Looking for most proper material stack up for basement refinishing
Hi all, we bought a house in a flat wet area while knowing that the basement waterproofing needed some work. The previous homeowners had installed some kind of interior drain, although there's no sump pump and it doesn't appear to be connected to anything, so it hasn't worked very well. They had finished the basement, but the carpet was wet a lot, the baseboards were soggy, and some of the drywall was moldy.
I had several quotes for waterproofing and I ended up selecting an interior drain with sump pump for the inside, and a French drain and dry well outside to take all of the house gutters a good distance from the house before sending it into the dry well. Work on that starts this week, and I just finished most of the demolition on the lower perimeter of the finished portion. This is where I'm looking for some advice and feedback.
The entire basement isn't completely finished, but this area is. They ran Tyvek down the face of the wall and tucked it under the stud framing, and used batt insulation most places and foam insulation where the depth was reduced. The framing all appeared to have stayed dry since it was installed in 2008, and it looks like the moisture of the drywall was due to capillary action up from the bottom where it hit the carpet and baseboards. The water was coming up through the cold joint in this badly done 'interior drain'. I don't know what we're going to find when we dig up the pipes, but it looks like they thought they could just put perforated PVC pipes under the slab and let the water do... something?
My initial plan was to flip the Tyvek up, then put it all back like I found it, but with pressure treated wood and all of the holes in the Tyvek patched with tape and fresh material. I'll talk to the interior drain contractor to see what they say about fasteners into the new material they're pouring over the new interior drain.
As I'm researching this it seems like maybe gluing/foaming foam boards behind the studs would be better than any of this Tyvek. In that case I'd have to rip out the rest of the wall and possibly redo a good bit of ceiling, but I'd rather do this right since we're going to the trouble and expense now and I'm not going to be any more eager to do it again in twenty years.
So, what authoritative source can I look to for the "right" way to do this? It seems like a lot of sources of information are trying to sell you something, so I appreciate any sources that are widely recognized for correctness and not for a marketing campaign.
Here’s a gallery with some pictures: https://imgur.com/gallery/basement-waterproofing-project-54AZfBZ