The job Foundation Restoration keeps getting called for is the one other contractors have already failed at. One homeowner wrote in a 2023 review that a decade of costly attempts by other companies had never stopped water coming into the basement; Kevin's crew came out the day after the call, ran a water test, and diagnosed it. Another, writing in April 2024, had spent twelve years and three contractors on a leaking chimney before this team found the problem and ended the leaks through three storms.
It is a small Boston masonry outfit working mostly on old housing stock — fieldstone and rubble foundations, brick chimneys, granite and brick front steps, the mortar joints of triple-deckers. Reviewers name Kevin as the owner and he appears in nearly every account across three years, on the estimate and on the job. The work described is consistent: repointing stone and brick foundations inside and out, waterproofing them, rebuilding chimneys from the roofline up, resetting steps.
That history now runs to 54 reviews between 2023 and 2026, and the striking part is not the star average but how often honesty comes up in the specifics rather than the adjectives. In February 2026 a homeowner said he came out quickly, identified the likely cause of water in the basement, and told them they needed a different trade for it. A 2024 reviewer in Scituate described him looking at garage-floor cracks and saying they were cosmetic, not worth spending money on. Several people say they hired him twice, or across two properties.
Pricing lands the same way in account after account: quotes described as competitive against several bids, jobs finishing on or under budget, and a 2024 reviewer noting extra prep work — replacing grates, filling rodent burrows on an exterior repointing — done without added charges.
Two things to sort out before booking. This is masonry, not a whole-house waterproofing operation: as that February 2026 homeowner found, some basement water problems get referred to another trade after the assessment. And nearly the entire written history sits on one platform, with only a handful of comments since early 2026 — worth asking for recent local references on a job of any size, particularly a full chimney rebuild.
One review credits the work to "Backbay Masonry" while praising Kevin and his crew, so it is worth confirming which legal entity your contract and any warranty are written under. For an old Boston-area house with a crumbling stone foundation, a leaning chimney, or water finding its way in through the mortar, this is a specialist rather than a generalist — get the scope and the entity name in writing on the estimate.