Celebrating 30 years of service, our family has specialized in structural foundation repair and basement waterproofing. We have built a long-standing tradition of excellent work and a commitment to total customer satisfaction. Contact us today and let's put your problems behind you once and for all. Basement Waterproofing: We custom design the SafeBasements Waterproofing System to meet your specific needs. Once the system is installed, it takes care of itself, backed by our Lifetime Guarantee..
"We hired Safe Basements to fix a problem with water leaching into our basement. One wall of the finished area of our basement doesn't have drywall/sheet rock, but instead has skim-coated mud and then paint directly on top of the cinder block. Since we moved into this house 5 years ago, we'd had water leaching in through that wall almost every year. We asked Safe Basements to come out and take a look, and they said that groundwater was filling up the cinder block, and that installing drain tile and a sump pump would direct the water into a trench and out of the house, thus fixing the problem. So, we hired them to fix it in November 2017, at a cost of about $5000. After they completed their work, we sanded down the previous damage to the wall, re-did the skim-coat, primed it and painted it to complete the repair ourselves. In March 2019, after all of the snow we got in February began to melt, we noticed that the paint on that same wall was completely blistered, with water once again leaching through the cinder block wall and breaking through the paint. It was exactly the same problem we thought was repaired. We called Safe Basements, and they visited twice. The person I spoke to over the phone said that sometimes the drain tile "system gets overwhelmed" and used "Act of God" to describe the heavy snowfall in February (language which is in the warranty and would ostensibly relieve them from any further responsibility). One of their staff who visited the house told us that the placement of our downspout outside of the wall would void the warranty, though the warranty materials do not address a specific distance requirement. They also pointed out that some water had come through our basement window, but that does not explain the water leaching through the cinder block. It seemed to us as if they were reaching for any reason to void their lifetime guarantee. However, regardless of whether the warranty is void or not, the most problematic issue for us is that upon viewing the new water damage, their staff told us that due to the nature of that finished wall, because it was mud over concrete as opposed to drywall with a vapor barrier, the concrete "couldn't breathe" and was therefore soaking up the water so it didn't flow to the trench that they'd installed below. This is exactly how the wall was when we first hired them, so we are at a loss as to why they either 1) didn't realize the construction of that wall in the first place, or 2) advised us to install drain tile that was apparently never going to effectively solve the original problem. We relied on their expert advice about how to address our problem, so we are disappointed that they sold us a solution that they reasonably should have known wouldn't work. Safe Basements has advised us to re-grade the exterior, which we have begun to do, and to either completely expose the cinder block on that wall (effectively unfinishing our basement) or install drywall (which isn't feasible due to the placement of a stairwell). The drain tile system is slowly working to some extent, and indeed, some of the blistering that caused us to call them has receded, but the blistered paint is still noticeable and needs to be fixed. So our original problem remains unsolved and we will incur more costs to repair that wall and try to keep water out of our basement. It seems to us that we could have just addressed the exterior grading in the first place rather than installing the drain tile, spending a fraction of the cost to get likely the same result.
Michael B. on April 2019