Leaning Foundation

If your home has a leaning foundation, it needs to be fixed immediately before it results in even more devastating foundation damage. Also, a leaning foundation is extremely dangerous. Your foundation is what the weight of your home sits on. If the structural integrity of the foundation isn't stable, your home's weight isn't distributed evenly and this could ultimately cause a collapse of one of the walls in your home.

Even though there are many causes of cracked, bowed and leaning foundations, the most common is too much pressure from the earth outside of the wall structure. When expansive clay soil soaks up water, it swells and applies force that usually exceeds the wall's design capacity. Along with expansive clay soil, an excessive amount of pressure is often the result of an unsuccessful or compromised foundation drain system in addition to a build-up of moisture behind the wall. Once again, this additional hydrostatic (water) pressure often surpasses the wall's design capacity, resulting in wall deflection. Inadequate surface grading and drainage is an additional factor that leads to the buildup of hydrostatic pressure.

Leaning Foundation Repair

Frontier Basement Systems offers affordable and reliable leaning foundation repair for homeowners in Clarksville, Nashville, Bowling Green, and other surrounding areas in KY and TN.

So, how will you know if you need foundation repair? Concrete block walls typically exhibit horizontal cracking across the center length as it begins to bow inward near mid-height. As the issue becomes worse, stair-step cracking at the corners might be seen. Continuous inward pressure applied on the concrete block wall can even lead to horizontal shearing at a mortar joint, where the bottom row of block is kept in place by the concrete floor slab as the next course of block and wall above slides in.

Vertical shearing may also be observed when the end of a wall is reinforced or kept in place by an adjoining perpendicular wall. The end of the wall remains stable as the remaining portion of the wall splits and moves inward. Poured concrete walls may frequently exhibit single, diagonal cracks extending up from the bottom corners of the wall toward the top center. Furthermore, as opposed to a block wall which bows in near mid-height, the top of a poured wall tends to lean in. In finished basements, where foundation walls may not be exposed, other signs may warn you of a structural problem. As failing basement walls shift inward, ceiling panels and ceiling drywall can begin to buckle.

Drywall on finished, abutting walls might also buckle between the wall studs. In extraordinary cases, horizontal cracking may even be seen in the residence's exterior brick veneer.

Please call us at 866.682.4420 for more information about leaning foundation repair or fill out our online contact form.