Crawl Space Repair in Metro Atlanta

The support system under your house

If your house sits over a crawl space, everything above it is being carried by a system down there you have probably never seen: footings in the dirt, posts standing on them, girders and beams spanning between, and the floor joists resting on top. It is a structure in its own right, and it is the part of the house doing the most work with the least attention.

This page is about repairing that system. If what you mainly want is your floor back to level and you do not much care where the trouble is, start with floor leveling instead.

What goes wrong down there

• Original posts deteriorate. Wood standing in a damp crawl space for decades rots at the base, and a post that has lost its bearing stops carrying its share of the load.
• Footings were undersized or absent. A support is only as good as what it stands on. Posts set on a thin pad, a stack of block, or bare soil settle into the ground over time.
• Beams and girders sag. Spans that were marginal when the house was built deflect as the load stays on them year after year.
• Joists are damaged. Cracked, split, or notched joists lose capacity, and the floor above follows.

You usually meet this from the other direction: bouncing, sloping, or sagging floors upstairs are the symptom of a support system that has quietly given up underneath.

How we repair it

The repair is assembled from what the crawl space actually needs, not from a standard kit:

• Structural steel beams set beneath the joists to carry the floor properly again across the affected span
• Vertical steel supports placed where the load needs a solid path down
• Supplemental concrete footings, poured or precast, giving every support a real load-bearing base instead of whatever it was standing on
• Controlled hydraulic lifting where the floor above can be brought back up, worked slowly and evenly
• Joist reinforcement or splicing where a damaged joist is part of the problem and repairing it is part of the job

Crawl space height, access, and what is already in the way all shape the plan, which is why this starts with someone going under the house and looking.

What we do not do

This is structural work only. We are not a crawl space contractor in the broader sense, and we do not want you expecting otherwise:

• No encapsulation, vapor barriers, or liners
• No waterproofing, drainage systems, or sump work
• No mold remediation
• No pest treatment
• No general carpentry or wholesale replacement of rotted wood

Where rot is extensive enough that there is nothing sound left to build on, a carpenter may need to do their part before our structural repair can go in. We will tell you if that is the situation rather than working around it.