As promised, here is the story of our house becoming stable. Here's the deal: our house is on the side of a mountain and the mountain is made of shale (slippery stuff) and on top of the shale is lovely clay soil (which absorbs water like nobody's business). So a lot of the houses in this part of town are moving around a lot, and ours was no exception. As a result, there are cracks in a lot of the walls, the doors were cut to funny shapes so they'd actually close or some doors didn't close at all, and the foundation of the house had some cracks and splits. You can be sure we had a structural engineer come and look around above and below ground before we bought the place, to make sure we weren't going to wake up one morning with half our house in the front yard. He made some recommendations, we verified his ideas and added some, and this is the project that resulted.
First things first -- stop water from seeping down the mountain to the soil under our house. This was the biggest factor in the house moving every year; soil gets wet and swells, house goes up; soil dries out and sinks, house goes down; crick; crack; crick; crack. The solution was to dig a perimeter foundation drain around the house. That's a fancy way of saying you dig a ditch, lay down some gravel and porous plastic pipe, cover it up, and forget it's there. Then all the moisture takes the path of least resistance (our pipe path around the house, not under it) and drains out another non-porous pipe to the street.
Next thing we had to address was the amount the front of the house had sunk due to shale slippage. The middle of the house was a good 3 inches taller than the front door, which is fun for rolling little trucks and getting rid of unwanted guests, but not so great for door frames and window frames and hanging pictures (which wall do you square corners to?), not to mention you feel drunk walking around even stone cold sober. Solution: drill helical piers down until they hit bedrock and then prop the house's foundation on those at the correct level. Which isn't quite as much work as it sounds. But you do have to have the correct kind of (dry) weather for a while, and all the laborers available, and all the parts in one place. So our house looked like this (yes, with the bobcat too) for about a month. "Thanks for letting us join the neighborhood. Now we're building a huge moat around our house to keep everyone out and letting large pieces of equipment rust in the front yard. Got a problem with that?"
Eventually everything fell into place and six of these babies were inserted around the south front and east side of the house. Down 27 feet, in case anyone is wondering. They also put in a couple of steel plates (like at the top left of the picture) to keep the foundation together where the cracks had formed over the last 55 years.
Now we're ready for leveling day! Project Manager Mr. Mark came in with his surveyors' equipment and measured all over the house. And then the outside team started cranking their jacks in coordinated fashion ("We're gonna do 5! Ready? Crank. Crank. Crank. Crank. Crank. Stop!") and the house popped and creaked and Mark measured and remeasured and they cranked some more and Mark measured some more and the house groaned itself into alignment. Ta da! A level house! And miraculously all the doors in the house all of a sudden shut (except the front door -- oops) and no windows burst and no pipes were ripped apart.
Waiting for perfect weather again, we were ready for the last phase: relaying concrete. They had to replace the top part of the driveway, the front stoop, the back stoop, and we added a little patio under the front window while they were at it. Six guys, running up our steep driveway with wheelbarrows full of wet cement and furiously shoveling and smoothing and barricading us in the house for a day. And then it was done and we have our house ready for living in for the next 55 years.
It was a bit frustrating at times (seeing that bobcat and moat at your house really gets to you after awhile). It took a lot longer than we thought (advertised time: 3 days; actual time: 5 weeks and 1 day) and was almost twice as expensive as we hoped (27 feet is a long way down). But adding this cost to what we paid to purchase the house -- it's still significantly under the asking price and way below what other people are selling their houses for in this neighborhood. And way worth it for crazy reasons like not having to repaint inside every year as cracks reappear, and being able to add a second story if we wanted to, and not having doors shaped like trapezoids that don't shut anyway.
Now on to fun projects. Like kitchen remodeling and bathroom renovating and floor touch ups and fireplace refacing and . . .
