 Hello. When you're looking at a house it's important to look outside the house as well as inside. One of the things to look for is the grading away from the wall. The grading is supposed to take a 5% slope for a distance of 20 feet. According to the 2003 International Building Code, ground immediately adjacent to the foundation shall be sloped away from the building at a slope of not less than one unit vertical in 20 units horizontal or 5%. For a minimum distance of 10 feet measured perpendicular to the wall. We're outside now looking at the exterior of a house and you'll see that the slope is quite flat. As we look at the ground here there appears to be a swale that is lined with a French drain. But as we go over closer to the house you see that the slope goes towards the house. In fact if we look farther away we see that there's a vacant lot and there's a rather broad swale that comes down towards the house and comes into an area next to the driveway. As you see there's a lawn area next to the gravel. Water that gets into the gravel area can't get over to the swale but instead flows towards the house. As it flows towards the house it collects and puddles in this area. Then you'll see that there's a different color of the rock here. What happened was that the water filled up so deep that it created a differential pressure and it saturated the ground and started to road out on the inside of the house and eventually created a channel or pipe through the ground under the foundation and all the original rock went into the cross space. Went up, went into the cross space, it overflowed and went into the basement and flooded the basement. This is the sort of damage that can happen when water flows towards the house when the grading is negative. Other things that can happen is it can get into the wall spaces. It can flow into window wells. I've seen windows broken where the water went into window wells and in general it can create all sorts of damage to the house. So when you're out looking at a house that you might be interested in buying, first thing to look at outside is how is the grading? Is water going to flow away from this house or is it going to puddle next to it? In the future we'll be looking at other issues to look for outside of the house. Bye for now.