Go for the Gold: Fix Your Home's Olympic-Worthy Problems

With the Summer Olympics starting this week, all eyes are on Rio as the nation’s athletes compete in hundreds of events to bring home the gold. But back home - particularly your home - you might have some Olympic size problems brewing that are anything but medal-worthy.
 
High Jump

Does it seem like that step up into your house is getting higher every time you walk through the front door? If the slab under your front stoop starts settling, it may take the steps with it, and before too long you need a head start to make the jump into your home.

But this can be solved with PolyLevel! PolyLevel is a two part polymer that can be injected directly under a concrete slab; as it expands, it lifts and stabilizes the concrete. Not only does it dry quickly (usually under an hour) so it can bear weight immediately, but it’s water resistant and resists further soil washout. This means that once it’s lifted, it stays lifted, and you don’t need to do deep knee bends to work on your jumping skills.

Balance Beam

Do you get the feeling that you’re...tilting...as you walk through your living room? Or maybe your desk chair keeps rolling to one side of the room? Your house isn’t haunted (probably), but your foundation may be sinking. It’s a similar problem to the one above, except instead of throwing your porch off-kilter, it’s the slab underneath your house and it causes the entire house to shift and settle.

The effects of a sinking foundation can include sloping floors, cracked walls, and sticking doors and windows. But by installing helical and/or push piers, we can shift the weight of the house from the unreliable soil to a piering system and raise and stabilize your home. That means no cracks, no collapse, and no balancing as you walk on slanted floors.

Swimming

You knew you wouldn’t get through this blog without a swimming/basement flooding analogy. But maybe sailing is the more appropriate sport here. Boats sail through the water, your possessions float calmly across your basement on the three inches of water that collected there after the last storm. It works.

There is very little rain in the upcoming forecast (although every time I mention that, it pours), and as we talked about last week, dry ground leads to more flooding than already wet ground, because science is weird and illogical. We’re in the home stretch of summer, and no one wants to spend the end of their longer, lazier days bailing water out of the basement.

If you have water in your basement always, or sometimes, or even once, it’s time for waterproofing so it doesn’t become a bigger problem. A perimeter system like WaterGuard allows the water to drain rather than collect, and a sump pump shows it outside quickly. We have a variety of products to fit the scope and size of your basement and its water problems, but they have one thing in common: they keep your basement dry all the time.