Craig Foundation Repair

In April 2016, we excavated for a foundation repair job on Florida Mesa (near Sunnyside Elementary School) as a result of the highly expansive clay soils beginning to damage the basement foundation. We worked in concert with Concrete Specialties to perform a repair of the foundation.

The prescription required that we excavate to expose the foundation at the failure point, raise the house off of the foundation (at the affected area), create anchors in the yard, and attach rods that would be used to make the tension required to pull the foundation back to plumb. Backfilling with non-expansive material and building a drain system would also be incorporated into the repair

The failure area was about 30 linear feet of basement wall, which was located in a small courtyard surrounded by a 4’ tall slump-stone garden wall. One of the challenges of this site  was the tight access due to the desire of the homeowner to  have a minimal impact to the yard. The area was very small (for working with heavy machinery) and did not afford the room to even stockpile the excavated spoils.

As you can see in the pictures, we were able to enter the courtyard by only removing a small section of wall and a gate.  Once we had the mini excavator in the courtyard, we could expose the wall and use the skid steer to remove the spoils from the work area and haul it off site.

We had to be careful of some large aspen trees and an existing sidewalk while taking each scoop of dirt out with the skid steer. Once the repair was completed, we built a drain system and backfilled with screened rock.  Because we couldn’t daylight the drain system, we built a drywall storage/leaching pit to eliminate any water that entered the drain system.