Repair My Foundation-A Homeowner's Look at the Options

If you’ve been trying to get a grasp on foundation repair jargon and have been hearing the term “bell bottom piers”, the Du-West website has a pretty good explaination. It has nothing to do with pants. There is also a drawing on the site to give you a visual idea of the process.
Bell bottom piers [...]

It’s not very often that a word used on a foundation repair contractor’s website sends me running for the dictionary. It did today, but more on that in a moment. OK, if you just can’t wait, the word is “thixotropy.”
If you live in a part of the country where you are bombarded with commercials for [...]

I’ve been talking about using soaker hoses to keep the soil around my foundation from completely drying up during this blazing hot and dry summer. If you have shrink-swell clay soil it can shrink away from your concrete slab during dry periods and possibly cause damage.
This morning, I ran across the website of a [...]

The foundation repair radio commercial blared out of the speakers in the kitchen this morning ignoring the fact that I just wanted to know how hot it was going to be today. Yesterday it was so hot I was afraid of standing still in the sun lest I spontaneously burst into flame. That’s hard on [...]

The other day I was reading what I could find on steel piers vs. concrete piers for foundation repair and ran across the term “skin friction.” With my heart beating a little faster, I read on.
It turns out that “skin friction” is an engineering term that describes the drag soil has on a pier or [...]

Calling up a concrete foundation repair contractor and asking how much it would cost is like lurching your smoking car into the mechanic’s parking lot and asking him how may dollars it will take to fix it without even popping the hood. Both are going to say “it depends on what’s wrong.”
A major factor in [...]

His name is Dennis and he lives down the street from me. I was coming back from an errand and drove past his house. All the tell-tale signs of a concrete foundation repair job in progress were there. Piles of dirt, piles of pilings, piles of caps. I went home, grabbed my digital camera, walked [...]