Monday, November 16, 2009

Shoring up the foundation

The above pic is of our eastern wall, as seen from within our crawlspace. Back in August I happened to notice that a supporting concrete block column had its top block tilted such that it was no longer supporting the main beam on which the house sits. This was partially due to the sinkhole that formed behind the column and partially due to the side wall having sunk into the ground signified by the large fissure in the block and brick. You could see the outside light through this fissure, which clearly was not a good sign. As one of my friends used to say, "you could see large sums of money stuck here and we'd need a professional crew to come out and yank it out for us" :) Yeah, you could clearly see that the repair work would run into the thousands. I don't have a pic of the leaning column, but the pic above is of the finished job. It took the crew about three trips to get all this done. First, they noticed that our builder hadn't used a wide enough foundation so that they could not sink down the steel support jacks to lift the house up from the inside. So they had to come back to dig outside the house to install these metal girders beneath which they could put in the jacks to hoist the house. In doing so they cracked the sewer drain pipe and shifted the wall such that there was a noticeable 2-3 inch offset between the lifted wall and the wall above (that luckily hadn't caved in yet). So, on their third visit, they sunk in these anchors about 5 feet outside the house, then connected those to the anchors you see in the pic. There are large nuts on these anchors so that we can tighten up the anchor system in the case of the wall shifting in further into the crawlspace. In the end, I think they did a decent job of fixing this potentially disastrous foundation problem. Glad that's over!

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