The Leaning Tower of Tennyson Street

It happens imperceptibly at first.  In time, though, you will notice odd things: the disappearance of right angles in your home, the desk chair that rolls from one side of the room to other--when nobody is sitting in it, windows that won't open and doors that won't close.  And finally, the jagged, step patterned cracks in the drywall near the corners of the room.

Unless you are living in the movie set for a remake of the "Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," your foundation is sinking!

That's when you have to call in a specialty company to underpin the foundation and raise it.  And you must have a professional engineer to plan and supervise the project.

Restoring a house to its former position is a lot like lifting an injured patient onto a stretcher.  You want to do it very slowly and gently so as not to cause more damage in the process.

How They Do It
Following the engineer's specs based on the load to be supported, pilings (helical piers) are driven at prescribed intervals and to a prescribed depth until stable subsoil is reached.

An L-shaped bracket at the top of each pile shaft is fitted under the foundation wall.

The piers drive down and the brackets lift up to restore the house to its former alignment.

The weight of the house is transferred to the pilings.

In tight situations like the Tennyson Street property, they use a hand operated hydraulic pump to raise the foundation--much like you would use to jack up your car to change a tire.

They raise the foundation a quarter to a half inch at a time, then let the structure rest in between.

While this is happening, everyone on the crew is listening (for bad sounds) and watching for cracks.

The foreman uses a wirelessly controlled laser level to measure the progress of the lift.

This isn't the type of project we typically get involved with.  But a client phoned us because the addition to their house (not ours!) that they'd inherited from a previous owner had begun to submerge into the soft earth of Rock Creek Forest.

They wanted someone they could trust completely to supervise this simple (but not so simple) task.  So we put together the team and came to their rescue.