Where We Work

• Schenectady
• Scotia & Glenville
• Niskayuna
• Rotterdam
• Hill towns
• Capital Region east

City of Schenectady

The age of the housing stock dominates everything here. Roughly half the city's houses predate 1939, and the neighborhoods behave quite differently from one another.

The Stockade is the extreme case and genuinely unusual nationally — over four hundred homes more than two centuries old, the densest concentration of period housing in the country. Rubble foundations, narrow lots with little or no machine access, historic district review on visible exterior work, and a documented flooding history from the Mohawk. Almost everything here ends up being an interior solution combined with repointing, and for properties in the flood-affected blocks the honest conversation is often a different one entirely.

The GE Realty Plot, built between 1887 and 1939 for General Electric's engineers and executives, is large, architecturally significant, and National Register listed. Big houses on generous lots, which means exterior work is often actually feasible here in a way it isn't downtown — and given the value of these properties, doing the wall properly from outside frequently makes economic sense.

Central Park, Bellevue and Mont Pleasant are the dense early-twentieth-century neighborhoods: block and early poured foundations, tight side yards, and a lot of two-family houses where a wet basement is also a tenant problem. Woodlawn runs somewhat newer with more postwar stock and more poured walls, which are the most predictable and cheapest to repair.

Scotia & Glenville

Across the river, and sharing the Mohawk's behavior. Low-lying parts of Scotia flood when the river rises — the same ice-jam events that reach the Stockade also put water into yards and basements along Schonowee Avenue and the low ground near the river. Everything on the flood-prone basements page applies here directly.

Move up out of the flats and it changes completely. Glenville rises away from the river, and the properties up the slope have entirely ordinary basement problems — hillside runoff arriving from above, best intercepted with a curtain drain before it ever reaches the house. Larger lots mean machine access is usually straightforward, which makes exterior work more affordable here than in the city. Also more well-and-septic properties as you get further out, where an old field tile of unknown vintage sometimes turns out to be routing water toward a foundation.

Niskayuna

Predominantly postwar, which changes the work substantially. A great many Niskayuna houses sit on poured concrete foundations from the 1950s through 1970s — and poured walls are the most predictable thing in this trade. They crack in understood patterns, they inject cleanly, and a leak that would be a $9,000 problem on a rubble wall is frequently a $600 problem here.

The recurring issues are different too: settled grading forty or fifty years after construction, original sump pumps well past their service life, window wells without covers, and the occasional bowing block wall where backfill was never properly compacted. Lots are generous, so exterior work is practical when it's warranted. If you're in Niskayuna and you've been quoted a full perimeter system, it's worth confirming that the diagnosis actually calls for one.

Rotterdam

Mixed, and the mix matters. Older sections near the city share Schenectady's housing stock and its foundations. Further out it becomes postwar suburban and then genuinely rural toward Princetown and Duanesburg, with larger lots, more well-and-septic, and more houses set on slopes.

The pattern we see most in Rotterdam is hillside water — a basement dry on three sides and wet along the entire uphill wall. That's usually cheaper to fix than a city basement, because a curtain drain placed across the slope above the house intercepts the water before it arrives. It's exterior work, it's often the complete solution, and it doesn't require touching the basement floor.

The hill towns: Duanesburg, Princetown, Delanson

Rural, higher, and snowier than the valley floor. Properties here are a wide mix of ages — genuinely old farmhouses on stone foundations alongside modern construction — and they share a set of conditions the city doesn't have.

Snow load is the differentiator. More accumulation through winter means more meltwater over a short window in March and April, arriving on ground that's still frozen. Houses up here can be bone dry for ten months and predictably wet for two. Because lots are large, exterior work is nearly always practical: room for a machine, room to daylight a drain line downhill, room to regrade properly. That makes the more thorough repairs more affordable here than they'd be on a Stockade lot — worth knowing if you've been quoted an interior system based on assumptions that apply in the city.

Old farmhouses out this way also frequently have field tile or hand-dug drainage of unknown age somewhere on the property. Sometimes it still works. Sometimes it collapsed decades ago and now routes water directly at a foundation, which is a genuinely common and genuinely surprising finding.

East: Colonie, Latham, Clifton Park, Albany

We work across the rest of the Capital Region as well. Broadly, the further from the older city cores you get, the newer the foundations and the more predictable the repairs.

Clifton Park and Halfmoon are heavily postwar and later — poured walls, sump pumps as standard equipment, and problems that are usually about a failed pump or settled grading rather than the foundation itself. Colonie, Latham and Guilderland are a broader mix by decade. Albany, Troy, Cohoes and Watervliet have older cores with housing stock much like Schenectady's, including plenty of stone and early block, plus their own river-adjacent low ground along the Hudson.

One note on this side of the region: it's where most of the larger waterproofing operations are based, several of them dealers within national franchise networks. Nothing wrong with that in itself — but you're buying from a product catalog, and on a 130-year-old rubble foundation the catalog may not contain the right answer.