Photo Album: The Problem - Oceanside, California

This home is Oceanside, California is showing signs of settlement, in the wall that surrounds the property.  The wall which is also a planter is positioned on a slope surrounding the property.  The cracking of the wall is a typical sign of foundation settlement and is very common in concrete walls.  As the home continues to settle further, vertical cracks may widen, indicating that the wall is rotating outward. The homeowner had noticed some very large cracks in the exterior of the wall/planter and knew that something had to be done to fix the problem.  That is the question, how to fix the problem?  Should the problem be hidden, or fixed?  By hiding the problem and patching over the crack, the real problem still exists and has not yet been solved.  The crack will soon re-appear, more repairs will need to be made, and soon the homeowner would be patching over a patch.  Besides, attempting to patch the wall can be easily identified due to variances in the finish or workmanship.  So the homeowner knew he needed a permeant fix to his problem.  The homeowner did some research and found Saber to find a solution to the foundation problem.  Commonly the issue with the settlement is not your home or your foundation, it is the soil underneath the foundation that is shifting and causing the issue.  This type of settlement is due to the shift in the soils supporting the foundation as the heat shrinks the supporting clay soils, causing them to become unstable. Once the property inspection was completed by Saber’s project specialist, the findings determined that the soils under the structure where intact the problem.  Saber has proposed a solution for the homeowner.  The solution will be steep push piers.  Push piers are made of steel and driven deep into the soil to bedrock, push piers are installed at the footing of the structure and provide an opportunity to lift the structure back to it’s original position.  In this case the piers will be installed and the lift preformed, once the lift is preformed a void fill will be added under the structure to add more stabilization and fill any void that may have formed, in turn the crack will close and the homeowner, will no longer see the signs of an unstable foundation.