ABT Foundation Solutions, Inc.

We had ABT take care of the installation of an interior drainage system beneath our 1913 home's basement floor along with a new sump pit. They came out to do an estimate, which took about an hour, and completed the job in two days once it was scheduled. I'll be completely honest here: I didn't pick them because they were the cheapest quote we received, it was more so based on the overall design of the system and its components. Their customer service was also pretty great and everyone who stopped out at the house was very friendly and easy to work with. They even returned to alter the pluming of the sump pump(s) based on what the original quote said, what was actually done, and my concerns for it after the system had been operational for awhile. That is something I greatly appreciated. There are only two things I wasn't a fan of, however I knew they were a risk. First are the cracks that formed in our floor during the demo work. It's an old concrete floor that isn't very thick, which is out of their control. As long as everything works as it should, there shouldn't be any water that infiltrates through the floor cracks. The other is that they cut through the interior load-bearing walls instead of going around them to route the pipes - which I knew they were going to do before accepting their proposal. I understand the reasoning for it and my thoughts for routing the pipes around the wall through the doorway(s) was only after I saw what the walls looked like below the floor - after the pipes were routed through the wall. The house did settle a bit, which I expected, and has creaks in places it never did prior to the work. My suggestion to anyone with a home the age of ours, or older, is to try and determine how the foundation was constructed/poured prior to the work being done. This is something the estimator and I tried to do, but apparently we were a bit off on our guess. We have an old poured concrete foundation, which I found out has no footing extending out further than the width of the walls. I didn't find this out until the floor was all broken up and the pipes were down. Considering I didn't take the time to break up the floor and look for myself prior to the work happening, how would I have known? By the time I noticed anything, it was too late, otherwise I would have requested to change the order and route the piping around through the doorways in the wall. I don't anticipate having any structural problems because of it; no cracks have formed in the walls where they did this. I am by no means a structural engineer, so this is simply my opinion. It's just something to think about. So far the system was worked wonders following these hard Spring rains we've had recently. Had this not been installed this past Winter, we would have had some water in the basement already.