Foundation block wall installation in Wilmington NC - a wall planned for what it carries

Most folks who call about this are putting up an addition, building on a lot or replacing a wall that's past saving, and if yours is cracked but still standing, foundation repair may be the better place to start. On a new wall, the price moves with its size in square feet and its height, how much steel goes in, whether every core gets grouted and whether a flood zone means adding openings, while the schedule mostly turns on the permit, any historic district review and the weather while we're laying block. I walk the job with you and put the estimate in writing, so you see your own number before anything starts.

Before anybody sets a block, I go over the grouting plan with you, which cores get filled and where the steel goes, and I ask early whether your home is in a flood zone, so the wall is planned for it from the start instead of changed halfway through. Then our crew lays out the wall line, sets the block course by course with full mortar joints, places the steel the plan calls for and fills the cores with grout. I'd rather explain all of that while you can still see it, because once the wall's finished, the mortar and grout inside it are the parts nobody looks at again.

The connected work usually shows up once the foundation is in. We can run walkway construction from the new addition out to the driveway, and if the yard project you've been putting off is a place to cook, our outdoor kitchen masonry gets the same block, grout and mortar care we put into a foundation.

A new foundation wall is part of building or altering a structure, and the city requires a building permit for both, issued by the New Hanover County Department of Permits & Inspections. Before you apply, the city asks you to check that what you're building meets its Land Development Code, and if your house sits in one of Wilmington's local historic or overlay districts, alterations also need a Certificate of Appropriateness, which only applies to some homes. We tell you which office handles your address and whether a historic district review could come into it, and we help you get the paperwork together before work starts.

We're based in Wilmington and work across the cities around it, including the ones on this site and plenty more. We build the same kind of block foundation for additions and new homes in Porters Neck and Carolina Beach, where houses near the water often sit up on block and the flood zone question comes up a lot.