How to lift a house
It's a big day at the flip! The house lifting is complete!
Maybe I should start from the beginning-, as a lot of you might know, when I purchased this house; it was sinking just a bit. In fact, the back Northwest corner of the home had literally sunk 6 3/8" total! It was a huge unknown and the only reason that the sellers were having issues finding a buyer! I saw the potential in the house and felt it was worth taking a chance.
I did my research pre-offer by contacting some foundation repair companies and having discussions with structural engineers. I wanted to understand "worst case scenario" on actually how bad the foundation could be and what that would do to my renovation costs. I felt the budget still worked in my favor so I worked up the appropriate offer considering the major foundation mystery.
The first step, as I mentioned in one of my previous posts, was have a soil-boring test done. As you know, the soil-boring test came back with good news! The house settling was a fluke, unlikely to ever happen again! The first 6" of our foundation soil was soft, but everything under that was good, sturdy and sound foundation soil!
So that brought me to my next step, understanding my options on how to get the house level again- talk to a structural engineer. My engineer came out and walked the house, read the soil boring test report and was able to give me a couple of recommendations on how to get the house cosmetically level again.
The first option was a very extensive process that would cost tens of thousands of dollars, this process is the only option if you have poor soil and your house will continue to settle.
The next was a much less invasive process of simply jacking the house up from the basement! Since my soil-boring test came back so positively and there's no risk of the house sinking again, we decided that we could comfortably go with the second, less invasive lifting process. Which was great news, as this option was a small fraction of the price that it could have been!
The lifting process was pretty fascinating. They installed beams and jack in the basement and started cranking at a pace of 1/4" every other day. It didn't take too long before we started seeing the house separate from the foundation wall!!!!! Once they lifted a couple inches they started taking out some of the foundation wall cinder blocks to get the jack to the back corner. Next thing we knew you could see outside from the basement because they had lifted so much! Once lifted, they shaped a wedge of brick and pressure treated wood to build out a level foundation wall. The house was then set back down onto the new level wall! After that we chipped out the basement floor to pour a nice new layer of level concrete floor with proper drainage.
In the end they were able to lift the house up about 6", it's almost completely level throughout and a massive improvement to where we started! I am thrilled with the results and cannot wait to keep going on the house!
Here are some process pictures.
Beams and jacks installed:
Slooooooowly we could start to see the house separate from the foundation wall:
Next thing we knew, it had lifted INCHES:
The Northwest corner was up many inches and you could see outside!:
The middle beam of the house had to go up a bit too:
Finally they built up the foundation wall and set the house back down!:
The basement after:
The floor is pretty level:
