Alright, let me give it to you straight — I want you calm, curious, and not handing over a giant check because some flashlight-wielding salesperson played the fear card. We walk through how concrete behaves (it cracks — that’s normal), how to read those cracks (hairline vertical = cosmetic; horizontal, stair-step, or anything wider than about a quarter-inch or that accepts a business card = time to investigate), and why soil, trees, old mixes (yeah, sometimes sand from the beach with salt), or poor compaction can turn a boring leak into a structural headache. I even tell a story where a broken sprinkler was the villain — a $2,500 fix, not a $30,000 nightmare — because someone knew how to look. We give you the practical playbook: grade your yard so soil slopes away at least 6 inches over the first 10 ft, run downspouts a minimum of 10 ft away (no cheesy short extenders), consider drywells or daylighting to lawn, and keep gutters clean. If water’s getting in, start with water management before you assume the foundation must be ripped out. If pumps keep failing, get an inspection camera and call a structural engineer — they’re your friend, not the contractor’s sales script. I also cover simple monitoring (crack stickers, humidity sensors) and sensible documentation (take pictures of repairs) so you don’t get upsold or stuck with surprises later.

Takeaways:

• I learned not all cracks are equal; tiny hairline vertical cracks are usually cosmetic, not structural, so don't panic.
• We always say: start with water management — grading, gutters and downspouts must direct runoff at least ten feet away to save headaches.
• If a contractor hits you with 'your house will fall' fear tactics, I roll my eyes and call a structural engineer first.
• We once turned a $30,000 scare-job into a $2,500 quick fix by finding a leaking sprinkler with an inspection camera — ask for diagnostics before signing anything.
• Sump pumps without battery backups are a disaster waiting to happen; I recommend battery or water-powered backups so storms don't become indoor swimming pools.
• Crawl space encapsulation isn't a blanket solution — either condition the space like the rest of the house or install a proper dehumidifier and manage moisture carefully.
• I insist on an independent engineer's stamped repair before accepting quotes; that forces contractors to propose engineered, cost-effective fixes like carbon fiber wraps, helical piers, or interior foundations rather than one-size-fits-all sales pitches.

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• Around the House
• aroundthehouseonline.com
• Simpson Strong-Tie
• Rhino Carbon Fiber
• Bobcat
• Tyvek

Thanks for listening to Around the house if you want to hear more please subscribe so you get notified of the latest episode as it posts at https://around-the-house-with-e.captivate.fm/listen

If you want to join the Around the House Insider for access to the back catalog, Exclusive Content and a direct email to Eric G and access to the show early https://around-the-house-with-e.captivate.fm/support

We love comments and we would love reviews on how this information has helped you on your house! Thanks for listening! For more information about the show head to https://aroundthehouseonline.com/

Information given on the Around the House Show should not be considered construction or design advice for your specific project, nor is it intended to replace consulting at your home or jobsite by a building professional. The views and opinions expressed by those interviewed on the podcast are those of the guests and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the Around the House Show.

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Welcome to the around the House show, your trusted source for everything about your home.

I'm Eric G. Thanks for joining me today.

We got a great show lined up here.

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Today we're going to talk about the controversial subject, how not to get ripped off by a foundation contractor.

Now there are a ton of great foundation contractors out there, but there's also a ton that dive into fear based sales techniques.

They're going to hammer on you.

They're going to stick around for an hour and a half to give you the hard sell.

And it's 25% off today before your house falls in.

And I don't want you to fall for that because most of the time that is one big high pressure sales tactic.

You might as well be sitting there in front of somebody selling, I don't know, timeshare condos as you're on vacation.

Yeah, you can feel that way.

So today we're going to educate you.

We're going to get you all the information that you know.

So you go into this not so blind and not so scared.

Because I'll tell you what, one thing with concrete, it's guaranteed to crack at some point.

It always does.

So how do you deal with it?

Let's dive in.

So here's the first thing.

Not all cracks are equal.

Little tiny hairline vertical cracks and poured concrete are just kind of curing shrinkage.

Cosmetic, not structural.

Now if you're getting into horizontal cracks, stair step cracks and brick and block or anything wider than a quarter inch or even anything more than when you slide a business card into start to signal some soil pressure or sediment.

And here's what can happen if that's settling.

I said sediment.

But here's what happens.

This is something you need to pay attention to and not just somebody that's going to come in there and caulk that up.

So here's the thing.

This can happen from a lot of different reasons.

First off, if you get into older homes, many older homes before the 40s, before the 50s, they didn't have rebar, they just poured concrete.

Sometimes it was a guy sitting there mixing it up by hand with a concrete mixer, sometimes it was the truck.

It can be all over the place depending on what you get.

Here in my Portland area, we have a whole generation of homes in the 20s and 30s out there that they didn't use pre washed sand.

So it came out of the beach.

So it had salt in it.

So what happens, I can go in there and with a screwdriver, grind through in about five minutes a hole right through the foundation, it just crumbles.

That's something that's a completely different problem than just a big crack.

And what can happen here is when you're looking at the foundation, when they dug it out, if this was fill dirt and they didn't compact it well enough, some parts of that are going to settle.

There's not much you can do about that now.

If it's settling a lot, there's a lot of things we can do about it and we can talk about that later in the show.

But really learning how to read those cracks is the big thing.

Now if you built it on clay soil, that clay soil can dry out.

And it's just like a sponge.

When clay soil drags out, dries out, it just gets that big crack right down the middle.

It's those desert pictures you see with the big cracks in the ground.

When you get water in, it swells right back up.

Those cracks go away.

Problems is that's now lifting and settling on the house and it never does it equally.

So that's something that you want to pay attention to.

I have seen people with clay soil just keep the soil damp in the dry part of the season out there.

Kind of eliminates that movement because it's not going through those almost like freeze thaw where it's really just moving the soil.

So if you keep it damp all the time, kind of kind of removes a lot of that.

Now here's the next thing.

If you get that kind of white chunky stuff on it, that's EFF fluorescence or any musty smells.

Those are small diagnostic clues and not just cosmetic.

That is water coming through, grabbing the minerals and evaporating.

Even if it looks dry today, that can be something that is a constant damp.

As the moisture comes through, it's now drying out just with the air so it never looks wet, but it's still pushing through.

That is usually a constant moisture path and not a one time event.

Now we were talking a little bit about clay soil, but those big trees right next to the house, that's one of those things too.

I have seen huge foundations get bowed in where you've got a bow that is left to right.

So you've got a big horizontal bow in a brick wall.

And we've fixed those before.

Now here's the thing.

These are what can be pushing houses up.

They can be pushing houses over.

Those big sequoia trees, those can do some significant damage on that foundation wall.

Now here is the thing.

When you're reading the problem like this, part of this, including moisture in the basement can just be as simple as having some gutter issues.

And we'll talk about that in the next segment.

But you'd be surprised of the issues you have.

Now here's the thing.

Foundation cracks usually will show up near openings.

Maybe it's a vent in a crawl space, maybe it's a window in a basement or around a doorway.

These are those common places that we see.

So there's a couple of things you can actually do.

And I say monitor them, go through and you can get these little crack stickers that go on there.

It'll show you and you can mark where it is and you can keep an eye on it.

Most of these cracks are not a big issue.

And what's cool with this is, yeah, you can go and repair them.

We'll talk about that in the actual fix in the fourth segment of the show.

But these are things that don't be scared about.

And I'll tell you what, here is one that I'm going to tell a story before we go out to break because it's that important.

I was working for a local foundation contractor.

Yes, I have experience in this and I did this professionally.

So I was helping up some guys who were an advertiser in the show.

I was going out and doing estimates with them nearly full time.

When I was in town, I was helping them take their load off, cruising in.

And there was another foundation contractor here in Portland.

They came in, sat down with the clients.

This is kind of one of those California split level houses where you walk in the door and.

And you got to go upstairs or go downstairs.

This was down in the daylight basement kind of thing.

So the, the soil was at probably 4ft of the space and there was water that was coming through.

They said that there was a Broken foundation.

Why wait there?

The guy had been there for two hours waiting and waiting, finally waiting for the guy to go because I could see his car out front.

So I was just giving him the courtesy to leave so it didn't get awkward.

So they're teary eyed.

They just had the high pressure sales technique.

They had everything going wrong for them.

And I walked in and I said, what's the problem, guys?

Here's one little caveat.

I walked up to the front door and I noticed a sprinkler in the bushes there that was kind of at an angle, like a 45 degree angle.

And I noticed this big foundation crack right next to that window, kind of up on the stoop.

I went, huh, that's interesting.

So came in the house, got them calmed down because they were freaking out, rightfully so.

And I said, let's go take a look at the problem.

We go down the basement, they talk about what the guide suggested about digging in, tearing up the basement floor, putting a blow grade French drain system and a sump pump.

I'm looking down, there's nine by nine asbestos tile.

The guy quoted him $30,000.

And then I asked, hey, did they deal with the asbestos first?

And they gave me a look like, oh, no, they hadn't done that.

Long story short, I asked him if I could poke a little hole in the wall.

I put my inspection camera and.

And that broken sprinkler was putting water right down into the wall.

It was a $2,500 fix, not a $30,000 fix.

All because the homeowners, no fault of their own, they didn't know what was going on.

So I saved them significant amount of money.

Quick and easy fix.

They had to do a little quick drywall patch and it was good to go.

And we'll talk about how that was fixed later on.

All right, we come back, we're going to talk about water management.

If you've got water in your crawl space or basement, we this hour is for you.

We'll do that just as soon as around the House returns.

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We'll be right back after these important messages.

Stick around.

Welcome back to the around the House show, your trusted source for everything about your home.

I'm Eric G. Thanks for joining me today.

That is on the around the House with Eric G. YouTube channel.

Now today we're talking about how not to get ripped off by a foundation contractor.

And before all the foundation contractors get all bent out of shape, there's a lot of you that are great.

There's a lot of you out there that just are fear based salespeople.

And I don't like it.

And I'm here to help out all the homeowners out there that are making sure they're making the right decisions with the right amount of information.

And so this segment here, we're going to talk about water management.

And this is a big part of keeping your foundation in the best shape.

Now first off here, get the water away from the house grading gutters and downspouts first.

Now this is the cheapest fix of anything we're talking about here.

And this is meant for diy.

Can you pay somebody to do it?

Absolutely.

Can you do it yourself with a shovel and some gravel and some pipe?

Yes, you can.

So here's the deal.

Grading is the cheapest fix in the business.

Soil should slope away from the foundation at least 6 inches over the first 10ft.

And downspouts need to dump the water at least 10ft away.

If yours goes down, kicks out right next to the foundation, you're going to add water to the basement, you're going to add water to the crawl space and you're going to get moisture.

If your house is slab on grade coming up through the ground that needs to go 10ft away.

No, I don't want the little gutter extensions, that kind of stuff.

Your best plan here is to do it like this.

Those downspouts should go down into a storm drain system.

So what I like to do for that, and if, depending on your lots and how it's laid out, if you've got a gentle slope going to the street, this can be huge.

You can run it down, put it down in the middle of the grass or the flower bed.

Problem is though, if you got a lot of water, it's going to wash the bark away.

They make these pop ups that are green.

And when you get enough water in that pipe, if it's going to get low enough away from your house, you can daylight it into the grass and then what happens from there you're going to be good to go.

Now here's the thing.

If you get it too close to the street and it starts running over the sidewalk, your city, county, state, whatever could have something to say about that.

So be very careful.

Now you can put this into a drywell.

What's a drywell?

You big a.

Just Dig a huge hole.

I'd get a little mini excavator.

You're going to put either a canister down there, fill it up with gravel, or you're just going to put it down into a big gravel area that you fill in and the water will just leach down into the soil that way.

But you need to plan ahead because if you get an inch of rain out of a typical downspout, that's going to be what, 50, 60 gallons of water in most cases.

And if you've got three or four downspouts going into that, that could be an issue.

So plan ahead.

You want it at least 10ft away and downhill from the house.

If you can do that, you're going to extend the life of that foundation.

And if you've got an older home, if you've got brick block, clay, tile, whatever that's made of down there, that can be a huge issue.

Now let me tell you what.

If you're looking at dealing with water like this, this is a huge issue.

I went out to a house, walked into a house and I felt really bad.

This guy had an old 20s farmhouse.

It was in the middle of a area where it built up around him.

And he's like, man, I keep burning through sump pumps from another company.

All right, let's take a look.

I get out my inspection camera, I get my flashlight, I start looking around.

This had some kind of a water leak under this block.

Foundation and concrete is a mixture of both.

Water had been going under the foundation wall, under the footing, washing up into the perimeter trench drain that was on the inside, filling that up with dirt.

They were grinding pumps to death, just taking grain, just pumping dirty water.

It was mud.

So he was going through all these.

The problem was is there was about 6 to 12 inches of clear space all the way around the perimeter of the foundation.

Now this is an old basement where you've got a post in the middle of the room, you've got a beam.

That whole house could have sank 6 to 10 inches easily all at once, or worse, even less.

That would have then pushed the middle of the house up 6, 8, 10 inches.

Would have been catastrophic.

So he had a big issue.

And I said, hey man, I'm not even comfortable sitting down here.

This is one of a handful of times in my 35 years of doing this.

And I went, we need to get out of here and you need a structural engineer.

To me, I would have went in there and probably poured a new in place foundation on the inside of that and then controlled the water a lot better, but that was going to be a mess no matter how you did it.

You would had to go in there and really build up some structural just to hold things up in case you had some settling.

All it would take would be a couple 3 or 4.0 earthquake.

That thing could easily shake down and that house is going to come down with them.

So watch your water.

It can do a ton of damage quickly.

Now match the repair to the actual problem.

Water management.

If you've got a crack, let's say you got a big foundation crack and you've got water coming through it.

Here's what I see people do and we'll talk more about the actual fix.

But crack injection can be the answer to this.

So what do they do?

If you've got one or two big cracks in a basement, what you can do is kind of clean up and grind out that area.

There's silica dust here, so you need to follow all the rules for that.

You're going to grind out that area and get it cleaned up.

Everything loose out of there, and then you're going to dampen that up and you're going to patch that with cementol and you mix it up.

So it's almost like the consistency of thick peanut butter.

You could literally make a snowball out of it, shove it in there, get it shoved in the crack as best you can.

Get that screeded off, let that settle, let that set up.

Then what you can do is you can drill into that and pump in.

It looks like warm honey.

That consistency, that is polyurethane.

When it goes through that area and hits any moist dirt, any, anything behind it, it will foam up like spray foam and it will just absolutely seal that crack up.

So it's good to go.

Now here's the issue that you got to worry about.

Concrete block to me, has been one of the worst in dealing with water coming in.

Because of the hollow nature of those CMU blocks, that water can just travel anywhere.

It could be coming in the corner and dancing around and filling up block holes and showing up 15ft away.

In that situation, your only real fix is to dig around the perimeter on the outside and do a full waterproofing system out there with a footing drain.

Get that dialed in and really do it from the outside.

That is not my preferred way of doing it, but many times that is going to be the best way.

It's a lot of landscaping.

You've got porches, you've got decks, you've got a lot of issues.

You have to work around.

But that is one of the bigger fixes and that is one of them.

Now the other thing that you want to pay attention to is if you've got water that's coming up through the floor and I'm talking about coming up through the joint between the wall and the floor or up in the middle of the floor, that is a high water table.

So if you've got your gutter system taken out, that's the thing.

First thing you do on this is make sure that your gutters are working.

That water is getting away from the house.

If it's still coming in, that's where you really need to dig around.

And so what you would do is go around and dig a trench underneath that concrete.

So you're going to cut out a foot of that around the base, go around, you're going to dig down, you're going to put in a French drain system, so gravel perforated pipe going to a low point sump.

So it's all going to go to a sump and that's going to get discharged and well away from the house.

So you want to talk to a structural engineer before you get that out.

Because sometimes you can cut out A and B sections where you cut out a section, put the pipe in, concrete it next section, or you do A and B where you take out, cut half sections out and then you can go that way so it still holds it round the house.

We'll be right back after these important messages.

Don't change that dial.

Welcome back to the around the House show, your trusted source for every everything about your home.

I'm Eric G. Hey, find out more about us.

Head to aroundthehouse online.com all right, now we're going to talk about protecting your space.

Now if you're just joining us coming back from break on the radio, we are talking about how not to get ripped off by a bad foundation contractor.

So the next part here in this segment is protecting the space.

So a sump pump without a battery backup is a dish disaster waiting to happen.

The worst basement floods happen during storms.

Exactly when the power goes out.

Battery backup or a water powered backup pump is cheap insurance against the $30,000 mistake.

So you want to spend the time.

There are some great ones out there that have big battery backups and they can notify you, they can beep, they can tell you everything that's going on because you're going to forget about it.

You're going to get this new system put in.

So make sure that you've Got a great battery backup for this.

Now here's the cool thing is what these do is they have their regular pump and they usually have a 12VT pump there as well.

And that's going to run off the battery.

And if you put in a good battery in there that can run for hours, that could really help you out for that time.

Now you could also do a generator.

And as long as that fires on, you're going to be good.

But you're going to want a whole house one that way it comes on automatically.

So make sure you've got a sump pump that's protecting your basement.

You've got a big battery backup.

Now here's the controversial one.

Not every crawl space needs encapsulation.

But if you do, you have two choices.

You either have to condition it like the rest of the house or you have to put in a dehumidifier, full stop.

It's one or the other.

So what is crawl space encapsulation?

Most crawl spaces building code is requiring you to have thick plastic down there covering all of the dirt.

That way that moisture does not come up into your crawl space.

Now there's some debate here, but in most crawl spaces, 60 to 80% of that air ends up in the living space.

So if you've got a house with cream color carpet and you keep noticing that you're getting dark around the edges of the carpet on interior walls, right up against the baseboards, don't blame your vacuum.

That is crawl space air coming up through the holes in that plate and coming in.

And your carpet is now the filter fabric.

That can be a huge issue.

That means all that dirty air that's down there with the spiders and bugs and rodents or whatever else is in your crawl space, that air is coming up inside.

So having that clean down there is good.

Now if you've got vents to the outside, you want to make sure you've got good airflow down there for a number of reasons.

Now you always want to make sure that you've had radon testing.

Now in my area here in Oregon, as part of the house sale, they pretty much require you to have a radon test to make sure you don't have dangerous air.

Because we have it here, it's common and it's common in most areas in the country.

So that might be a way to have to get that whole thing encapsulated anyway.

And I think if you were just gonna write checks out there, encapsulating everything is not a bad idea.

But is it required?

No.

The worst thing you can do is go in there.

And this is where I think we make some problems.

I like to have that encapsulation go in and make sure that when you have posts that you don't wrap up, those posts that you wrap around the base where the concrete is.

So that way you're not trapping the wood on the inside of the moisture.

That way you're not pre rotting those posts out because you've got grow, you know, moist air coming in, coming up through the soil and attacking those posts.

So I want to see that really taped off really well.

And then you're gonna have to put in a big dehumidifier.

And that can be thousands of dollars by the time you run power there.

And then you need to pump that water someplace.

That can be an issue.

So that dehumidifier has to do its job.

If you're in a humid area, yeah, you're going to want a dehumidifier.

Even in the desert.

I have seen people need dehumidifiers down there because if not, that's now going to be a moldy crawl space.

And when you've got a moldy crawl space, that air is going to go still up inside the house.

So something to consider, take some time with that.

But really, this is one of those things that encapsulation makes perfectly good sense for very damp crawl spaces.

I have seen where you get down there, and 24, 7, that place is a mud pit.

Yes.

You have to deal with that.

That is where encapsulated crawl spaces are.

But if you go down there with the vapor barrier and it's 40, 45% humidity, 24, 7, not that big a deal, guys.

Just keep it super clean and have that inspected every single year.

I think a crawl space needs to have somebody poke around.

Whether you hire a company to come do it, or you get your Tyvek suit and a dust mask and go down there.

It's worth taking a look to see what's going on.

You're gonna find shower leaks, you're gonna find plumbing leaks.

You're gonna find all these things going on.

My house there was a hard place to get into.

I didn't realize that I had a slow plumbing leak that a long time ago, somebody had done a poor job fixing where a screw had gone into a pipe and they just didn't fix it right.

So it was a slow drip and I had to go in and do a little work on mine.

I didn't even catch it.

So these are things that I tell you what, big crawl spaces are nice, but holy smokes.

Now there's a building developer around the corner from me here.

We were talking about girlfriend's kid about his house.

They're building houses on a hill behind it.

That thing's got to have a 12 or 16 foot high crawl space and 3/4 of it.

It's huge.

The ladder down into the crawl space is going to be massive.

If it was me, I'd be converting that into living space down there and do something with it.

Because they've got an easy thousand square feet, they could add a basement if they got a little creative.

And because they built it on the cheap, the back wall, which is open, is stick framed so you can cut holes in that way easier for windows and that kind of thing.

So take a look down there sometimes they're going to be a square footage gift.

So just make sure that you've got it either conditioned down there or you've got a nice dehumidifier down there.

And make sure you get down there a couple times a year.

If you got the dehumidifier that you're checking the filter or if have the foundation company go down there and take a look and do that, that will get you all dialed in.

Now be really careful, guys.

Take a look at how you insulate that space as well.

If you've got a big deep basement or a big deep crawl space, putting insulation up on the walls can be a way to go.

But you need to be careful.

I can't tell you how many flipper homes I've gone into and seeing all the baseboard moldings that were MDF that are all swollen up and nasty.

These people were three months into a house flip and nobody planned for the water.

Now this is one of those things that I see all the time.

So what I tell people, if you want to finish that unfinished basement, watch that basement for the entire rainy season in your area.

Watch it, make sure that it is dry, make sure that things are working good.

And then when you go to waterproof it down there or do your best, make sure that you've got a plan for that.

Now if it starts to get a little damp, yeah, it might be something where you have to put in a perimeter French drainer out on the inside.

Maybe it's a gutter problem like the other things we were talking about.

But don't just move in and say, I'm going to finish this basement because you could have to rip it all out with a ton of water damage and make sure, you pull those permits as well.

Because one of the things that you can do is finish that basement.

You go to sell it, they're like, oh, that's an unpermitted storage space.

And then that can get in the way of that house sale.

More and more people are starting to look to see what was permitted and what is the square footage.

And now you overpaid.

So be super careful out there.

Take your time, no matter what.

With humidity in your house, if it's over 60%, you got a serious problem.

And I can promise you mold's going to be growing and you're going to want to deal with that with your crawl space.

With any of these things or basements, humidity should always be monitored.

And it can be just as simple as getting a cheap weather station off Amazon, throwing the outdoor sensor in your crawl space so you can take a look at it and you'll know what it is.

Put it in your garage, put it in the workroom, whatever you're doing, put in your office, you can peek down and see what's going on before you have an expensive problem to fix around the house.

Be right back.

We're going to talk about what the actual fixes are for these problems and more just as soon as we return.

Don't change that top.

Welcome back to the around the House show, your trusted source for everything about your home.

I'm Eric G. We've been talking today about how not to get ripped off by a bad foundation contractor.

Now, part four here of this series is the actual fix and the there are a lot of different ways people are fixing stuff out there, but the first thing I want to say, there's no really a reason to lift a house unless you're lifting it up to change its height.

So many foundation contractors out there going, oh yeah, we've got a foundation problem, we're going to come in, we're going to lift the house off the foundation, we're going to rip the foundation off and we're going to put another one down in.

Now if you've got some big plans where you want a 10 foot ceiling height and you're going to lift the house up or it's a floodplain, totally get it.

But a lot of people out there will come in and tell homeowners that means the whole house has to be done in the foundation.

No, it doesn't.

Here's how you get around that.

If you have a brick block or even a bad foundation around the house, what you can do that's considerably less money, is you can go in and pour a new interior foundation.

Here's what you do.

You go, first off, you have to have an engineer come out, and they're going to drop all the plans.

Now, this is the thing.

For every single project you're doing, if you have a significant crack or settling problem in your house where the windows and everything is not working right, and you know you've got a settling issue, the first person you call is not the foundation contractor, it's the structural engineer.

You're going to pay them to come out and do a report, and they're going to give you what I would call the fix with the stamp on it.

The one that says here is what you do.

And if you follow these specifications, they put their engineering stamp on it.

This is the approved repair.

Now, you can call up foundation companies and get your three estimates, and they will be following that stamped repair.

It could be that you're going to put unidirectional carbon fiber in there.

It could be a new interior foundation wall.

It could be some steel studs where they put iron in that to hold it up.

There could be a fix.

Now you're getting the same quote, and you know what's going on, and you've heard it right from the expert's mouth, that your house isn't going to fall in, but you've got to take care of it before further damage occurs.

There are things that you can do.

If you've got a chimney that is pulling away from the house, you can come in and put helical piers.

Or if a corner is falling many times, you can't lift it, but you can stop it from sinking.

And what are helical piers?

They'll come in with a Bobcat or another tool, and they're going to screw these big, huge foundation screws into the ground.

And they put it in and they measure it by torque.

How many feet down?

What is the torque?

Then they can put brackets to the foundation or to the chimney or whatever else you're trying to keep it from moving.

Have I seen people lift things up?

Absolutely.

It can be done, but that's a bigger thing.

So those helical pirate piers, you're two or three thousand dollars for each time they put that in the ground, maybe more now, depending on where you're at, but those are pretty expensive to put in.

But it's a engineered fix.

So carbon fiber, as we talked about, is one of the most versatile fixes in the industry.

And it's just not one product.

There are carbon fiber bands.

So this is a woven carbon fiber product that can be or unidirectional where it's directional two ways.

And so you can go over, you can go through it.

If you got a big crack, for instance, in the wall that is going kind of diagonally across the wall, you can go through and do again, it has to be engineered.

You can do these six, eight, ten strips across that, that basically stitch that wall back together and it's as strong or stronger than the rest of it.

So this can work really well.

If you've got a corner that's cracked and pulling away, you can wrap that around the corner and do it and it can really hold it together.

If you've got a concrete slab that you're trying to hold together, you can put in these carbon fiber staples that look like a little tiny 12 inch long dumbbell where it's got two balls on the end and one strap of carbon fiber and you can grind in and put that in there and you're good to go.

Works really well.

Fill it up with epoxy.

Now you've stitched that together.

So there's a lot of different solutions for this.

Can you buy the products even yourself?

Yeah.

Simpson Strong Time makes it Rhino.

Carbon fiber makes it Rhino.

Can you can order it right out of the, right out of their website.

Now they are from Canada, so I have not looked at their website to see what if they're shipping out of the US or what that thing is with tariffs.

So be careful there.

But this is a great toolkit.

You don't need to go in and bolt big steel bars up against it.

Carbon fiber is going to do it.

And then what you can do is just paint over the complete wall once that's cured and you're good to go.

But like everything, that independent structural engineer is going to be the one that's going to tell you how to fix it.

So don't take the foundation contractor's word for it.

Go there.

Because here's the one thing and here's the little dirty secret about the foundation industry out there.

There are companies out there, many of them that are franchises and they have a certain way they do things.

They have fix A, they have fix B, and that's it.

You need the engineer to come out and go, what is the most cost effective repair to make this whole, to bring this back together.

That is what you're looking for, the most cost effective solution, because that's going to force those companies to come up with that for you.

So pay attention.

Take a look at it now.

If you do an interior foundation, because you've got a completely, worst case, failed, a failed foundation, this thing is crumbling, it's cracking, there's horizontal cracks.

It's Boeing.

It's really not that big a deal.

Now, it can affect the staircase going down in there.

It could affect your H Vac system, your utilities coming in like water or gas or oil, but that's not a big deal.

And generally you can live in the house while utilities could be shut off.

But if you're lifting the house up, you're living in an RV or doing something else because the building department is not going to let you live in that house.

Well, it's up on Jack stands.

So that's the thing.

So you want to make sure you've got that dialed in.

If you're going to lift it, that's a whole other story.

That's not a bad deal.

I have done new interior foundations and then as we did that, we have dug it out and made it a livable space where we took out two feet down below.

Here's how you do that.

Just to give you an idea, if you're trying to build a bigger space down there, they come in and take out about 2ft of space off the wall.

They'll cut that out and they're going to pour new footings that will stair, step down.

So they will do that.

And then you can get that foundation poured on the outside of the wall.

Then you can come in and dig it out.

So I've seen it done.

And now you can do something with that space.

So there's a lot you can do.

There's a lot you can do.

But it's expensive.

But if you've got a way to access that where you could put a.

Or you could put a.

We've cut holes in the side and brought in excavators into that space and dug it out.

I've also had it where people dug it out by hand and we put a big conveyor belt through the.

Through a big window down there, an egress window, and people shoveled it out as well.

There's ways to do it.

There's ways to Fix it.

And it all can be done.

But at what expense?

That's where you get those quotes.

So if I wanted to give you some advice here, guys, stay on top of the water.

Make sure that you're bringing out a professional like a structural engineer to do that.

And you can look up foundation structural engineers out there.

They're not that scarce, and they can come out and take a look.

Plenty of engineering companies do this stuff all the time.

And that way you have that fix, pay them, could be a thousand bucks.

Whatever it is, you can do your shopping and then go bring your foundation contractor in.

I if they have their own structural engineer, that's awesome.

I want somebody independent that's going to tell me the right fix, not try to be part of the sales process in the sales team.

That's where you can get caught up.

And that's where I get just a little bit nervous with all of that.

Now, if you've got questions, here's what you can do.

Message me over to Roundthe House online.com we gotta contact us page over there.

That'll end up in my inbox.

I keep an eye on that and I'll get back to you.

And maybe we can talk about it even in a future episode if you've got some interesting stuff.

But I have fixed my own foundations before.

I know how to do it.

I've been trained.

You can buy the kits online and if you do it correctly and prep it right, you'll be good to go.

Now, the funny thing is, when I did mine and we talked about it in the show a little while ago, but the inspector that inspected my house said, eric, you got a crack in your foundation and it's leaking water.

Now, there's epoxy coming in because I fixed it on the outside before I built the deck over it.

So I really wanted to get it strong.

So I fixed it on that side because it was exposed and under the deck.

So just make sure you take pictures of what you do.

So if anybody comes back and you go to sell the house, they say, hey, what did that repair look like?

You got pictures of it and put it away.

That's what I did, and it took care of the issue.

So make sure, guys, be careful out there.

Get your estimates and don't fall prey to the handful of foundation contractors.

They're going to try to scare you to get a big check from you.

Thanks for tuning in to around the House.

I'm Eric G. We'll see you in the next hour.