House Leveling
You don’t need us to tell you that you’re in trouble if your house shifts off the level and starts to dip or sag. Or that once a house, designed to be level, moves off that level it is only the beginning for structural problems. All the engineering that has intended the forces at play to work together in one plane will now be out of kilter and those stresses will only increase and potentially skew your home making it unsafe. But what you might not realize is that the early signs of a house leaving the level and can be quite subtle. That door and those windows that stick now, despite there having been no rain. That floor that seems to dip a little in the middle or has started to creak a lot. Cracks in the walls, or even the plumbing backing up. You could need a lot more than a carpenter or handyman to fix those problems if the underlying cause is the movement of your foundations. Call Humble Foundation Repair for a free inspection and find out sooner rather than later if your house needs leveling.
Installing Supports
Humble Foundation Repair has a number of different techniques for house leveling depending on the nature and degree of the problem. Different types of foundations need different approaches but one of the classics is to install metal or concrete supports to bring the house back to an even keel and help reinforce the existing foundations.
Wood Replacement
Not all cases of unlevel homes need a response as dramatic as installing underground supports. In some cases we find that the problem actually comes from decay in the wooden joists and beams that form the internal skeleton of your property. As they rot they weaken and no longer provide the stiff frame that helps distribute the weight of the house. Which leads to uneven loading and an unlevel home. Humble Foundation Repair will carefully inspect all your load bearing woodwork and replace and reinforce any that we find is no longer strong enough to do its job properly.
Jacks and Shims
Ever steadied an uneven table by putting a piece of card under one leg? Well that’s the same principle as jacking and shimming but with a bit of a difference of scale. When we talk about jacking we mean lifting the concrete slab of slab foundations and then putting in tailored shims underneath the slab to bring it back to dead level.
Future Proofing
Fixing the lean on a property is important, but the professionals at Humble Foundation Repair never forget that it is only part of the whole picture. We like to get to the bottom of why your home needed leveling anyway and that means a full inspection of the subsoil and finding the reason why the original forces at play in your house are no longer in balance. We then set out to resolve that which may include better drainage, or retaining walls. When we level a house we don’t consider that the job done: we aim to keep it level from that day on.