From Foundation Failure to Family Oasis: A Coggon, IA Transformation

Every home tells a story, but for one family in Coggon, IA, the story their basement was telling was getting downright scary. They had a beautiful collection of family heirlooms they wanted to protect, alongside a desperate need for usable extra square footage. Instead, they were dealing with a basement that felt less like a storage space and more like a high-stress liability. The foundation walls were physically bowing inward under the weight of the expanding earth outside, and water was constantly seeping through the joints, sending the humidity levels through the roof. Realizing their precious memories were one heavy rainstorm away from being ruined, they called in the experts at MidAmerica Basement Systems.

Our System Design Specialist, Daniel Kelchen, arrived on-site to perform a rigorous diagnostic inspection. He pinpointed two major threats: extreme hydrostatic pressure from the outside soil causing structural deflection in the walls, and a high water table that was aggressively pushing groundwater into the living space. To save the basement, Daniel engineered a heavy-duty, multi-layered remediation strategy designed to fix the structural issues and the water problems simultaneously.

With the blueprint in hand, Foreman Jacob Oetzman and his elite production crew—Jose, Antonio, and Colby—rolled in with the heavy equipment to bring the design to life. The team tackled the structural failure first using the GeoLock® Wall Anchor system. Jose and Antonio worked outside, embedding heavy-duty steel earth plates deep into the stable, undisturbed soil well past the active expansion zone. Inside, Colby drilled precision access ports through the walls to run high-tensile steel rods out to those earth plates, anchoring them firmly to heavy-duty steel plates on the interior basement walls. Jacob then tensioned the entire system to exact specifications, instantly locking the bowing walls in place and stopping the structural damage in its tracks.

Next, the crew shifted their focus to the water invasion. They carefully broke through the perimeter floor slab along the footings to install our premier WaterGuard® sub-floor drainage conduit. This system intercepts water right at the footing-wall joint, catching leaks before they can ever touch the basement floor. Jose, Antonio, and Colby routed this drainage line directly into a TripleSafe™ Sump Pump Matrix. This powerhouse system features three levels of protection: a primary pump for standard water volume, a secondary high-output pump for extreme weather influx, and a battery-powered backup pump that takes over if a storm knocks out the local power grid.

To turn the newly dried space into a truly comfortable, storage-ready environment, the team encapsulated the floor with TerraBlock® insulation. This durable barrier stops cold temperatures and moisture vapor from rising up through the concrete slab. Finally, they installed a SaniDry™ Sedona dehumidifier to actively filter the air and keep the relative humidity safely below 50%, completely eliminating the risk of mold or musty odors. Thanks to the precise design by Daniel and the flawless mechanical execution by Jacob and his crew, these Coggon homeowners can finally rest easy knowing their structure is safe, their air is clean, and their family heirlooms are perfectly protected for generations to come.