foundation, and new downspouts (going from 2x3" to 3x4" doubles the amount of water you can move away from the foundation). The grade immediately around the house had sort of sunken down and toward the house from years of neglect, so we did all those options. It came out to be not-so-cheap at around $1,800, but most of that was excavation cost. Downspouts are so cheap and easy to work with, I highly recommend watching a few YouTube videos on how to do it yourself.

The following spring - water in the basement as though we had done nothing. So we had a few more contractors over that specialized in french drain and drain tile. After a lot of song and dance, we went with a company called Rite-Way Waterproofing to install interior drain tile around the entire perimeter of the house, install a sump basin, and a sump pump with backup pump and battery backup. They spent two days jacking up 18" of the slab around the interior block wall, dug out dirt, put down river rock, laid PVC with holes on the bottom, covered with more river rock, secured drain tile 18" up the wall down over the river rock, then poured new cement to cover it all. 3 years later (now), still not a single wet stain, puddle, or other sign of water intrusion. It's so dry down there, that it also no longer has that "musty basement smell". Total cost was $6,500. $1,000 of that was the redundant/battery system - the only way our homeowners insurance would cover future flooding of the basement was if we had a battery backup. So it could have been $5,500...

Rite-Way was super up-front about everything and was truly amazing. They promised a total install cost of less than $45/ft and that's what we got. The sticker shock wore off after we had our first week-long rainstorm and zero signs of water in the basement.

If you only have water coming in on one side, then I highly recommend that you look into companies in your area that install interior drain tile and sump systems. Concrete and mortar is naturally porous, it doesn't need to erode/break in order to let water through. Unless you can actually see signs of the block wall bowing/crumbling, don't trust that dude that wants to rebuild your block. Are your basement walls finished or just bare block? The latter is much easier to work with.

I also have a coworker that took a week long vacation to hand-dig an exterior french drain on one side of their house and apply a thick rubberized coating to the exterior block, so they saved a ton of money, but their basement is only half underground.

Here's what the drain tile looks like that we have - this is nearly identical to what ours looks like before they pour new slab over it, but ours goes up the wall several inches:

 

[Jeff7]

...

The following spring - water in the basement as though we had done nothing. So we had a few more contractors over that specialized in french drain and drain tile. After a lot of song and dance, we went with a company called Rite-Way Waterproofing to install interior drain tile around the entire perimeter of the house, install a sump basin, and a sump pump with backup pump and battery backup. They spent two days jacking up 18" of the slab around the interior block wall, dug out dirt, put down river rock, laid PVC with holes on the bottom, covered with more river rock, secured drain tile 18" up the wall down over the river rock, then poured new cement to cover it all. 3 years later (now), still not a single wet stain, puddle, or other sign of water intrusion. It's so dry down there, that it also no longer has that "musty basement smell". Total cost was $6,500. $1,000 of that was the redundant/battery system - the only way our homeowners insurance would cover future flooding of the basement was if we had a battery backup. So it could have been $5,500...

Ok. I was quoted a bit over $4k. It doesn't mention anything about a battery backup though, just a sump pump.
The same company also does exterior French drains.

...
If you only have water coming in on one side, then I highly recommend that you look into companies in your area that install interior drain tile and sump systems. Concrete and mortar is naturally porous, it doesn't need to erode/break in order to let water through. Unless you can actually see signs of the block wall bowing/crumbling, don't trust that dude that wants to rebuild your block. Are your basement walls finished or just bare block? The latter is much easier to work with.

The walls on that side are unfinished. I did have an interior system quoted for somewhere over $3k to do one side of the basement. There's a stairwell to work around, and a half-bathroom that'd need to be demolished. Demolition cost was included in the price, but of course not rebuilding it.
(And there might have been a misread there....no one tried selling me anything to rebuild the walls.)
An exterior system just feels like a better option though - keep the water out so that you don't even have to drain it from inside. And then I'd need an electric pump with a battery or generator to be able to run it through a bad storm plus however long it takes to restore power if there's an outage. I'm closer to a city now, so the longest outage I've seen was less than a full day. Growing up in a rural area...longest outage then was an ice/snow storm, power-down for 4-5 days. I guess I just don't like an option reliant on electricity, when one possible time it'd be needed is when there's a days-long period of rain and storms which could end up disabling power.

I may have originally asked the guy doing the estimate for a price for a lower-cost option; at the time, I was only about 2 months out from having done the down-payment, so my funds were feeling a little on the light side. I have a better feel for expenses now. (And the utilities here are less than they were for my smaller apartment. There's decent insulation here, and the AC's more efficient.)
And I saw water seeping in and semi-panicked, after the experience with the sewage backup and seeing inches of water in my parents' basement a few times over the years, I thought I was in for some pain in the summer. Thus far, all I've gotten is a few slow trickles that go down the drain. I do want to solve it, but it doesn't look like it's a catastrophic issue....yet. It's still definitely a priority to fix though, if not this year, then in 2018.

I also have a coworker that took a week long vacation to hand-dig an exterior french drain on one side of their house and apply a thick rubberized coating to the exterior block, so they saved a ton of money, but their basement is only half underground.

That's a heck of a week. And of course, if it rains during that week, there could be risk of a cave-in.
I'd have to go down probably 6 feet just to reach the same level as the top of the basement floor. I don't know how much farther down the footer would be from there.

Here's what the drain tile looks like that we have - this is nearly identical to what ours looks like before they pour new slab over it, but ours goes up the wall several inches:

That's about like what I've seen on Youtube. There are weep holes drilled in the blocks then too?