What is a Foundation?
A foundation is the structural backbone of your home—a large mass of reinforced concrete that stabilizes and elevates it above ground level. Most Bay Area homes use a perimeter foundation, often supported by central footings or piers for additional strength. Properly constructed, it protects your home from soil movement, water intrusion, and seismic activity.
Why Do You Need a Strong Foundation?
Understanding the importance of a solid foundation is crucial for the longevity of your home. Over time, water, soil settlement, and earthquakes can deteriorate concrete structures, especially older foundations that lack steel reinforcement (rebar). As they settle, cracks form, causing walls to shift, doors to stick, and floors to become uneven.
If left unaddressed, foundation issues can lead to severe water intrusion, structural instability, and skyrocketing repair costs. Acting early prevents these problems, protects your home’s value, and ensures lasting stability.
How We Reinforce Your Home’s Foundation
We handle every project with precision and care, ensuring minimal disruption to your life. Here’s how:
Conventional t-shaped foundations are often not sufficient to support homes in hillside conditions. If there is settlement but the current foundation is more modern and in decent condition, we can sometimes do a pier and grade beam repair. This consists of installing a new reinforced concrete beam next to the current foundation and attached with rebar that is epoxied to it, and then supporting the modified structure with drilled concrete piers, consisting of holes often 10’-20’ deep filled with concrete and steel. This serves to hold up the modified foundation with supports in deeper more stable soils.
Supporting additional soil on the outside. Older foundation retaining walls are generally not designed to modern engineering standards, lacking rebar and the wide footings needed for proper stability. They also lack modern drainage, and older systems are often no longer functional. The installation of new proper walls and drainage solves this problem.
Often the interior walls in the crawlspace or basement are supported with isolated piers, which have posts sitting on them supporting a beam which holds up the floors above. In older homes these piers are often in poor condition and substantially undersized. We typically replace them with new piers of 24” square or larger dimensions, with steel reinforcement and post base hardware and postcaps to provide better connections between the piers and the support beamabove.
For new residential structures or additions properly engineered walls are a must. Drainage is also critical, consisting of proper French Drains and downspout drainage. The drainage under the new interior floor slabs can be integrated with the perimeter drainage. Depending upon the elevations, new drainage can either be sloped to the street, or on down-sloped or level properties sometimes a sump pump system will be needed.
Small foundation cracks in older footings are common and are usually the result of settlement, often related to drainage issues. When they are not too large or numerous, epoxy can be used as a repair method. Steel plates bolted to the foundation are sometimes used for bigger isolated cracks. When these cracks become larger (typically greater than 3/8” or so) and they are numerous, or if there are more severe issues with settlement or rotation, replacement with a more modern foundation that is properly designed is the solution of choice.
Brick foundations generally lack stability and do not function well in a seismic event. They are not reinforced and the mortar is often in poor condition in soils exposed to moisture, causing the bricks to become loose. We generally recommend their replacement with modern engineered steel-
reinforced foundations or foundation retaining walls, along with proper drainage and basic seismic upgrades.
Alameda, Berkeley, El Cerrito, Oakland, Orinda, and Piedmont.