One of the biggest causes of stress is knowing something is wrong with your home. It’s probably the biggest investment of your life, so it only makes sense that you’re upset when something bad happens – especially when it has to do with the structural integrity of your home. But the best way to relieve stress is to learn all you can about the foundation problems most likely to impact your home.
Homeowners in every part of the country experience foundation problems, but what problems are common for Minnesota and North Dakota homeowners?
Your Problem: Foundation Settling
Because of drought conditions across Minnesota and North Dakota over the past year, many homeowners are dealing with settling foundations. Foundations settle when soil shrinks away from the home, leaving a gap that can allow foreign objects to enter. Because water tends to pool in the gap, your home becomes vulnerable to flooding.
However, potential flooding isn’t the only problem of foundation settling. Your foundation walls can crack as the soil around your house shifts. Eventually you’ll find evidence of settling inside your home: cracks in drywall, uneven floors, and hard-to-open windows and doors.
Our Solution: Push Piers, Helical Piers, and Slab Piers
Innovative offers several different piering options. No matter how complicated your settling problem, one of our piering systems is bound to work for your home. Push piers are straight steel piers that attach to your foundation and extend into the strong soils below your home. Helical piers are just like push piers, except they have helical blades welded to each shaft. Similarly, slab piers are straight steel piers that extend into the strong soil below your home, but they attach to support brackets on the underside of the foundation slab.
When you sign up for a free estimate, we’ll send out one of our foundation repair specialists to assess your situation and recommend a piering solution customized to your home.
Your Problem: Bowing Walls
Bowing walls are formed when the pressure on the walls from the outside isn’t countered on the inside. They can cause significant damage to your foundation, and they’re not something that will improve over time. Quite the opposite – over time, bowing walls continue to deteriorate and can eventually lead to the failure of your foundation and the collapse of your home.
Our Solution: Wall Anchors and Braces
What you need is a solution that will stop the bowing in its place – and even reverse it over time. That’s where Innovative comes in. We have two ideal solutions for homeowners with bowing foundation walls: wall anchors and wall braces.
Wall braces are an ideal solution for those times when access to the soil outside the foundation is not possible. Our IntelliBrace system handles this problem with ease. IntelliBrace’s steel i-beams attach to the floor joists above and the concrete basement floor below to provide support to bowing basement walls. Over time the braces can be tightened so that your bowing walls can be returned to their original state.
Our other recommended solution is our wall anchor system, which work by placing a heavy-duty anchor in the strong soil outside of your home. The anchor will be connected to a strong steel rod to a plate on your foundation wall. The pressure applied by the wall anchor system is a highly-effective way to restore your bowing walls to their original position.
Your Problem: Heaving
Foundation or slab heaving is caused by expanding underlying soils, which cause the upward movement of the foundation or slab. The expansion has a number of causes: expansive soils, plumbing leaks, frost heave, and heavy precipitation are all foundation heaving causes the Innovative crew has encountered. Heaving is evident when cracks show up on the basement floor – and sometimes on the walls and floors of the upstairs living space.
Our Solution: Tailored to Your Home
Because heaving is a problem with several possible causes, it also has several possible solutions. The solution can range from repairing damaged plumbing fixtures to completely replacing sections of the foundation or slab. Once we send out an experienced foundation repair specialist to inspect your heaving foundation, you’ll receive a recommendation tailored to your home.
Repairing your foundation seems hard, but it doesn’t have to. When you work with people who have been in the business for over a decade, you don’t have to worry about anything going wrong. All of our foundation repair specialists have the experience and training to diagnose any foundation problem – and our crews have the tools and experience to get the job done right. When you’re ready to ease the stress of having a bad foundation and get started on repairing it for the long haul, call Innovative or sign up for a free estimate today!
