Foundation repair for older houses in Hoopeston

A foundation rarely fails all at once. It starts with one corner where the downspout dumps, one crack that opens a little wider each spring, a few joints that have washed out behind the water heater. Caught at that stage, it is a repair.

The hard part is that basements are dark and nobody goes looking. By the time the wall is obviously moving, the cheap fix is behind you. So if you have noticed something, that is the time to have it looked at.

On a stone foundation, repair usually means digging out the soft, failed mortar and packing the joints with new mortar, and resetting stones that have worked loose. On brick, it means replacing broken brick and repointing. On block, it can mean dealing with a crack or rebuilding a short run of wall that has pushed in.

• Repointing stone foundation joints
• Resetting loose or fallen foundation stone
• Replacing broken foundation brick
• Cracked block and short sections rebuilt
• Above grade foundation walls tuckpointed

A crack is a symptom. Something put pressure on that wall, and if nothing changes, it will crack again. Around Hoopeston the usual reasons are water and frost: roof water dumped at the corner, ground that slopes toward the house, and heavy wet soil freezing against the wall every winter.

Brian looks at what is going on outside as well as inside. Sometimes the most useful part of a foundation repair is a downspout extension and some dirt moved so the yard drains away from the house. That part costs very little and it protects the repair.

This is the repair Brian sees most on the older houses in Hoopeston. The stones themselves are usually fine. It is the mortar between them that has gone soft, washed out or fallen into the basement as sand. Left alone, the stones lose their bed and start to shift.

The fix is to rake out the failed mortar to sound material and pack the joints with new mortar that suits old stone. A soft, lime based mortar is the usual choice on old work, because a hard modern mortar does not move with the stone and can crack it. Done on the inside face and on the part of the wall you can reach outside, it buys the wall a lot more life.

If the wall is bowed in across most of its length, if the stones are loose all the way along, or if the house above has started to settle, repairing pieces of it is throwing good money after bad. That is when Brian will tell you a replacement is the honest answer, and why.

If you are on the fence, the repair or replace guide on this site goes through how that call gets made.