The Spring Thaw and Your Foundation

As winter wraps up (on the early side for once) let’s have one last conversation about frost heave and how it affects the structural integrity of your home.

With the wild temperature swing we saw all winter, the soil around your home spent months freezing, thawing, becoming saturated, freezing again, thawing again, and on and on. Each cycle causes an expansion of the soil, which exerts pressure on your foundation walls, and then a retraction that leaves a void. 

Add to the cycle the fact that there’s lots of precipitation in the forecast, and the ground is already pretty saturated, and you add in the risk for flooding and further stress on the walls. This constant push-pull can destabilize the foundation and put you at risk for bowing, cracking walls, and even wall collapse. 

So how do you prevent it?

In short, you can’t. It isn’t what you want to hear, but you have very little control over the weather and the soil around your home. But what you can do is act - the earlier the better.

Now is a great time to go down in your basement and really look at the walls. Do they look like they’ve shifted? Are there new cracks, or have existing cracks changed at all? If you have block walls, is the mortar between the blocks intact?

Any of the above changes, and even visible water entering through a point in the wall, can be signs of shifting, cracks, and bowing. That’s when you call us.

We have multiple wall stabilization solutions and can design a custom plan based on your foundation’s issues and existing structural obstacles, but it’s easier, less invasive, and cheaper the earlier we can address the problem. 

A few times a year, we receive calls from people who either had us out to inspect a problem but hesitated to fix it, or who ignored a known problem. They usually call us after waking up to “a loud boom” and finding half their garden in their basement via a collapsed wall. 

Don’t let it get to that point. We always say that problems in your basement never get better over time, only worse, and that’s doubly true for foundation issues. Call today to schedule a free inspection and don’t spend your spring worried about soil expansion.