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The foundation is crucial to your home’s entire structure, as it stabilizes your entire house. Therefore, checking on it regularly to make sure everything is in its right place is very important.
But more often than not, homes have foundation issues that need to be addressed. Since your home’s foundation might be sprawling, foundational issues may be hard to pinpoint. As a result, it’s difficult for most homeowners to understand what to do when they see a problem.
Luckily, Benton Harbor residents can rely on Bluebird CFW Foundation Repair & Waterproofing to handle their foundation issues. Let’s go over what foundation repair entails and why it’s so important to your home.
Signs of Damaged Foundation
Your home’s foundation refers to many different areas of the house, including the following:
- Walls
- Floors
- Pillars
- Chimney
Because it’s such a wide-ranging term, there’s an even bigger list of foundation troubles that you need to look out for. Here are some of the most common ones:
- Cracks in Drywall – These are hard to spot at first, but drywall cracks will get worse with time if you don’t address them immediately. Shifts in the foundation cause the walls to move, which is what creates drywall cracks.
- Cracks in Floor – Cracks can happen on any floor regardless of what it’s made out of. Whether you have ceramic tiles or concrete slabs, cracks will only get worse if you don’t address them properly.
- Cracks in Corners – Vinyl and other material sidings will often indicate foundation shifts. You’ll start to see widening gaps between pieces of siding, which then causes cracks.
- Cracks in Brickwork – Cracked brickwork contributes heavily to drywall damage. As soon as you see cracks in your brick structures, it’s time to call someone to address the problem right away.
- Leaning Chimney – A leaning chimney is a definite sign that something is not right with your foundation. If you notice that your chimney looks off, you will want to get it looked at.
Why Should I Repair My Foundation?
While we don’t want to exaggerate, failing to address foundational issues will cause a lot of damage to your home. If your floors and walls start collapsing, your rooms and basements will eventually cave in, which really threatens you and your family’s safety.
Even if you think a foundation problem isn’t too bad, it’ll only get worse over time. The longer you wait, the more expensive the fix will become in the long run.
You’ll also compromise the property value of your home if you don’t address foundation issues. When people see that you have foundation issues, they’re not going to buy your home as easily.
What Bluebird Offers
Interested in fixing up your foundation? Bluebird has you covered.
We are RamJack certified, which means that the materials we use have been tested and proven to work. Safety, quality, and efficiency are our top priorities, and this shows in everything we do and every product we use.
How we approach your foundation issue will depend on a few different factors. For example, is your home more lightweight in composition, or is it heavier? If the former, we implement what is known as a helical piering system to keep everything in place. For cases that fall into the latter category, we choose deep-driven steel piercing systems.
Bottom line: we’ve got all the technical details down. You can relax as we get to work on your foundation.
Call Bluebird Today
Benton Harbor residents don’t have to wait for their foundation issues to become devastatingly severe. Call Bluebird Foundation Repair & Waterproofing for a quote! In addition to foundation repair, we also offer crawlspace waterproofing and basement waterproofing in Benton Harbor, MI.
Frequently Asked Questions
Foundation repair is the process of raising, securing, and stabilizing the foundation back to its original position. There are different methods for foundation repair, such as installing helical, steel, or concrete piers, slabjacking/mudjacking, or polyurethane foam jacking. Among all, steel push piers are the most effective foundation repair method, which lasts for 10 to 15 years with minimal maintenance.
We repair foundation cracks through epoxy injections. Epoxy injection is a process of welding the cracks back together and restoring the concrete’s strength, design, and structure. Basically, in this process, we inject the epoxy into the cracks, which expands and hardens by filling the crack. For deeper cracks, we open them at ¼ inch width, install ‘T’ shaped injection ports, and place them at 6 to 8 inches centrally.
On average, the foundation repair in Benton Harbor, MI, costs $1,100 to $5,000 per project. This price changes with the change of foundation repairing methods, the extent of the foundation damage, and the size of your building.
If the cracks in the concrete foundation walls are ¼ inch wide or less, we fill them with polyurethane injection and adhesive epoxy in a zigzag pattern by 5 inches. We finish by applying carbon fiber reinforcing fabric to the epoxy-covered cracks.
We use the piering method to lift a house to repair the foundation. Our process starts with digging vertical piers deep into the soil just below the hollow part of the foundation. Then, we use hydraulic jacks on the piers to lift the level of the foundation. The trick here is to over-lift it slightly so that future soil movement won’t impact the house’s structure much after the repair.
If you observe – cracks on the drywall, gaps between exterior windows and walls, uneven floors, musty odor, and sticking doors, these are the correct signs of foundation problems. As soon as you observe these foundation problems, you need to fix them as quickly as possible.
Probably. Most of the foundation issues erupt due to fluctuating moisture in the soil around the house. If the trees around your home have extensive roots, they require much water. So, these trees can drain moisture from the ground, which causes soil to dry and unevenly settle, causing uneven floors.
Here’s one trick – get your child’s marble and roll it from one corner of the room to the other; if it rolls, the floor is uneven. You can also try the same trick, but this time, walk yourself lengthwise and widthwise and see if you notice any change. If you felt like you went down a little, then your foundation has a problem.
Flooding damages the home’s foundation by shifting the foundation. The water consists of hydraulic pressure, which constantly pushes your foundation. This pressure on the foundation ultimately leads to causing cracks, leaks, and structural damage to your house.
The common issue due to the post and beam foundation is wet crawl space. Most of the time, this issue is due to its improper construction. When the post and beam get exposed to water, it can lead to its beam rotting, which can further cause floors to be uneven.
