The corner of my house is settling; nobody locally (Central Kentucky) seems to know how to fix it.
The soil is expansive clay. I think the footer was probably poured directly in a trench without a compacted gravel bed. I also think there are random voids in the soil.
How do I bring the footer up so that the subfloor is level and the top plate on the walls is level in both directions? How do I stabilize the soil and fill the voids without digging a big hole and tearing off the masonry veneer? Then I can repair the masonry exterior, and the interior sheetrock. Also, will I have to do anything with the windows that are racking in the rough openings? Or will that take care of itself when the foundation is stabilized?
Replies
Expansive clay will shrink and expand according to its moisture content, which can be as high as 30%.
The settlement may be caused by the clay drying out -- if the depth of the foundation is 3' or less below ground level and you've had a lot of hot, dry weather then I'd suspect that as the reason.
IanDG
Adding to Ians comments, most of our sites here are highly reactive / expansive soils. My experience is that a compacted gravel base will make no difference.
Does your footer come with an Enginer design and was it supervised?
Does your masonary veneer have vertical expansion joints?
This is not a DIY repair.
Get some proffesional advice onsite. If you don't already have one, get a soil test done, then engage an Engineer for a remedial design. Sounds like some serious underpinning needed.
Regards
Mark
http://www.quittintime.com
"The corner of my house is settling; nobody locally (Central Kentucky) seems to know how to fix it."
Who is "nobody".
You want to get a structual engineer to first identify the cause of the problem and possible fixes. Then find a contractor to do the fixes.
One possibility is piering. They will sink a pier until they get resistance and then attack it to the footing or side of the foundation and jack it up.
Bill and the others who have responded:
Thanks for the input. It is helpful. Any additional thoughts are really appreciated.
"nobody" means there are no local structural engineers. The nearest structural engineers are in Louisville KY (about 50 miles north); none of them handle residential work; I called and/or emailed every firm listed in the yellowpages. I've not even found anyone local to perform a soils test. There isn't demand for it. My town is about 25,000. Everything is generally built on flat ground. The industrial park was big enough to afford to bring in soils testing at that time.
The soil here has a high clay content in Central Kentucky. The site drained to my house, rather than away from it. I was new to the area, and did not know about the drainage problems at the time -- late winter, ground relatively dry, no recognizable signs of water draining toward house; local home inspector "overlooked" the problem. I regraded the site to get water away from the house; soil that was almost continually damp or wet from 1988 to 2004 has dried out, causing that corner of the house to settle more than it already had. The site drops away from the house at that corner, too. The foundation settling may be due in part to horizontal shifting of the soil that may have occured right after the home was built -- funny nobody noticed it in 15 years before I bought the house!
Contractors in Kentucky are not required to be licensed. Anybody can build a house. Usually the site is leveled, somebody comes in to pour a footer, and voila. The open slope on my house is unusual. The builder of the house was an English teacher at the local junior college, who built houses on thse side. He had a reputation for less than stellar construction techniques. Rumor has it he went bankrupt and was run out of town for shoddy work.
I've talked with a lot of contractors. They know how to build simple wood-framed structures with a masonry veneer on a flat site. All the "engineering" comes from building code span tables, the local building official, and rules of thumb. They don't know how, or are not interested in, fixing a house with problems.
It has becom a DIY out of necessity: there is no one willing, able, and/or knowledgeable. I've had estimates from a few hundred $$$s to many thousands -- they are just guessing. Only one contractor even recognized racking windows as a sign of the foundation settling.
I've never done this before; but no one else in the area has either. I'm willing; I need to become able. I just want to fix my house! Necessity is the mother of invention.
I've seen websites that speak of forcing grout into soil to force out water, fill voids and provide a more stable base. I've looked at reference material that shows a 4" or deeper compacted gravel base at the bottom of a trench on which a concrete footer sets to receive the foundation wall. I'm pretty sure no compacted gravel was used on this site. It doesn't seem feasible to provide the compacted gravel base now, so pushing the footer back up for a level floor and stabilizing the footer with this grouting technique looks like one solution.
Willing and learning to be able.
Willing and learning to be able.
Good attitude. Bill's suggestion of piering will work.
About a hundred yrs ago I was a laborer in the Denver area, building 11 acres of apartments. Expansive soils, common there. Bentonite. The foundation solution was to drill holes, fill with concrete, pour the foundation walls above the piers. Then us lucky laborers got to dig out 4" below all the concrete walls between the piers. 4" was assumed to be adequate for soil expansion there. Last time I looked the apartments were still there.
The trick with expansive soils is to not let surface water get under your foundation, where the dry soil has not expanded. Your house sounds like it was built with no care to that, on already expanded soil, which is now drying out. You could try wetting the low (dry) area, but I'd have to see that work to believe it.
Your future problem is that there's no certainty this won't occur in other places. Seems it's simply dried out in one place first. Give it a good drought and it might really get interesting.
Good luck.
PAHS Designer/Builder- Bury it!
There are several thoughts here -- the clay has only been drying out since 2004 and already you are seeing settlement on one corner. How much more will the clay dry out and will more of the foundation be affected?
The correct foundation for this situation would have been one deep enough to sit on clay with a constant water content -- pier-and-beam perhaps -- or a reinforced slab with drop beams. Any permanent remedy needs to duplicate one of these foundations.
IMO, grout injection won't lift the foundation, even if it were a DIY project and how will you protect against further movement if this is just the start of the settling? If the existing foundation isn't reinforced [likely!] the grout injection will simply break it rather than lift anything
I know this sounds ridiculous but I'd look at the feasibility of re-hydrating the clay to a perimeter of 6', say, around the house -- using lawn or flowerbeds and irrigation.
I would like to add to the warning of other posters that this is not a DIY project -- it requires engineering knowledge.
IanDG
Thanks again guys. This is really helpful, with some ideas that I'd not even considered.
I am not totally without engineering knowledge. I was trained as an architect at Cal Poly SLO, with lots of engineering classes and labs. I understand the concepts, though I've not utilized them in my work on a day-to-day basis. I've got the book knowledge but little field experience.
I know that no solution is foolproof. But I'm thinking it has got to be better than racking windows, a sloping bedroom floor, door that I can't close and cracks in the wallboard running diagonally from floor to ceiling.
I have the water draining away from the house now that allowed the ground to be saturated. The grade is basically flat or nearly so for most of the site. It is just at one end, the settling end, where the grade slopes off quickly: at 45 deg or greater with a vertical differential of 10'+.
Pretty sure I'd be getting a patch to lift the low spot and planting a For Sale sign out front. Foundations are pretty basic.
Last guy I had dealings with had a simpler problem. Dryvit coming off his house. Estimate was upwards of $100k to replace. After considering his options, he sold it to somebody else. They knew about the patches and undertook the risk. He got a new place.
PAHS Designer/Builder- Bury it!
vanwarren,
Google brought up these guys.
http://www.foundationlifting.com/aboutus.htmlKK
I'll be calling them in the morning!
Thanks!
Where you at, Bardstown, E-town?Try posting a request in the Help Wanted/work Wanted section and give the location. There are several members that I know of in the Louisville area and more in Lexington. I find it hard to believe that there is no that can do soils/structural engineering.Might try asking the county or city engineering office if they know of people. BTW, I am orginally from Louisville and never heard of expansive clay problems, but I was not really into buildigns at the time.But I am wondering could it be a completely different issue, a sink hole?
E'town.
The city and county folks have not had any ideas. The one guy that was suggested didn't have any idea how to fix it.
This has been challenging. It took me a long time to get over the shock that nobody disclosed this. I was new to the area and up to my eyeballs in moving, selling a house, buying a house, and work!
The soil here has a high clay content -- expands when wet, contracts when dry.
I've not found anyone in Louisville. All the structural engineering folks say they don't deal with residential, only commercial and industrial. I contacted every structural engineer / firm listed in the yellow pages by telephone and/or email.
I didn't even think of looking in Lexington, with the response I got from Louisville.
I've been asking around, but not gotten any leads for soils testing and remedial foundation work. New construction seems to be more interesting to most construction folks.
Having said all that, I'm open to any leads you may have to offer.
Thanks for asking.
Edited 7/19/2005 10:46 pm ET by vanwarren
Well, I can tell you a few guys in Shelby County to NOT hire.
Google.......Helitech or Grip-Tite.
Both names are attached to franchised installers of foundation lifting & stabilizing systems.
............Iron Helix
Are there any house movers in your locality? They might have some experience with this kind of problem, and the equipment to deal with it.
There's a region not far from my mom's house called Portuguese Bend. Road construction there started a huge landslide affecting dozens of houses. It's been going on for decades. Some of them are using permanent screw jacks, they have to tweak up the leveling of the house from time to time.
-- J.S.
Kentucky Foundation and Concrete Lifting is Larry Logsdon, Leitchfield KY.
His plan is to install two helical piers near the one corner. He did another job in the area a year or so back: said he went down 30' to bedrock. He is figuring the same for my house.
He showed me a well worn binder of photos of projects in Central and Western KY. His references checked out. He did work for an attorney who is happy with his work of about 6 months ago!
I didn't go very far with the Grip-Tite lead. There is on contractor in Eastern Kentucky, and one in Southern Indiana. A third is at an unknown location.
There is a Helitech contractor out of Belleville IL that is closest. But they service only IL, the far western part of KY, and part of MO: they don't get as far east as Central Kentucky.
Thanks for all the input everybody!
Forget the engineers, start with the foundations folks - some will do that work.Talk to experienced home inspectors, some will give names of companies that they are familiar with.If you lift that area (options: earth screws, uderdig and pour new footers) odds are you'll be chasing cracks around the foundation.After the fix, get all water off the roof away from the house - well past the overdig area - and keep the soil moist in dry seasons -
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Sojourners: Christians for Justice and Peace
Thanks again for all the information.
I had Kentucky Foundation Lifting do the work about 3 weeks ago. Amazing: no more racking of the windows, doors close, and most of the settling cracks are gone.
One project down, unknown number still to go!
Thanks for getting back on this.Can you give us some details?Pics?
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Sojourners: Christians for Justice and Peace
I couldn't get any good pics of the helical piers being installed. I've got some pics of a hole with a couple of shirtless, dirty, sweaty guys down in the hole. I've got a picture of two guys in my crawl space working to redistribute the weight along the center beam and those supporting piers. I'm sure you'd rather look at something other than those pictures.
I didn't make a sound recording of my house creaking as the weight was redistributed along the center beam and the helical piers lifted the corner. It was music to my ears! I didn't know I could get so excited about opening and closing a door!
Yer gonna make me ask.... what did it cost?
In this part of the country (North Texas) expansive clay soils are about all we have and there are lots of companies that do nothing but foundation repair. The better ones have been in business for a long time and have a guarantee that is good for the life of the house and that is backed up by a trust fund.
What is the name of the company, and contact information?
They may not be affordable to me in KY, but I may be able to find someone else with their help.
Are you on a slab or a crawl or a basement?
crawl
I think you have two possibilities. One is to tile soil below the foundation so you keep it dry. A lot of excavation, and no guarantees. The other is to put the whole mess on piers.
Regrading the site to drain away from the house will help stabilize things, but probably not enough. Or it might actually be better, if you have a ready source of water, to grade TOWARD the foundation and keep the soil saturated. If you don't mind the mosquitos.