Home Repair Foundation

If you are faced with a home repair to your foundation, don’t ignore it. The foundation of a home is the most important structural element in a house. Floors, walls, the roof all depend on solid bearing, and if the foundation to your home is splitting apart, dropping, sliding, etc., the rest of your home will probably suffer significant damage.

The home foundation repair cost that you may get quoted by a contractor will likely take your breath away. It can take specialized equipment and methods to stabilize a foundation. Some repairs that correct a bowing concrete-block foundation wall can be done with little effort, while installing poured concrete piers under a settling footer can by much more invasive. Each job often has a specialized solution.

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To repair a home foundation, the first thing I recommend is to call a residential structural engineer. These professionals know the real stresses on a foundation, and they can provide solid engineered solutions based upon physics, mathematics and schooling. These engineers often know excellent foundation repair contractors who do very good work.

One of the things you have to be very careful of when repairing a shifting foundation is concentrating loads to other points of the foundation as you try to repair the problem. A great engineer will make sure this doesn’t happen. For example, let’s say a house is constructed on spongy soil. One end of the house is settling more than the other. If you pier just the one drooping end and stabilize it, you can create new cracking at the other end as it may continue to drop. It’s all very complicated, and repair companies may not have the engineering background to anticipate this.

Unfortunately, when you start to look into the event that was the cause of the home foundation repair, it is almost always related to poor construction practices by the builder. The home may have been built on poorly compacted soil, a footer may be too narrow or too thin, there may be no reinforcing steel in a poured concrete wall, or a concrete block foundation wall may have never been filled solid. There are many places where a builder can cut corners or not make the foundation as strong as possible.

It’s imperative that you consult with a great engineer as you plan to build a home so that you take the time to construct a solid foundation. It often costs just a little more to get a superb foundation that will not let you down.

Foundation repair is a huge industry. There are many types of methods and products that will do a fantastic job of making permanent repairs. When I was still building on a day-to-day basis, I did several major repairs to foundations. The most common foundation failure I witnessed in Cincinnati, OH, was an older poured concrete foundation that would develop a horizontal crack in the wall. In many cases, the soil pressure would cause the wall to bow inwards. A thicker concrete wall or vertical steel bars in the wall would often prevent this.

To repair this horizontal crack, you had all sorts of options. You could actually straighten the wall by digging out the soil around the exterior of the foundation and using horizontal jacks to push the crack together. Once the wall was plumb and in the same plane, vertical small I-beams could be placed tight against the wall so it would not bow inwards once the soil was placed against the wall.

In certain situations, you didn’t have to do all this work as the same result could be achieved by placing large steel plates at the crack on the inside of the home. A thick threaded rod would then be placed through the wall and connected to a large plate put in the soil outside. When you turned a nut inside, it would pull the two plates together which over time would straighten the wall. The point is that there are different methods to repair foundations.

Cracks in poured concrete foundation walls can sometimes be repaired with amazing epoxy compounds. When the epoxy is applied to solid, clean concrete, it can lock the two pieces together permanently. In some cases, the cured epoxy is many times stronger than the original concrete.

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