Dimples make for a dry bottom

How do you keep basements dry? A not unimportant question in our neck of the woods, where you can find a good source of water just by sticking a pipe in the ground.
There are springs everywhere and in spring, the ground itself is a giant sponge. In parts of our property, water wells up in your footprints even in August.
But back to the basement. Contractor Peter Wanless ordinarily just uses tar. This stuff, sprayed on the outside of the basement, is toxic, yuck, and the fact is that if water wants to find a way in, tar is hardly going to stop it.

So we used a product that tract builders in Ontario have almost universally adopted, called DELTA-MS, see www.deltams.com  Its dimples create an airspace next to the foundation wall so that if water gets in, it flows down and out to the tile at the footings. Builders discovered that when they used it, there were no more call backs by buyers of their homes to complain about leaky basements.

On Wednesday, the crew came out to install this material -- none had any experience with it, so major learning curve. However, after a review of the detailed instructions and a few runs at it, they were installing like pros. Tiling should have happened today, then stone slinger and next week -    

- if all goes well -- they'll start framing up... then everything will start moving much faster.