Struc­tur­al Foun­da­tion Dam­age – Don’t Keep Mak­ing Above-Ground Repairs

Oct 18, 2012 • By Matthew Stock.

If you’re a do-it-your­selfer, you’ll find all kinds of resources for fix­ing cracks in dry­wall and mak­ing stuck doors and win­dows open again. 

Just for dry­wall cracks alone, there’s arti­cle after arti­cle in mag­a­zines and online about secur­ing cracked dry­wall and cov­er­ing up those pesky cracks that emanate from the cor­ners of doors and win­dows. There’s also an array of prod­ucts in the DIY aisles at the local home super­store, rang­ing from spe­cial spack­le to vari­eties of tape and even a spray to apply to a repaired crack that are intend­ed to keep cracks from recurring.

Sounds like every­thing you need, right? Prob­a­bly not.

Why Struc­tur­al Foun­da­tion Dam­age Will Undo Your Repairs Every Time

Look, it’s not always a bad idea to repair cracks in dry­wall and realign win­dows and doors. If your home was built recent­ly, some minor set­tle­ment may have occurred that won’t hap­pen again and your repairs will be fine for the fore­see­able future. How­ev­er, if you’re fix­ing the same ​“set­tle­ment” cracks and redo­ing the same doors every few years, not only are you wast­ing your time and mon­ey, you’re ignor­ing a poten­tial­ly seri­ous prob­lem with your home’s foundation.

There are two main sources of struc­tur­al foun­da­tion dam­age that will cause, and keep caus­ing, prob­lems in the above-ground liv­ing areas of your home.

Sink­ing Foun­da­tion – The weath­er con­di­tions in 2012 have been a per­fect set­ting for sink­ing foun­da­tions. If you had neglect­ed to prop­er­ly man­age water around your foun­da­tion by keep­ing gut­ters clean of debris, extend­ing your down­spouts away from the foun­da­tion and prop­er grad­ing and land­scap­ing, the soil around and under your foun­da­tion like­ly became sat­u­rat­ed and expand­ed. When this summer’s drought hit, this expand­ed soil dried out and shrank, allow­ing out­er cor­ners of your foun­da­tion to sink.

Foun­da­tion Wall Move­ment — The soil around your foun­da­tion exerts a lot of pres­sure against your foun­da­tion walls under nor­mal cir­cum­stances and that pres­sure inten­si­fies when the soil expands from sat­u­ra­tion. If your walls are con­struct­ed from con­crete block, the walls may bow or bulge in the mid­dle. If they are poured con­crete, increased pres­sure will cause them to sep­a­rate from the bot­tom of the house and tip inwards. Both will cause above-ground damage.

In either of the above sce­nar­ios of foun­da­tion dam­age, there will be a down­ward shift­ing of the struc­ture of your home and all those care­ful­ly repaired cracks will re-open and doors and win­dows will stick shut -– again. If all you do is break out the spack­le and the crow­bar, you could be mak­ing a big mis­take. Cracked dry­wall and stuck win­dows, although unsight­ly and annoy­ing, are mere­ly symp­toms of a much big­ger prob­lem and if you ignore it in favor of cos­met­ic repair, well, you’ve heard that remark about deck chairs on the Titan­ic, haven’t you?

If your dry­wall is crack­ing and doors are hard to open and close, you real­ly need a pro­fes­sion­al eval­u­a­tion of your home’s foun­da­tion. The experts in struc­tur­al foun­da­tion repairs at U.S. Water­proof­ing have the knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence to diag­nose your prob­lem and rec­om­mend the best, most cost-effec­tive solu­tion. Just ask for a free con­sul­ta­tion.

Tags: signs of foundation problems, structural foundation damage, home foundation repair, settlement cracks

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