Foundation Repair Services
Everything Every Homeowner in LA, SFV, OC, and Ventura Needs to Know Regarding Foundation Repair
We are a full foundation repair service contractor. We inspect and repair foundations day in and day out, providing over 65,000 free home inspections throughout Southern California!
Foundation repair for the average homeowner in Los Angeles or Southern California has become a modern concern. A few decades ago, most homes with a raised concrete foundation did not seem to be threatened. The truth about concrete is that no matter how strong the concrete is, concrete cracks. This is concrete’s nature, and what builders and building dwellers need to keep in mind when assessing to what extent of foundation repair will need to be undertaken.
Repair Cracked Concrete Foundations:
What Exactly Makes Foundations Crack?
Many houses in Los Angeles and throughout Southern California are constructed with foundations that are inadequate for the soil conditions existing on the site, the most common case for foundation repair.
Because of the lack of suitable land, homes are often built on marginal land that has insufficient bearing capacity to support the substantial weight of a structure.
Homes were built during the great “Hollywood migration” that started in the 1930s until the 1950s and up until today. Architects and builders constructed these homes anywhere there was room to build them in order to meet the demand of the rapidly growing population of the city, without enough time to prep and plan the proper engineering designs required to take the soils conditions into consideration. Not only is this the reason why Los Angeles is so vast with homes but why so many of them need foundation repair services.
When your foundation cracks, your home can become vulnerable.
In addition, there are many areas where the near surface soils consist predominately of expansive clays that shrink and swell as their moisture content changes. If the bearing soils consist of expansive clays, foundation movement can occur if wetting and drying of the clays do not occur uniformly, causing the home to shift or move, and applies also to homes built upon concrete slab. We offer foundation repair for concrete slabs as well.
Any of the following can cause moisture in the soil to fluctuate: Vegetation (roots), poor drainage, plumbing leaks, evaporation, wet/dry rain cycles.
Foundation Repair For Older Homes
Many of the older homes in Los Angeles are 50-100 years old on concrete raised foundations. Concrete placed 50-100 years ago was set without any reinforcement rebar. The life of concrete without reinforcement is 60-75 years old. The footing was also placed into the soil only 8″-12″ deep, where many homes were placed on moving, expanding clay soil. These older foundations were also built without any hardware connections to the house itself, in a very critical process for safety in Earthquake Country known as earthquake retrofitting.
Three common causes of cracking concrete foundations in Southern California:
1. Concrete set without reinforcement rebar. The results are now widespread throughout Southern California’s landscape of older homes and foundation repair is now common in today’s homeowner’s and home improvement market.
2. Water. Water will harm the foundation in one of two ways: through shifting the home while expanding and shrinking the soil upon which the concrete foundation footing sits, causing it to crack as it moves and tugs in different lateral directions, or due to inadequate yard and/or rain drainage systems that help prevent water from deteriorating the footing directly. Water weakens concrete, and concrete’s nature is to crack, which puts concrete at a severe disadvantage when it is consistently felt by water. Look for widening cracks in the concrete, near garden areas, sprinklers, downspouts, or at low points where gravity may cause water to pool near your foundation.
3. We live in Earthquake Country. Many homes, and a staggering number of them without any reinforcement rebar, have lived so far through an unpleasant number of quakes and shakers. Small hairline cracks created several years ago are highly susceptible to widening if consistent conditions weaken it slowly over time.
Foundation Repair Los Angeles
Identifying Foundation Problems, Hazards and Weaknesses
The house weight is the primary reason that keeps the house from moving or sliding from its foundation. The signs of foundation failure do not become obvious until after there are serious problems with the foundation.
The most obvious signs will be doors that do not close properly anymore, windows that stick and diagonal cracks in the interior and exterior walls. Less obvious symptoms are small cracks in the foundation or floor and uneven floors.
Sidewalks can crack from seismic activity
Common sidewalk cracks throughout LA is day-to-day proof that earthquakes have a significant impact on the concrete structures of our city. Foundation repair is the best way to survive the Big One, which is projected to be bigger than that of the Northridge earthquake which had a magnitude of 6.7.
There is an overwhelming amount of evidence and case studies that demonstrate that homes in Southern California that have had foundation repair services performed on them have a significantly higher chance of their structures remaining in tact. Past earthquakes, such as the Northridge earthquake of ’94, have most likely caused your foundation to crack or weaken in some way or other, which may not seem so evident today as a sign of weakness if your home still feels strong. However, with possible minor to major weakening that has already been done to the home your home may be seriously damaged in the next earthquake.
Severely cracked foundation
Cracked walls are a sign of a cracked foundation
A severely cracked foundation in Earthquake Country is much like driving fast on a freeway without a seatbelt and without any brakes. When the Big One strikes, the house will suffer extraordinary damage. Foundation repair is highly encouraged, and not just by us. Your local authorities such as the CEA also encourage homeowners to repair their foundations. With foundation repair, the home will receive earthquake retrofitting services since the current codes include house bolting in the plans. With new, strong reinforced concrete footing combined with bolting the mud sill of the perimeter of the foundation, the chances of withstanding the forces of the next major earthquake are greatly improved.
We Are Southern California’s Leading Foundation Repair Experts!
Every crack in the foundation of your home possesses a unique story for how it came to exist. Only an expert can trace that story and pinpoint its origin. Weinstein Retrofitting Systems has been a concrete foundation specialist for over 35 years.
Many foundation specialists claim to be experts, and may even possess concrete licenses. Weinstein Retrofitting Systems has been around longer than any competitor in the area doing what we do, and we do it best!
Customers are often referred to us for foundation repair by our competitors because we are the true foundation repair experts of Southern California.
While there are many builders in this area who specialize in foundation repair because they have a strong knowledge in concrete, we are your foundation repair experts because we specialize in foundations!
Foundations include a knowledge of concrete, but concrete does not always include a knowledge of foundations. Foundation repair is intricate in many ways and our inspectors are carefully chosen and rigorously trained to provide you with the best foundation repair services possible.
Concrete experts turn to the foundation repair industry because it is one of the few places in a house that uses concrete. The foundation of the home, however, has always been acknowledged as the most difficult portion of the home to fix and to fix well. Foundation repair is a difficult process and we have earned the respect of being your neighborhood foundation repair experts! We have over 7,000 satisfied customers because we treat every home uniquely along with our unique ability to solve every foundation problem.
Foundation repair is more like a science than a trade, and from great customer care to desirable results that usually go above and beyond homeowners’ expectations, we have perfected that science to bring you an excellent construction experience!
Foundation Repair Step-by-Step
For simple hairline cracks in foundation repair assessments, we suggest repairing them using epoxy injections supplemented with metal straps that keep the concrete from spreading. However, if the cracks exceed 2″-3″ or more, then it may be time to think about repairing the foundation.
Foundation repair can widen in degree of scope of work from a replacement of two-foot section, to replacing an entire wall or even the entire perimeter of the foundation. By new city building codes for foundation repair and replacement as well as earthquake hazard mitigation, the rebar is placed into the soil 2′ in depth, and will outlast the original unreinforced concrete by about double the age. By current code, your new reinforced concrete foundation will last you almost 100-150 years!
In some cases, full foundation replacement is recommended when the foundation is in irreparable, poor condition.
In the sequence down below you can see how the foundation replacement process is being completed. Work is courtesy of and performed by Weinstein Retrofitting Systems:
