Foundation Repair Hereford

Located half an hour north of Baltimore, Hereford is what many would call an exurb, a community populated by a mix of long-distance commuters and people who serve the rural residents nearby along with the travelers on I-83. Out here, the houses have the room to get bigger without significantly increasing the price, but residents don’t always get the same access to utilities and other public services which city and suburb dwellers take for granted.

This can potentially lead to problems with building foundations. Building codes are minimum standards, not the best a homeowner can get, and if there’s a housing boom, many construction companies are willing to take shortcuts to keep up with demand. The added cost of transporting concrete to the exurbs can also play a factor in these sorts of decisions. As such, while foundation repair in Hereford might or might not come up often, it’s definitely something you should take seriously when you notice a crack or uneven settling.

The Trouble With Water

Water is a powerful force of nature. It can carve out massive riverbeds, wear down seaside cliffs, and it can wash away unprotected soil in a matter of days. Water is definitely not concrete’s friend, either, since it can make cracks worse over time if it gets in and it can slowly wear away at the cement that binds concrete together.

That’s why every new house and building has several different features that keep water away from the foundation. Roofs come with gutters and rain spouts that move rainfall away from the base of the building. The landscape always angles up towards the walls so rain will flow down and away. Construction workers also backfill the holes next to basement walls with gravel and sand, since clay soil tends to collect water and swell up, putting lateral earth pressure on the walls.

And because water is such a danger, every foundation repair in Hereford should always begin by making sure the foundation is safe from water damage.

The Trouble With Soil

Water isn’t the only danger to basements and foundations, although it is the one that can deal the most damage in the shortest amount of time. The ground itself can slowly move in different directions, putting pressure on building foundations that are supposed to be stable and unmoving. This is especially true for buildings on the sides of hills, where gravity is slowly moving soil from the tops of hills to their base.

This can put what’s called lateral earth pressure on basement walls, and it can cause solid walls to bend or lean to one side, and it can cause cement brick basement walls to crack along the seams. Fortunately, there are ways to fight against this pressure: you can reinforce the walls with steel or carbon fiber supports, or you can attach steel rods to anchors you place in a deep layer of soil or even bedrock.

The ground can also settle unevenly beneath the foundation, causing it to warp and crack as it moves right along with the ground underneath it. However, for a foundation repair in Hereford that deals with this problem, you can answer it with slabjacking, which involves filling the ground under the slab with a concrete grout. Otherwise, you can prop up the basement with piers, anchors that go straight down and use either bedrock or a solid layer of soil for support.

Different Solutions For Different Problems

When you’re looking at foundation repair in Hereford and beyond, you should understand that water damage and even serious cracks in a foundation don’t always call for a complete slab replacement. A professional contractor like AA Action Waterproofing can fix most problems by simply cutting out any weak and degraded concrete and filling the space back in with new, healthy concrete. The patch may turn out to be obvious, but there’s no reason why it couldn’t last for several more decades.

The only time you would need to replace the entire foundation at once would be if the concrete turned out to be crumbling altogether. And even then, the cost of the operation has gone down significantly in recent years, at least compared to the price of the house.

If you do need a foundation repair in Hereford, White Hall, Hampstead, or in any other Maryland community, you should contact AA Action Waterproofing and get yourself a free estimate. In our three decades of experience, we’ve never come across a problem we couldn’t fix. Our services include foundation repairs, basement waterproofing, mold remediation, and much more.