Thread: small gloat - Family Woodworking

Well i have a house to fix. that need's some major work on the sill plates...

/threadjack alert

I've worked on a few building jacking projects back when I was in the civil engineering biz. There was a series of houses in a high-dollar part of town that were having bad settling problems caused by overwatering yard landscaping. (One house had 8" of elevation difference from one side of the living room to the other.) These were slab on grade 2-story houses. The crew ended up jackhammering out the slabs and foundations out from under the houses, re-leveling the frame with bottle jacks, and then we installed post-tensioned concrete slabs and foundations under the existing houses. (My BIL and I installed and pulled the cables...we didn't do the formwork or concrete finishing.)

On another project, the foundation under an entire elementary school had shifted over about 12" and sunk. The concrete grade beams sheared off the concrete piers. (Takes a lot of force to shear multiple strands of #12 rebar...this problem was also caused by overwatering the landscaping.) They ended up jacking the grade beam (and the rest of the building) up and over to put it back in place, and used epoxy to keep it there. They also installed diagonal piers under the building to pin the grade beam and keep it where it was supposed to be. My job on that project was to test the grout that was pressure-injected into the piers and confirm they pumped as much in as they were supposed to.

Source: http://familywoodworking.org/forums/showthread.php?28403-small-gloat

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