Warning Signs Your Foundation Is Failing

Foundation problems rarely announce themselves. They show up as small things around the house that are easy to explain away, one at a time, until enough of them add up. Knowing what to look for is the difference between an early, manageable repair and an expensive one down the road.

The signs worth paying attention to

• Cracks in the brick or exterior walls, especially stair-step cracks that follow the mortar joints, or a gap opening at the corner of a window or door
• Cracks inside, in drywall or plaster, often running at an angle from the corners of doorways and windows
• Doors and windows that stick or no longer latch, when they used to open and close fine
• Floors that slope, sag, or bounce, or feel uneven when you walk across a room
• Gaps opening between the walls and the ceiling, or between the floor and the baseboards
• A chimney or porch pulling away from the rest of the house
• Cracks in the concrete of a slab, garage floor, or basement floor

One of these on its own is not always cause for alarm. Houses move a little as they age. What matters is the pattern: several of these together, or any one of them that keeps getting worse over time, points to a foundation that is settling unevenly.

Why foundations settle here

In Metro Atlanta it usually comes back to the soil. Our red clay swells when it is wet and shrinks when it is dry, and it does that over and over with the seasons. Every cycle lets the footings settle a little, and they rarely settle evenly. Poor drainage, big trees pulling moisture out of the ground on one side of the house, and fill dirt that was never compacted all speed it up.

What to do about it

The important thing is not to wait. Foundation problems only get more expensive as they go, because the longer the house moves, the more it cracks and the more there is to repair. When we look at a home, we find the actual cause of the settling and stabilize it with steel piers driven down to solid ground, then repair the damage the movement left behind.

If you are seeing some of these signs, it is worth a look. See our foundation repair page for how we handle it, or call and we will come out.