Case file — Kensington, Montgomery County, MD. One of the 25 jobs in our 250-home series. New here? Start with our open letter.
At a glance
| Location | Kensington, Montgomery County, MD |
| The problem | An actively leaking crack in a poured foundation wall |
| The fix | Polyurethane grout injection, then a return visit to cut the packers, clean the wall and patch it |
| Time on site | Two visits, about a month apart |
One job, two appointments
Our records show this house twice. The crack was injected on one date, and the wall was finished on another, four and a half weeks later.
Homeowners sometimes read a second appointment as a sign something went wrong. On an injection job it is the opposite: it is the job being done the way it is supposed to be done.
What is happening in between
When polyurethane grout goes into a crack, it does not simply harden in place. It reacts with the moisture it meets and expands to fill the path, and the packers stay in the wall while that happens because pulling them early can pull grout back out with them.
So at the end of visit one, the wall looks unfinished. There are packers standing proud of the concrete and cured polyurethane squeezed out along the line of the crack. That is the correct appearance of a freshly injected wall.
Visit two is the finishing: cut the packers off flush, remove the excess material, and patch the surface with cementitious mortar so the wall is smooth and sealed again.
Why the gap was a month, not a day
Curing itself does not take a month. Scheduling does.
The honest version is that the finishing visit is short, it is not urgent, and it gets fitted around jobs where water is actively coming into somebody’s house. A sealed crack waiting to be tidied is a better use of a delay than a basement waiting to be drained.
What matters is that the second visit is booked, tracked as part of the same job, and already inside the price quoted at the start. It is not an add-on and it is not optional. If it were billed separately it would be very easy to quietly never do it, which is exactly why some walls out there still have packers in them.
What to ask before you sign
Ask any company quoting you crack injection one question: is the finishing included, and when does it happen?
If the answer is vague, or if the finishing appears as its own line with its own price and its own decision attached, you are being quoted half a job. The injection itself is the part that stops the water. The return visit is the part that proves somebody intends to come back.