You don't want the lowest point against your foundation. A slope towards it but with a swale redirecting the water around the side is fine. Ideally, you'd want 10' or so shallow slope away from your foundation into that swale.

Anonymous wrote:Our house is on a hill. The backyard is a significant slope down to the back of the house, and then a siginificant slope down from the front of the house to the street. The backyard is graded so that a lot of the water flows around the sides of the house. We also have an internal french drain along the back wall of the basement. No water issues in the basement.

Anonymous wrote:Geotech engineer. I would never purchase any property where
Any part of the yard slopes towards the home (no matter how many swales, water management systems, etc in place. Nature has a strange way of flooding your home (hydrostatic pressure). I see this every day. There are plenty of homes not graded in this manner.

Anonymous wrote:I work for a company that does the most amount of basement waterproofing in this area. I've inspected over 3,000 homes and designed/engineered solutions to mitigate and manage water intrusion into the house. In many cases, I already know what the homeowner is going to tell me as I'm walking up to their home just from looking at the slope of the land.

Controlling surface water, French drains, proper swales, and buried downspouts that carry water well away from the home are all great things and also very rare from what I've seen. Many homeowners have already undertaken all those projects before calling us because water is still coming in.

That said, I would NEVER buy any house that had any slope going towards any part of the home. Never. Eventually, this will be an issue and not just with water down at the base of the foundation, but foundation settlement issues, block walls cracked and bowing in, etc. If you see a house with a slope facing the house, run away.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I work for a company that does the most amount of basement waterproofing in this area. I've inspected over 3,000 homes and designed/engineered solutions to mitigate and manage water intrusion into the house. In many cases, I already know what the homeowner is going to tell me as I'm walking up to their home just from looking at the slope of the land.

Controlling surface water, French drains, proper swales, and buried downspouts that carry water well away from the home are all great things and also very rare from what I've seen. Many homeowners have already undertaken all those projects before calling us because water is still coming in.

That said, I would NEVER buy any house that had any slope going towards any part of the home. Never. Eventually, this will be an issue and not just with water down at the base of the foundation, but foundation settlement issues, block walls cracked and bowing in, etc. If you see a house with a slope facing the house, run away.

This is the vast majority of houses, I don’t really get how you could avoid it except in a flat area. Otherwise you get one house on the top of the hill but all the other houses are on a slope.

Anonymous wrote:Geotech engineer. I would never purchase any property where
Any part of the yard slopes towards the home (no matter how many swales, water management systems, etc in place. Nature has a strange way of flooding your home (hydrostatic pressure). I see this every day. There are plenty of homes not graded in this manner.