Foundation raising in Sunnyvale CA - a stable house that sits closer to level

Most people call us after a floor starts sloping toward one corner, a door stops latching or a crack keeps growing from the corner of a window. The price mostly follows the kind of foundation you have, how many piers the house needs, how far it has dropped and what it takes to fix the cause. The schedule turns on the same things, plus any review the city asks for. If the job needs a permit, we handle the application and the inspections with the city and keep you informed. After the estimate visit, you get the scope and the price in writing.

I start every job by looking for what made the house move, because lifting it without fixing that only brings the problem back. I walk the outside to see where the roof and yard water ends up, look at the footing on the low side and check how far the floors have dropped. Only then do we choose how to lift. Our crew sets the shims or piers and raises the house a little at a time while we watch the doors, windows and floors inside, then backfills any digging and cleans up. Many owners would rather put the whole budget into the lift, since that's the part they can see. I'll still recommend dealing with the water or the footing first, because a house lifted over the same problem tends to settle again.

Lifting a slab house sometimes means opening the concrete beside it, so our crew handles the concrete cutting for a neat opening at each pier and patches it afterward. If your driveway or front walk dropped along with the house, we can replace it once the foundation is steady. The page on concrete driveway building explains how we prepare the ground under a new one.

Before any lifting starts, we find out whether the city needs to review the job. The city's permit center at City Hall reviews building plans, with building, fire, planning and public works engineering staff in one place. First-time applicants can call to learn the process, the documents needed and whether a project needs plan review. If it isn't clear whether your job needs a permit, we check with the permit center before we start. Houses in a Special Flood Hazard Area, the flood zones FEMA maps, have special requirements for remodeling work. If the city's Building Division deems a project there a Substantial Improvement, the whole house has to be brought up to current FEMA standards, so we raise that question with the city early when a house sits in one of those areas.

On jobs here we mostly meet single-story houses, many on slabs and some older ones on raised floors, and we often find the driveway or the side walk has dropped along with the house. We do the same work in Santa Clara and Cupertino, where the houses and the questions are much the same.