How to Per­ma­nent­ly Repair a Sink­ing Foun­da­tion in Chicago

Dec 6, 2012 • By Matthew Stock with Barry Schilling.

So, you’ve start­ed notic­ing cracks.

First it was cracks in the dry­wall upstairs, start­ing at the cor­ner of your bed­room doors.

Then you went into the base­ment and saw more signs of foun­da­tion dam­age: tip­ping walls and cracks in the cor­ners of the walls and down the middle.

Final­ly, while clean­ing up the flowerbeds, you saw some cracks that looked like stair steps, run­ning between the bricks on the out­side wall of your home. And they were BIG cracks.

I hate to tell you, Mr. or Ms. Chica­go Home­own­er, but your foun­da­tion is sink­ing and you need to do some­thing. But what?

Installing Steel Piers is the Best Way to Per­ma­nent­ly Repair the Sink­ing Foun­da­tion under Your Chica­go Home

Sink­ing foun­da­tions are noth­ing new; they’ve been plagu­ing home­own­ers as long as we’ve been build­ing hous­es with foun­da­tions. There have been many repair meth­ods devised over the years, includ­ing tear­ing out and replac­ing the dam­aged foun­da­tion, installing con­crete pil­ings under the house and installing ​“heli­cal” piers that screw into the ground under the house.

Many of these meth­ods are still in use although replac­ing a foun­da­tion is breath­tak­ing­ly expen­sive, con­crete pil­ings don’t work all that well and heli­cal piers are best used for lighter loads. The best method is the hydrauli­cal­ly dri­ven steel pier, some­times known as a ​“push” pier.

The steel pier con­sists of a col­umn of heavy duty, gal­va­nized tubu­lar steel that is dri­ven, sec­tion by sec­tion, into the earth along­side the foun­da­tion. The num­ber of piers used is deter­mined by load cal­cu­la­tions and engi­neer­ing studies. 

The instal­la­tion pro­ce­dure for steel piers is sur­pris­ing­ly sim­ple and caus­es min­i­mal dis­rup­tion. First, a hole is dug along­side the foun­da­tion at the site of the pier. A steel brack­et is attached to the foun­da­tion that includes a ​“shelf” under the foun­da­tion foot­ings and a hydraulic dri­ver is installed on top of the bracket.

The dri­ver is then used to dri­ve sec­tions of the pier through the brack­et into the ground, adding new sec­tions until the pier hits a load-bear­ing stra­tum, often called ​“bedrock.” Once the piers have been installed and loads have been test­ed, all piers are con­nect­ed through a man­i­fold to a hydraulic pump and the entire affect­ed sec­tion of the house is slow­ly and gen­tly raised back to level.

Once the struc­ture is lev­el, the piers are secured to the brack­ets, the dri­ving equip­ment is removed and exte­ri­or soil and land­scap­ing can be restored to their orig­i­nal con­di­tion. Repairs can then be made to both inte­ri­or and exte­ri­or cracks and fis­sures with the knowl­edge that the house is per­ma­nent­ly pro­tect­ed against fur­ther sink­ing or settlement.

As you can imag­ine, the prop­er assess­ment, design and instal­la­tion of a steel pier sys­tem are not to be left to ama­teurs. Han­dling a crit­i­cal job like this requires not only exper­tise and expe­ri­ence but also the right prod­ucts and sys­tems to make an effec­tive, per­ma­nent and reli­able repair.

At U.S. Water­proof­ing, we’ve been doing struc­tur­al foun­da­tion repair in the Chica­go area for a long time, almost as long as we’ve been in busi­ness. We’ve tried the oth­er meth­ods and have always sought out the best equip­ment, mate­ri­als and tech­niques for our cus­tomers and their homes.

We have invest­ed in the train­ing of a spe­cial group of advi­sors and installers to han­dle struc­tur­al foun­da­tion repairs so, if you’re start­ing to see cracks in your home, please ask for a free consultation.

Tags: foundation repair, foundation damage, foundation repairs, structural foundation damage, structural foundation repair, sinking foundations, sinking foundation

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