Massachusetts · Rhode Island · Connecticut · New Hampshire · Maine
The part nobody sees, and the reason the rest of it is still straight in twenty years.
Price your project →A wet yard is a route, not a puddle. The fix starts by working out what is feeding it — roof, driveway, the neighbour, the water table — because a drain installed at the low spot without answering that just moves the problem a few feet.
Some ground drains and some does not, and it is mapped. Poorly drained soil holds water under a base course, freezes, lifts, and cracks the surface from below. It is why two identical driveways on the same street fail ten years apart, and it is knowable before anything is built.
Most wet basements are a grading problem dressed as a waterproofing problem. Soil settles against a foundation over decades until it pitches back toward the house.
A pipe that ends in the ground is a pipe that backs up. It runs out to daylight where the grade allows, and to a dry well sized for the catchment where it does not.
Every wall and patio we have taken apart failed for one of these five reasons. They are most of what separates a job that looks right at twenty years from one that does not make five.
Compacted gravel, deep enough for the ground it sits in. Every course above copies the first one, and so does every mistake in it.
New England ground moves in winter. A footing poured above the frost line lifts with it, and the wall on top of it cracks — not that winter, usually the third one.
Saturated soil expands about nine percent when it freezes, against something that cannot move. Clean stone, fabric, and a pipe run out to daylight.
A tooled joint sheds water off the face of the stone. A joint struck flush holds it there, and held water is what freezes.
The top takes the weather and everything anyone sets on it. Pitched away, set solid, joints tight.
If something we built moves, cracks or fails in the first year because of how it was built, we come back and fix it. No argument, no invoice.
Trace the job on a satellite view of your own property, or send a photograph, and the page prices it. The on-site visit is free and it is what makes it exact.