Foundation Repair Case Studies: Garage Foundation Settlement Repaired with Piers
Challenge
Foundation push piers helped to correct the foundation settlement occurring for this home in Valley Center, Kansas. Exterior wall cracks were closed.
Foundation push piers helped to correct the foundation settlement occurring for this home in Valley Center, Kansas. As you can see from the photos, the garage floor was lifted, and cracks in the brick exterior wall were closed after the repair was completed. This solution is excellent and causes minimal intrusion, unlike replacing your entire foundation.
Settlement can happen to any home, and it is essential to understand how it happens. When your home was initially built, the builders needed to remove soil and build your home foundation to rest on. The earth put back is called fill soil; unfortunately, we will never be able to compact the ground as well as mother nature did over thousands of years. This soil is now easily manipulated by the elements. Many areas we service, such as Valley Center, Kansas, Sioux City, IA, Omaha, NE, and more, have clay soil that will react differently to specific weather periods. Some periods we have drought causing the soil to shrink, leaving void space for your home to fall into. We have heavy rains saturating that soil and making it weaker, causing the house to quickly sink into it. When this starts to happen, you will see some settlement symptoms, some shown in the photos.
Outside you can see stairstep cracks in the foundation and possibly a chimney separating from the home. You can potentially see damage by doors and windows such as cracks extending from them, they are out of square, separation from the frame, and even see caulk frequently being split open. You will even see damage on the inside, such as drywall cracks along with doors and windows not functioning correctly. The customer noticed these signs and had one of our experts determine what they can do to prevent further damage. They made the right call. Problems like settlement do not go away on their own. The longer the issue persists more time, money, and stress will be spent by the homeowner. Home is a person's largest asset, and we want to help our customers protect It, whether It Is their forever home or even if they plan to sell.
Thrasher and Supportworks(opens in a new window) work together to have the right products and knowledge to solve these problems the right way every time. Contractors in the Supportworks network are in the field every day to diagnose and repair structural foundation problems. Their extensive training, experience and technical knowledge have encouraged thousands of homeowners to trust them with even the most challenging foundation problems. Add to that the support of the entire Supportworks team, including professionals in structural engineering, geotechnical engineering, construction and the manufacturing and installation of repair products—and there you have the power of the network: trustworthy foundation repair experts, trained in delivering the best permanent solutions.
Our specialist helped this customer by determining how much the foundation settled, where the settlement started and stops, and building the perfect solution for that customer to fix their problem permanently. We have a few options to repair these options, such as push piers or helical piers, but we do not have a one size fits all approach to fixing these problems. Our specialist determined the push pier system was perfect for repairing this home. Our team of engineers provided the specialist with the software to accurately calculate how many piers the customer needs and their spacing for their home to be fixed properly, using the specialist's measurements.
Once we make sure we have everything for a flawless install, our team of expert installers came in to do the work. They will push our piers as far into the earth as they need to go until we hit a layer called load-bearing strata. This layer is stable and will not sink, and this will permanently stabilize the home and prevent any further movement. In some cases, we can even lift the settled foundation back up, causing gaps and cracks to close, as shown in the photos. The crew also stabilized their garage slab with our PolyLevel foam. Due to how much this garage settled when we lift it back up, we now have void space under the slab. This is done, so the garage slab has something substantial to sit on and is not floating, eventually leading to damage to the slab. Another satisfied customer is relieved to know their home is no longer settling. We are glad to give them total peace of mind with our 25-year transferable warranty.
