Foundation replacement and repair in Hoopeston, Illinois

Walk into the basement or crawl space of an older house in Hoopeston and you will often find one of three things. Fieldstone or cut limestone laid up in a soft lime mortar. Soft red brick, sometimes plastered over. Or early concrete block that went in when somebody added on or replaced a bad wall a long time ago.

All three held up for a long while. But the mortar in a stone or brick foundation was never meant to last forever. Ground water and frost work at it every year, and once the joints wash out, the stones start to shift and the wall starts to move.

Brian does both, and the first job is figuring out which one you are looking at.

Repair is for a foundation that is still mostly sound. A few loose stones, a crack in the block, joints that have gone soft in one corner. Those get fixed in place, and the rest of the wall keeps doing its job.

Replacement is for a foundation that is past that. The wall is bowing in, the stones move when you push on them, water comes through everywhere, or the house has started to settle into it. In Brian's own words, he does complete replacement of the foundation with modern materials. The old wall comes out and a new one goes in under the house.

• Foundation replacement: the whole wall, or the failed sections, taken out and rebuilt
• Foundation repair: cracks, loose stone and washed out mortar fixed in place
• Straight answer on which one your house needs

This is flat prairie country. The soil in most of Vermilion County is heavy and holds water, and a lot of farmland around town still drains through buried tile. In a wet spring the ground around a foundation stays soaked for weeks.

Then winter comes. Wet soil that freezes expands and pushes sideways on a basement wall, and water that has worked into the mortar freezes and pries the joints apart. Do that for enough winters and an old stone wall loses its grip on itself. Downspouts that dump right at the corner and ground that slopes toward the house make it worse.

Not every house in town sits on a full basement. Plenty of older places have a shallow crawl space under part of the house, a full basement under another part, and an addition on the back that went in on its own small foundation. Each of those can fail on its own schedule.

So when Brian looks at a house, he looks at all of it. A back porch or kitchen addition settling away from the main house is a foundation problem too, and it is often the easiest one to spot from the yard.

A new foundation built with modern materials is a different animal from the one that came out. It sits on a proper footing below the frost line, the wall is solid instead of a pile of stones held by soft mortar, and it can be built to deal with the water that caused the trouble in the first place.

It is a big job, and nobody should talk you into it if the wall can be repaired. But when the old foundation is gone, patching it every few years is money spent on a wall that is still failing.

If you are trying to figure out what you have, these pages will help. They cover the signs that a foundation is failing, how the repair or replace decision gets made, what old stone foundations are and how they work, and what a replacement is like while it is going on.

Then send Brian a few photos. One wide shot of each wall from inside, one of the worst spot up close, and one from outside showing the ground and the downspouts.