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Posted by D Sherman [24.32.202.83] on Friday, March 26, 2010 at 12:21:31 :
In Reply to: Re: Home depot? Lowes? posted by Kaegi [24.113.81.122] on Friday, March 26, 2010 at 11:46:12 :
Knowing the hillsides around Puget Sound, are you sure there's any "rock" to hit, and if you do, are you sure the rock isn't moving along with the hill? Most of the hills around the Sound are glacial moraines sitting on top of gray clay, which is what causes lots of slides when the clay gets wet and slick and the dirt on top of it gets heavy. I know the system you're considering, though I've not actually seen it in use. It seems to me it would be good for solving problems caused by part of the house being build on uncompacted fill which subsequently settled, but not so good if there's a big stump rotting away under the sinking part of the house, or if the whole hillside is sliding. In those cases you need a real poured foundation with rebar in it that can redistribute loads across the whole footing and will at least ensure that the whole house moves as one unit.
If you don't care about trashing the yard, putting a new foundation under a house is not as bad as it seems. When I lived in Everett, I watched J&K House Movers jack up my neighbor's house so he could build a new foundation under it. Using nothing but an old flatbed truck with a winch similar to a car hauler and a pair of rollers, two burly guys put a pair of 12x12 I-beams and a bunch of smaller timbers under the house within a day. The next day the old man came out to do the actual lifting with a set of 4 synchronized hydraulic jacks. As he lifted and leveled out the house, the muscle guys kept raising the railroad-tie cribbing. By the end of the second day, the house was 10 feet up in the air, sitting on 4 substantial stacks of cribbing, and the foundation guy could get under it with a bobcat to do all the digging. They sure made it look easy.
I know that's still a big project, but it might not be as bad as you think it would be. On the other hand, if you're confident that the ground has quit settling and there will be something solid for the soil pins to hit, that's certainly a less drastic solution. On the other other hand, if the soil has quit settling, why not just jack up the settled parts of the house with house jacks far enough to raise the footings in the sunken parts by pouring concrete or putting wood shims on top of them?
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