Our house is 120 years old. The original foundation wall is limestone. Inside this wall to a height of 5 feet from the basement floor is a poured concrete wall 2 feet thick. The original limestone needs reinforcing, it is loose in spots and the mortar is dry. It has been skim coated with a stucco-like rubbery product on the outside. Because of the concrete wall on the inside, the limestone is very hard to reach. Is there a spray-on product I can use to stabilize the limestone? Any other ideas? (To make matters worse the limestone actually reaches up to the subfloor completely capturing the rim joist, fishing wires into the wall cavities is a major pain…)
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Replies
Spray on concrete, AKA shotcrete, would stabilize your wall. Are you having structural problems?
The other solution is to remove and reset your stones a section at a time.
edited for spelling
Edited 1/22/2007 8:39 pm ET by Brian
Only structural problems that any 120 year old house has. We wouldn't pass the marble test, but the material applied to the exterior over a decade ago hasn't cracked. I could probably dismantle the entire foundation without tools. I think the foundation isn't holding the house up as much as the house is holding the foundation in place.
There are a lot of foundations like that in our area. My friends live in a 150 year old house where the floor is out 6" over a 12' piece of drywall! We call it the skateboard park.
I think forming and pouring concrete against it (although ugly) is probably the cheapest solution. But remortaring the stones would keep the look. Shotcrete would be the fast way to cover it.
Remember that gravity always pulls straight down. The original builders knew this, and if they did things well, your foundation is solid.
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Talk to masonry contractors about epoxy injection. I'm thinking you could grind the joints out with an angle grinder as far as you could reach, then they do epoxy injection (neat process in itself), then you can strike the new joints with mortar on the outside to keep the same look.
I'm not sure the compressive stregnth of the epoxy, but worth a discussion with a local outfit.
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