If you’ve ever been in a house with a sagging floor, you know how annoying it can be. While sagging floors are unsightly, they can be dangerous as well. A sagging floor means that it has lost support, and it may eventually collapse into lower levels of the home. The overall structure of your home could be at risk, therefore making repairs a priority is imperative.
Before you can find sagging floor solutions, you need to know what causes it.
Since your foundation is built on soil, weak soil conditions can cause a variety of structural problems such as bowing walls, settling foundations, cracked concrete, and sagging floors. If the soil under your home is weak, the columns holding up the floor can sink. The sinking column can cause a gap to form between the top of the column and the girder it was supporting. This gap can allow the floor above the girder to sag.
There should be codes and guidelines that a contractor follows when building a home, but if a home was built prior to 1970, the rules may not have been in place. The columns in a crawl space should be spaced a certain distance apart. If the columns have too much space between them, the floors will not have the support that they need. The beam or girder supporting the floor can begin to sag between the columns, allowing the floor to sag.
If your home is not properly sealed, you may have a problem with high humidity and moisture. If you have wooden beams or floor joists, they can soften when they get wet. This causes them to bend and allows the floor above to sag. Once the floor joists can no longer strongly support the floor, it will begin to feel spongy and uneven.
Although a sagging floor is obvious, we hope to repair your home before it gets to that point. Here are some things to look out for before your floor gets worse.
Check your floor joists for wood rot or excess moisture. Do they feel soft or have mold growing on them? Do they show signs of warping or compressing? These are all indications that your floor joists may not be supporting the floor as they should. Also, while you are in your crawl space, look for gaps between the columns and the girders that hold the floor up.
Inspect your floor. Is it uneven or sloping? A simple test is to use a tennis ball and put it in the corner, it may roll to a low spot that isn’t visible to the naked eye. You can also look for gaps between the walls and the floor. While looking at your walls, look for cracks in them. The cracks could be caused by the wall being pulled down as the floor sinks.
Are your door jambs level? If the doors are sticking or you see gaps when the door is shut, they may be being pulled out of level by a sinking floor.
The steps that need to be taken to repair a sagging floor are not something the average homeowner should take on. So the question is “Can sagging floors be fixed?” The answer is most certainly. If you need to repair a sinking floor, you have to start from the bottom. You will need to get the humidity in the crawl space under control. Installing dehumidifiers and having the area encapsulated will help reduce the moisture level in your crawl space. A vapor barrier will prevent water from entering the crawl space and a dehumidifier will dry out the air that is there.
While inspecting your home to discover the cause of your sinking floor, Airlift Concrete Experts will make sure your foundation is stable. If the foundation is sinking or settling, we can install steel piers to stabilize the foundation, making your home safe and secure.
When you repair sagging floors, you will increase the value of your home and make sure that you and your family have a safe place to live. Contact a slab lifting expert in Arkansas as soon as you suspect that you have a problem. The sooner the repair is made, the less it will cost and the less amount of work it will take.
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