Basement waterproofing in Inverness

Inverness has two housing stocks working on completely different failure modes, and that is genuinely useful to know before anyone quotes you.

The older stock is what remains from the coal era and the fishing communities along the coast: modest houses on stone, rubble and early block, built before drainage at the footing was a thing anyone installed. Those walls weep through mortar joints rather than cracking in one place, and they need repointing, appropriate parging and a drainage route, not injection.

The newer stock — and there is a lot of it now, with the growth the golf resorts have brought to the west coast — is poured concrete and ICF on properly bedded footings. Those foundations do not usually fail from age. They fail from details: an unplugged form-tie hole, a cold joint, a crack from the corner of a window opening, backfill that settled and now slopes toward the house, or a downspout dumping into that settled backfill. Those are cheap fixes when they are diagnosed correctly and expensive ones when they are not.

The ground is different from the eastern side of the island too. This coast is sandstone bluffs and beach sand, which drains fast — until you are close enough to the shoreline that the water table is shallow, at which point fast-draining soil simply delivers water to a wall more quickly. Along the Ceilidh Trail through Judique, Port Hood and Mabou the ground rises steeply off the shore, and on those slopes lateral seepage from uphill is the dominant mechanism, exactly as it is around Baddeck.

Weather is the last piece and not a small one. This coast takes the full west-facing exposure to the Gulf, with severe wind-driven rain, and the highlands behind it hold some of the heaviest snow loads in Atlantic Canada. Snow banked against a foundation from December to April does not run off in spring; it melts straight down into the soil at the wall.

Many properties here are on well and septic and several are seasonal, so discharge routing, freeze protection and pump backup get the same attention we give them around the Bras d’Or.

We work Inverness, Mabou, Port Hood, Judique and the Margaree area on regular Cape Breton routing.