Damage to a foundation can be a severe problem, one that requires you to get specialized help from high-quality professionals. If you don’t, there’s a good chance that your home may end up severely damaged and hard to repair. Thankfully, foundation repair in Iowa City, Cedar Rapids, Quad Cities, Davenport, Waterloo, and Cedar Falls, Iowa can help you out. At Tomlinson Cannon, we can perform all of these repair methods for you to ensure that your home is reliable and secure on its foundation.

Placing Pilings

When you’re starting the foundation repair process, it is vital to place pilings around the perimeter of your home. These pilings are things that you shouldn’t try to install on your own – like many foundation elements, they require professional skill to install and adjust. So be prepared to call an expert for this job. You’ll be glad that you did because they’ll make sure that your pilings are as strong as possible to ensure your foundation is secure.

What are pilings? Simply put, they are columns that are pushed into the ground that go underneath the foundation. Typically, they require tunnels that are dug underneath your home. Once these tunnels are dug out, the foundation specialist carefully puts pilings in under your foundation slab. They run at evenly-spaced intervals throughout the slab to provide you with extra support if the ground is weak or sinking and causing foundation concerns.

For some foundation damage, these pilings may be all that you need to keep your home strong and secure. However, there is also a good chance that you’ll need a higher level of support. That’s because many issues can affect your foundation and cause problems. So let’s examine a few more to give you an idea of what to expect in this repair situation. You’ll be glad that you learned more about these factors.

Breakout Needs

When you’re repairing your foundation, there is a chance that you might have to break apart more than just the soil around your home to get access to your support areas. For example, some people need to break open asphalt or concrete around their garage or driveway to get underneath their homes. This approach allows them to utilize less extreme foundation repair methods and is usually necessary for less damaged types of homes.

This process is known as a breakout. It occurs when you break through the floor of a garage or surface of a driveway to reach the beams located underneath either the garage or home. Typically, this process is necessary before a lift of your foundation and provides the extra support that you need to keep your home’s foundation secure. Usually, you can anticipate one or two breakouts every time that you have to repair your foundation.

And after your repair is finished, the foundation experts will patch or repair the driveway. In some cases, they may have to call in concrete or asphalt repair experts to patch the hole that they dug. Whatever the case, you should be able to repair your foundation much easier using this technique. So make sure that your repair expert understands this method before you begin.

Foundation Lift

The essential foundation repair technique that you can use for your home is the foundation lift. This technique is more or less what it sounds like – your repair experts carefully lift your foundation and provide extra support to keep it stable. For example, they may have to repair the post-tension cables underneath your foundation to keep it more durable. These cables help to keep your foundation secure and avoid complications with its operation.

Typically, a lift requires the experts to add new support beams and other types of care options to your foundation to keep it as strong as possible. These support beams are typically scattered throughout the slab evenly, as we mentioned in a previous section. The number of beams added usually depends on the severity of the damage. Sometimes, you may only need a handful of beams while other times you may need many more positioned carefully.

Typically, the soil removed to get access to your foundation is correctly replaced after you lift it. Then, you usually don’t have to worry about any other repairs for years after this technique. However, that doesn’t mean that different types of damage may not occur. And besides that point, there is one more technique that is usually applied during a typical repair to ensure that your home has the kind of support that it needs to stay stable and secure.

Plumbing and Electrical Lifts

You may be wondering what happens to other elements in your home during a foundation lift. For example, what happens to your plumbing and electrical systems? Do they stay where they are at, or do they get lifted too? They get raised in a separate process that helps to keep your home running smoothly. The idea behind this two-pronged approach is to ensure that your house’s wiring and plumbing don’t get damaged by this repair process.

Typically, this process requires your repair experts to focus heavily on the plumbing and electrical elements and carefully lift them to keep your home from any more damage. This process often requires specialized repair options, such as using specific equipment that helps to boost these items. Sometimes, they’ll need to call plumbers or electricians to ensure that things go smoothly. Basically, they want to avoid damaging these elements in your home as much as possible.

After they properly lift your plumbing and electrical elements, your foundation repair is close to done. Now, they’ll double-check all of their work to make sure that everything has been done correctly. Most of the time, this type of repair process is relatively simple and mostly focuses on gauging the quality of their work and how well they’ve executed their lifts. As a result, you shouldn’t have a hard time finishing up this repair process satisfied with the hard work that they have done.

Get the Repair Your Foundation Needs

As you can see, the best foundation repair Iowa City, Cedar Rapids, Quad Cities, Davenport, Waterloo, and Cedar Falls, Iowa have to offer can give you the help that you need to keep your home safe from damage. By taking these types of repairs seriously, you put your home in a better place and ensure that repairs are correctly and adequately handled. So please call us at Tomlinson Cannon today to learn more. Our experts have years of experience and will do what it takes to repair your foundation.