Hear from Our Customers
When your basement stops taking on water, the rest of your home stops being at risk. No more pulling up wet carpet after a hard rain, no more running a dehumidifier on full blast all summer, no more wondering whether that musty smell means something worse is growing behind the drywall. You get your space back — and your peace of mind with it.
Melrose Park sits squarely in the Tookany Creek watershed, and if you’ve lived here for more than a season or two, you already know what that means. The clay-heavy soil throughout Cheltenham Township doesn’t drain — it holds. After a storm, it presses against your foundation walls with sustained hydrostatic pressure that older poured concrete and block foundations simply weren’t designed to handle. A properly waterproofed basement changes that equation entirely.
And because a large share of Melrose Park’s housing stock was built between the 1920s and the 1950s, water rarely shows up alone. It brings mold. Sometimes it disturbs lead paint. We handle all of it under one roof — waterproofing, mold remediation, lead inspection — so you’re not coordinating three separate contractors while your basement sits wet.
We’ve been working in Montgomery County for two decades. That means we’ve been in basements all over Melrose Park and Cheltenham Township — homes along Old York Road, twins near the Melrose Park SEPTA station, houses that back up to the Tookany Creek corridor. We know what the soil does here, we know what these foundations look like from the inside, and we know exactly where the water finds its way in.
We’re fully licensed, bonded, and insured. We hold EPA/HUD certification and a Certified Lead Inspector and Risk Assessor designation — which matters more than most homeowners realize when you’re dealing with pre-1978 construction and any kind of wall disturbance. We use HEPA filtration systems on every job, and we offer free estimates with zero pressure attached.
When you call us, you get a real person. Day or night.
It starts with a free on-site estimate. We come out, walk the basement, and look at everything — wall cracks, floor joints, efflorescence staining, grading around the foundation, any signs of active seepage or prior patch attempts. We’re not there to sell you a package. We’re there to understand what’s actually happening with your specific home.
From there, we put together a scope of work that fits the problem. For some Melrose Park homes, that means interior drainage channel installation and a sump pump system to manage hydrostatic pressure from the clay soil. For others, it’s exterior waterproofing membrane application, crack injection, or a combination of approaches. Because Cheltenham Township requires stormwater management review for exterior work involving significant disturbance, we handle the permit coordination so you don’t have to navigate that process yourself.
Once the work is done, we don’t disappear. If mold remediation or lead-safe work was part of the job, we follow EPA/HUD protocol through completion and clearance. You get documentation. You get a basement that’s been addressed at the source — not just patched at the surface.
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Basement waterproofing isn’t one thing — it’s a diagnosis followed by the right combination of solutions. We offer interior drainage systems, sump pump installation and replacement, exterior waterproofing membrane application, foundation crack injection, basement wall sealing, and crawl space encapsulation. If your home needs more than one of these, we sequence the work correctly so each layer supports the next.
For Melrose Park homeowners, the age of the housing stock is the defining factor. Homes built before 1960 — and nearly 45% of homes in Melrose Park were built before 1950 — have foundations that have been dealing with Cheltenham Township’s clay soil and Tookany Creek watershed saturation for sixty, seventy, sometimes eighty-plus years. That history shows up as horizontal cracks from lateral soil pressure, white mineral deposits on block walls, and floor-wall joint seepage that gets worse every spring. We know how to read those signs and address them properly.
Because we’re also a certified mold remediation and lead inspection contractor, any environmental hazards uncovered during waterproofing work don’t require you to stop everything and find another contractor. We assess it, we handle it, and we document it — all in one project, with one point of contact.
The most common cause in Melrose Park specifically is the combination of clay-heavy soil and an aging foundation that was never designed with modern drainage in mind. Clay soil doesn’t absorb and release water quickly — it holds it. After a significant storm, the soil around your foundation becomes saturated and starts exerting hydrostatic pressure against the walls. Older poured concrete and block foundations develop cracks and joint gaps over decades, and that pressurized water finds every one of them.
Melrose Park’s position in the Tookany Creek watershed compounds this. Cheltenham Township has a well-documented flooding history — serious enough that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers conducted a formal flood damage reduction study for the area. The township’s own guidance explicitly recommends sealing basement walls with waterproofing compounds to prevent seepage. That’s not generic advice — it’s a direct acknowledgment that water intrusion is a known, widespread issue in homes throughout Melrose Park and the surrounding area. The fix isn’t a coat of paint on the wall. It’s addressing drainage, pressure, and foundation integrity as a system.
Cost depends heavily on what the basement actually needs, and that varies significantly from house to house — especially in Melrose Park, where homes range from 1920s construction to postwar builds. A basic interior drainage system with sump pump installation typically runs in the $3,000 to $8,000 range for an average-sized basement. Exterior waterproofing involving excavation, membrane application, and drainage board installation can run $8,000 to $15,000 or more depending on the perimeter length and soil conditions.
If mold remediation or lead-safe work is needed — which is a real possibility in any pre-1978 Melrose Park home where water has been present for a while — that adds to the scope and the cost. We provide free, itemized estimates so you know exactly what you’re looking at before any work begins. We also offer cash discounts, which is a straightforward way to reduce your total cost if you’re paying out of pocket rather than through a financing arrangement.
Done right, the core components of a waterproofing system — interior drainage channels, a properly sized sump pump, exterior membrane application — are designed to last for decades. Interior drainage systems are typically installed beneath the floor slab and don’t degrade the way surface coatings do. A quality sump pump with a battery backup will run reliably for ten or more years with basic maintenance.
What can change over time is the foundation itself. In older Melrose Park homes, new cracks can form as the structure continues to settle and as freeze-thaw cycles — Cheltenham Township averages a January low around 24°F — continue to work on the concrete. That’s why it’s important to address the underlying drainage and pressure issues rather than just sealing surface cracks. If you’re only patching cracks without managing the hydrostatic pressure behind them, the water will find a new path. A full-system approach is what makes waterproofing last.
It depends on the scope of work. Interior drainage system installation and sump pump replacement are generally lower on the permit threshold and often don’t require a formal building permit. However, exterior waterproofing work that involves excavation around the foundation is a different story — that type of work typically requires a building permit under Pennsylvania’s Uniform Construction Code, and Cheltenham Township also requires stormwater management review for any property improvement involving 250 or more square feet of land disturbance.
If your Melrose Park property is near the Tookany Creek floodplain, there may be additional considerations under Cheltenham Township’s Floodplain Conservation Overlay District, which has specific requirements for work on structures in or adjacent to designated flood hazard areas. We handle the permit coordination process as part of the job. You won’t be left figuring out what forms to file with the township on your own — we’ve done this work in Montgomery County long enough to know what’s required and how to move through it efficiently.
Yes, and it’s more common than most homeowners expect — especially in Melrose Park, where a significant share of homes have been dealing with periodic moisture intrusion for decades. Mold doesn’t need much: a little moisture, an organic surface, and time. Once it’s established, you can’t just dry out the basement and call it done. The mold needs to be properly remediated before any waterproofing work seals the walls, otherwise you’re locking the problem in rather than solving it.
We handle mold remediation as part of our core service offering, which means you don’t need to bring in a separate contractor before we can start the waterproofing work. We assess the extent of the mold growth, contain the affected area, use HEPA filtration to prevent cross-contamination with the rest of your home, and remediate according to established protocols. If the mold is in a pre-1978 home and disturbing painted surfaces is part of the remediation, our Certified Lead Inspector designation means we’re already equipped to handle that safely and in compliance with EPA/HUD requirements.
We offer cash discounts on waterproofing jobs, and for Melrose Park homeowners paying out of pocket — which is common for this type of work since it typically isn’t covered by homeowners insurance unless tied to a sudden, specific event — that discount is a real and meaningful reduction in your total cost. It’s a straightforward arrangement: paying cash eliminates processing fees and administrative overhead on our end, and we pass that savings directly to you.
Beyond that, the free estimate itself has real value. You’re not committing to anything by having us come out and assess your basement. You get a clear picture of what’s actually happening with your foundation, what it will take to fix it, and what it will cost — before you make any decision. In a market where some waterproofing contractors use high-pressure sales presentations to close jobs on the first visit, we’d rather earn your business by being straight with you about what your home needs and what it will realistically cost to address it.
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