Foundation raising in San Gabriel CA - a house that sits level and solid again

Most calls start with something you notice inside, like a floor that rolls underfoot, a door that won't latch or a crack climbing from the corner of a window. Price and schedule turn mostly on what the house sits on. Leveling a slab house costs more than leveling one on pier and beam, because the slab has to be lifted on piers driven down to soil that can carry it, while on pier and beam the framing can be reached from the crawl space, so leveling usually means shimming or replacing piers. A full lift, brick walls and any city review before work starts all add cost or days, and you'll get your own number from me once I've seen the house.

First I come out and figure out whether your house needs leveling or a full lift onto new concrete, and whether it's brick or frame, because that changes the whole plan. Brick, stone and other masonry houses can be lifted, but masonry cracks easily when it moves unevenly, so they need more support points, more careful planning of where the weight goes and often bracing inside, and you should expect that extra work. On a leveling job the pier choice matters. Helical piers, steel shafts screwed down into the ground, work whatever the house weighs and in most soils, while push piers, which are pressed down against the house's own weight, can start lifting a light house before they reach good soil, so a lighter house usually points toward helical. On a full lift the house goes up, we tear out the old foundation and pour the new one, and then the house is set back down on it. The state's building moving license covers raising, lowering and underpinning a house and its foundation, but not repairs or changes to the parts of the house that stay, so we tell you straight which parts we handle and who else needs to be on the job.

A lift usually touches the concrete around the house too. If a walk or patio is tied into the foundation, concrete cutting frees it with a clean saw line instead of breaking out more than we have to, and if the driveway sank along with the house, a new concrete driveway poured once the house is back down lines up with the new height.

San Gabriel City Hall takes permit applications by type of project, so what your lift or leveling job needs from the city is the city's call, and it's one of the first things we look into for your house. If equipment has to sit in the street, the city's Engineering Division issues the permit for that.

The ground here shapes the plan as well. San Gabriel and the other Los Angeles Basin cities made their own structural changes to the building code because the area sits close to seismic faults, so a new foundation here gets planned to the city's rules, not a generic drawing. Before I come out, you can type your address into the state's EQ Zapp hazard map to see whether the lot sits in a mapped earthquake hazard zone. We're based in San Gabriel and work in the cities around it across the San Gabriel Valley, and we run into the same older houses and settled floors on jobs in Alhambra and San Marino.