Boston, MA Commercial Waterproofing, Caulking & Coatings

No, and the two get confused most often in the week after a nor’easter. Waterproofing is work done on the outside of the building before water gets in: joint sealants, coatings, membranes, masonry repellents, glazing. Water damage restoration is what happens indoors afterwards, drying out, tearing out and rebuilding whatever the water reached. Presto works on the outside only. On a Boston building that distinction carries a price, because the same driven rain that costs a few thousand dollars of joint sealant in October costs a great deal more in soaked gypsum, corroded metal and displaced tenants in February.

Yes, and nearly all of it is. Most of our Boston work is on occupied office towers, hotels, hospitals, condominiums and mixed-use buildings, and the constraints are the ordinary ones for a dense old city: narrow sidewalks, tight staging, and a building that cannot afford to lose its entrances. We work from industrial rope access and swing stage wherever the elevation allows, which keeps the sidewalk open and avoids a season of scaffold. Noisy work is scheduled outside peak hours, tenants get notice before we are over their windows, and the scope is phased so common areas and daily operations stay usable. There is a practical bonus for taller buildings: the close-range access the city’s periodic exterior wall inspection requires above 125 feet can be shared with the repair work rather than mobilized and paid for twice.

Paint is a finish. It gives you color and a little weather resistance, and it will not stretch with the wall or bridge a crack. An elastomeric coating is a waterproofing system that happens to look like a finish: it goes on at roughly ten times the film build of paint, flexes with the substrate, and bridges hairline cracks so water cannot work in behind it. In Boston that flexibility is doing real work, because a crack that opens and closes across about 68 freeze-thaw days a year is a crack a rigid film will simply split along. The catch is the calendar. Water-based acrylic and elastomeric coatings generally want about 50 degrees Fahrenheit and rising to be installed, and manufacturers begin cautioning from the mid-50s downward, warning that acrylics can freeze overnight and cure to a glazed, cracked surface. Boston’s normal daily high sits below 50 degrees from November through March. In practice that makes water-based coating work an April-through-October scope here, solvent-based silicones and urethanes will run further into the shoulder season if they are stored warm, and a genuine winter emergency needs different chemistry. Confirm the specific product data sheet in every case, because each manufacturer sets its own minimum.

Some of it can wait and some of it should not, and in Boston the deciding question is whether the defect will take on water before that water freezes. Treat it as immediate if joint sealant has split or released from one face of the joint, if there is dark streaking running down the wall below a failed joint, if efflorescence is blooming on masonry or concrete, if paint is bubbling or damp is showing on an interior face, if a coating is chalking or peeling past normal wear, or if concrete is spalling anywhere or reinforcement is visible. Two more are particular to this city. Joints working open at the base of a wall on filled land, common in Back Bay and the South End where nineteenth-century buildings sit on wood piles driven through fill and organic silt, are usually a movement problem rather than a water problem and need the right discipline looking at them. And any low-slope roof edge, scupper or internal drain where ice built up last winter should be reviewed before the next one. A project consultation will scope out exactly what is needed and help you prioritize, and where something can genuinely hold until April we will tell you so.

Yes. Permit applications go to the City of Boston Inspectional Services Department, generally as a short-form permit for repair scopes, and our project management team files them. If the building is individually landmarked or sits in one of Boston’s landmark, architectural or architectural conservation districts, the reviewing body is the Boston Landmarks Commission or the relevant district commission, and the document is a Certificate of Appropriateness or Design Approval, or an Exemption where the work falls outside their purview. Masonry cleaning, repointing and changes to coatings and roofing materials are explicitly within scope for review in districts such as Back Bay and the South End, and genuine maintenance and repair items can often go through administrative review rather than a public hearing. Two clarifications worth having in writing. The Massachusetts Historical Commission does not review purely private work; it enters only where state or federal funding, licensing or permitting is involved. And Massachusetts has no state product-approval registry or Notice of Acceptance program comparable to Florida’s, so do not expect a lookup number: under 780 CMR Chapter 17, coatings and sealants are accepted on third-party testing and labeling by an approved agency. Separately, if the building is over 70 feet or classified high-rise, Boston Municipal Code 9-9.12 requires a registered professional to inspect the exterior walls at least every five years and file a sealed report with the Commissioner, with close-range access required above 125 feet. We regularly provide both the access for that inspection and the repair scope behind a Safe With A Repair and Maintenance Program finding.