Foundation Repair & Crawl Space Encapsulation in Bentonville, AR

Getting rid of the groundwater around your foundation is impossible without waterproofing solutions. After all, you aren’t able to see what’s going on below your yard. There are two things that Foundation Recovery Systems recommends for homeowners that wish to drain groundwater from their foundation. One is a sump pump and the other is a perimeter drain.

The sump pump is placed inside the foundation and it is capable of collecting water that flows into the basement as well as the surrounding groundwater. Whenever enough water gets collected into the sump pit, the unit will pump out the water away from the foundation, so it’s not something that will run constantly. The only time you can hear it running constantly is after a big storm when the sump pump has a lot of water to drain. Moberly, MO gets many storms in the spring, so we suggest getting a sump pump with a battery back-up that can be used if the primary one fails, which is what happens to many sump pumps that overwork themselves after a storm.

A perimeter drainage system is also installed inside the basement. A shallow trench is excavated around the edge of the basement and gravel is poured in. The drain itself is placed on top of the gravel and then the trench is covered up. Placing the perimeter drain right at the wall-floor joint is deliberate, as this is where there’s groundwater seepage when there’s hydrostatic pressure. Besides waterproofing solutions, you may also want to consider re-grading your yard so that water flows away from the foundation whenever it rains.

Wood rot in a crawl space is a result of moisture and humidity problems. The wood gets infected with fungi that eats away at it and weakens the structure to the point that it can no longer support the floorboards. When the floor joists in your crawl space are rotting, there is a brief window in which you can save the wood and conserve it instead of getting brand new floorboards, but you have to act fast. Before the wood rot advances too much, you need to do something about it. Diagnosis always precedes treatment, so learning the signs will allow you to protect your floor joists and spend less money on repairs.

The best way to spot early problem signs is to head down into your crawl space and look for visual cues. Take a look at the floor joist and see if you can spot any discoloration on the wood. White, green, black, and gray stains are all common signs of fungal infection. Some forms of wood rot, like dry rot, will leave a layer of spores along the surface, so any red or green dust particles you see could just be spores. Other forms of wood rot don’t discolor the wood at all and instead create a pattern along the wood that resembles termite damage.

With a pencil, stab a piece of the wood, and if it’s soft, it is infected with wood rot. Other forms of wood rot might not make the joist soft and will instead deteriorate to the point where it is extremely brittle. Outside of the crawl space, you can tell when something is wrong with your floor joists if your floor is bouncy or uneven. This does indicate that the wood rot has advanced significantly, but the wood can still be saved up to this point. Even the joist does not need to be replaced, it can always be assisted by IntelliJack™, a crawl space support jack.

Any homeowner concerned about the cost of repairing their home can explore DIY basement floor repairs. Unfortunately, these repairs are often worse for a home than they may initially seem. 

The Cost of DIY 

DIY basement floor repair often costs far more than most homeowners anticipate. After all, homeowners who want to do this kind of work need to have both the tools and materials they need on hand before they can even start repairing a basement floor. 

If you’ve never worked on a leaking basement floor before, you may not know precisely what to do with the materials you’ve brought home. Even if you have an instructional video or guide on hand, you can make mistakes along the way. Those mistakes can cost you in materials, sending you back to the hardware store for replacements. At the end of the day, you easily lose more in time and money conducting DIY basement floor repair than you might reaching out to area professionals. 

The Potential for Error 

Mistakes made during DIY basement repair are more than just costly. They can also have long-term impacts on the overall stability of your home. 

Once you’ve finished repairing your basement floor to the best of your ability, you may think your work is done. However, when you don’t have experience repairing basement floors, then you may only cover up the damage that you’re contending with. In these cases, that damage can fester out of sight until it puts even more of your home at risk. When you do eventually call professionals in for guidance, your future repairs will be more costly than they would have had you reached out to area professionals in the first place. Not only that, but professionals will have to remove your DIY repairs before installing their own, meaning that your initial purchases will have been for naught. 

If you find yourself concerned about the cost of pool deck repair, you may be tempted to try and take on repairs on your own. After all, there are plenty of other DIY solutions you can do around your home, so why not this one? DIY pool deck repair solutions, unfortunately, rarely work out in a homeowner’s favor. Instead, these endeavors can become costly and riddled with errors, meaning that you’re actually going to end up paying more if you try to DIY the fix. 

Concerns About Costs  

Most of the time, homeowners who try to lift their concrete on their own are concerned about the cost of professional repairs. If you’re already someone who enjoys DIY, you might know that certain DIY projects can save you lots of money — after all, making food at home is cheaper than eating out, so why wouldn’t concrete lifting follow the same idea? The problem is that concrete lifting isn’t at all like making food, and DIY work can actually cost a homeowner far more than professional help.  

For starters, you’ll need to find the materials and tools you need to bring your concrete back up to its original height. If you don’t have any similar projects planned for the future, many of these tools may be of one-time use. Professionals already have many of the tools they need on hand to restore your pool deck. That means they can afford the hundreds of dollars in tools they need for pool deck lifting, whereas you probably can’t. Similarly, experts can reach out to industry peers for materials they might need, garnering industry discounts you wouldn’t be able to take advantage of.  

The Dangers of Errors  

Most of the time, DIY mistakes aren’t that big of a deal. If you mess up a recipe, even to the point of complete disaster, you’ll just mess up a couple dollars’ worth of food and have to get takeout. Making a mistake while trying to lift your pool deck, however, can make the structure effectively unusable. For starters, you may end up leaving your pool deck more uneven than you found it, putting you and your family at risk of injuries. You may also put the other nearby concrete structures you have in place at structural risk.  

Then there’s the question of your property’s value. If you fail to appropriately fix your pool deck, or if you make a mistake while trying to repair it, you can put your home’s market value at risk. You risk losing up to 30 percent of your home’s market value if you try to list it with a damaged pool deck or any other type of concrete failure on the property. That might not be a big problem now, but if you’re ever going to sell your home, you could end up taking a big hit on it. If you work with professionals, you’ll be far less likely to eventually sell a home that’s lost some of its value due to damaged concrete.