Our house on upper market was suffering from a terrible foundation leak that was exasperated by the rains this past winter. The water penetrated the unfinished back, subterranean room on the 1st floor and made its way to another room, undermining tiles on the way, soaking through a closet and a carpet. We interviewed 5 or 6 contractors about the problem. Each one said basically the same thing: french drain. However, although the solutions all seemed to be identical, they all had wildly different prices. In one case they couldn't even give me a bid instead citing T&M with no cap which basically scared us silly.
Dan came over, took stock of the problem, sketched out a possible solution on the spot, and delivered a professional and competitive quote as promised two days later. Dan came recommended to us by a friend of a friend and has had extensive foundation and concrete experience. He has a degree in engineering from Portland State, has worked on dams and does seismic foundation work in addition to general contracting.
The work on our house started days after he delivered the bid and we agreed to take him on to stop the leak that penetrated our rear retaining wall set into the hillside. The work turned out to be more extensive than we had originally anticipated. The foundation wall was low and thick on our 1936 home. Instead of stopping Dan's team dug down 10 ft. in a narrow work space extruded soil from under a stair case. The final product was a double french drain system that connected directly to a downspout in the floor of a rear staircase instead of spilling out over the stairs from a higher stair. Our house has no street access to the backyard so all materials had to be carried by hand, up the stairs and through the first floor of the house including excess soil after the trench was filled with gravel.
The work was done expediently, professionally and at all steps of the project we were kept informed by Dan who was on site every single day to supervise and do the work himself. The inside of the wall was sealed with a double layer of Kryton, a slurry that Dan assured us penetrates concrete pores and grows toward moisture adding another layer of protection to the ailing wall. There has been a series of bad rains since the work was complete and no water has come through the wall. Dan gave us a 10 year guarantee on the work and was very confidant that fix would work and we'd now have a dry basement, well, at least in this room, we've other issues elsewhere.
Dan's final bill was more than the original estimate and bid. The overage was reasonable given how much more work he did in the end and how much deeper he went than originally projected. Whenever you open up big holes you're never sure what you'll find there and I'm not surprised that it turned out to be more than originally estimated. At all stages Dan did his best to save us money and leverage his vast resources and knowledge to deliver a superior level of service final product. I wouldn't hesitate to use Dan again for future projects. read more