Heirloom Home's Foundation to Be Stabilized for the Future, Concord, NH

Tuesday, April 25th, 2023 by Travis Kellogg

Challenge

The owner of this family heirloom home in Concord, New Hampshire, had lived in their home since they were born. The home was built in the 1860s. Since the owner could remember they have noticed sticking doors and windows in the home, which is a telltale sign of foundation damage. The owner doesn't live in the home anymore by uses it as a rental home and would like to preserve the estate for generations to come. To ensure that the home will be preserved, the homeowners decided to call EFS for a free inspection of their foundation. Our Design Specialist Liam visited the home and inspected the entire foundation and looked for potentially concerning issues that could affect the foundation or internal structure of the home.

Solution

After Liam's inspection, he recommended rebuilding 2 sections of the home's foundation wall with a new masonry block wall, installing 4 EZ post supports under the front porch roof, and installing 26 SmartJacks with 112' of Supplemental Beam to support the floor system of the home.

Our Installation team will first install the SmartJacks and Supplemental Beams into the basement to strengthen the floor system of the home. To begin setting up for the SmartJacks the team first had to create footings for the SmartJacks. The floors in the basement were half concrete and half dirt so the team had to use two different methods of installing the footing of the SmartJacks. The two processes were similar but slightly different. On the dirt floor, the team would create a hole that would fit our big plate footing. Next, the team would install rebar, engineered fill, and then concrete to create a strong footing. Once the concrete was cured the team installed our big plate over the concrete and installed the SmartJack to the floor system of the home. For installing the footing on the concrete slab portion of the basement the only differences were chipping out a section of concrete before digging out where we would install the big plate, and then after the plate was installed the team would pour concrete over the footing to lock it in place. After all of the SmartJacks were installed and the supplemental beams were in place the team used the adjustable top bracket of the support to lift and add stability to the floor system of the home.

After the SJs were installed, the team moved on to prepping the 2 sections of the foundation walls to be rebuilt with Masonry Block. The first step was to remove dirt from against the foundation wall to the footing so the team could set up temporary supports and remove the foundation wall. After the section of the wall was removed, the team poured a new concrete footing and waited for it to cure.

While waiting for the new footing to cure, our team began to install our EZ posts to support the covered porch. The team used a hydraulic drive head to twist our EZ post down into the soil until we reached our PSI goal. Once each post was driven down to the correct pressure the team then attached our porch bracket and installed a 6x6 pt post up to the covered porch we were supporting.

Once the footing was cured our Lead Mason Nick would lay his starter blocks and then start building up the wall to the rim joist. Once the wall was built to the rim joist the team installed Sentry Seal to cover the outside wall of the foundation to guard against water seepage. After the Sentry Seal was installed the team then removed the temporary support and backfilled the dirt against the foundation wall.

The homeowner was very impressed with EFS. The installation of everything went smoothly and the home is now structurally sound.