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, it cracks. This is concrete’s nature, and what builders and building dwellers need to keep in mind when assessing the extent of foundation repair that will need to be undertaken.
Repair Cracked Concrete Foundations:
What Exactly Makes Foundations Crack?
Many houses in Los Angeles and throughout Southern California are built on foundations inadequate for the soil conditions on the site, the most common case for foundation repair.
Due to a lack of suitable land, homes are often built on marginal land with insufficient bearing capacity to support the substantial weight of a structure.
Homes were built during the great “Hollywood migration” that started in the 1930s and continued through the 1950s and beyond. Architects and builders constructed these homes wherever there was room to build them to meet the demand of the city’s rapidly growing population, without enough time to prepare and plan the proper engineering designs required to take soil 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.
In addition, many areas have near-surface soils that consist predominantly of expansive clays, which 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 are not uniform, causing the home to shift or move; this also applies to homes built on a concrete slab. We also offer foundation repair for concrete slabs.
Any of the following can cause soil moisture to fluctuate: vegetation (roots), poor drainage, plumbing leaks, evaporation, and 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 unreinforced concrete is 60-75 years. 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, a very critical safety process 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 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 tends to crack, putting it at a severe disadvantage when it is consistently exposed to 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 formed several years ago are highly susceptible to widening if consistent conditions slowly weaken them.
Foundation Repair Los Angeles
Identifying Foundation Problems, Hazards, and Weaknesses
The house’s weight is the primary reason it doesn’t move or slide from its foundation. The signs of foundation failure do not become obvious until serious problems arise.
The most obvious signs will be doors that no longer close properly, windows that stick, and diagonal cracks in the interior and exterior walls. Less obvious symptoms include small cracks in the foundation or floor and uneven floors.
Sidewalks can crack from seismic activity
Common sidewalk cracks throughout LA are day-to-day proof that earthquakes significantly impact the concrete structures of our city. Foundation repair is the best way to survive the Big One, which is projected to be bigger than the Northridge earthquake, which had a magnitude of 6.7.
There is overwhelming evidence and case studies demonstrating that homes in Southern California with foundation repair services have a significantly higher chance of their structures remaining intact. Past earthquakes, such as the Northridge earthquake of ’94, have likely caused your foundation to crack or weaken in some way, which may not be as evident today if your home still feels strong. However, with possible minor-to-major weakening already 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 a 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 other competitor in the area that does what we do, and we do it best!
Customers are often referred to us by our competitors for foundation repair because we are the true foundation repair experts in Southern California.
While there are many builders in this area who specialize in foundation repair due to their strong knowledge of 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 areas of 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 and have the 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 often go above and beyond homeowners’ expectations, we have perfected that science to deliver an excellent construction experience!
Foundation Repair Step-by-Step
For simple hairline cracks in foundation repair assessments, we suggest repairing them with epoxy injections, supplemented by metal straps that prevent the concrete from spreading. However, if the cracks exceed 2″-3″, it may be time to consider repairing the foundation.
Foundation repair can range in scope from replacing a two-foot section to replacing an entire wall or even the entire foundation perimeter. With 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. Under the current code, your new reinforced concrete foundation will last you 100-150 years!
In some cases, full foundation replacement is recommended when the foundation is in irreparable, poor condition.
In the sequence below, you can see how the foundation replacement process is being completed. Work is courtesy of and performed by Weinstein Retrofitting Systems:
