Foundation repair in Wilmington NC - the right fix for the problem you actually have

It usually starts with something you noticed, like a crack that zigzags up the brick, a door that won't latch or a floor that tips toward one corner. The price mostly turns on whether it's sunken concrete or the foundation itself, how many spots need support, how far down firm ground sits and how easy it is to get equipment to that side of the house. The schedule turns on what we find once the ground is open and on any permit or historic review your address needs. Sometimes the thing that sank is really the front walk and not the house, and that's a smaller job, often handled with our walkway construction work. Either way, I'll walk it with you and put the estimate in writing.

First I'll tell you straight whether you're looking at sunken concrete or a real foundation problem, because they're different jobs at very different prices and I don't want you paying for the wrong one. Then we look at your gutters and downspouts together, since water sitting against the house is usually part of why it settled in the first place. If the house needs support, we dig out along the footing where it's moving, set the supports, backfill and pack the soil, and slope it so water runs away from the wall. Before we leave, we clean up and I show you what we did and why.

Settling rarely stays in the foundation. A chimney on its own footing can lean or pull away from the house when the ground under it moves, and that's chimney repair we can look at on the same visit. Stair-step cracks through the mortar usually call for tuckpointing, cutting out the cracked joints and packing in fresh mortar, once the house has stopped moving so the new joints don't crack right along with the old ones.

Here's how the paperwork side works. New Hanover County Permits & Inspections issues Wilmington's building permits for construction, alterations and remodeling, and the city's building permit page names those but not foundation repair, so ask the county whether your job needs one before work starts. If your house sits in one of the city's local historic districts or overlay districts, alterations to the building need a Certificate of Appropriateness, so plan for that review as part of the job. Applications go to the county online through COAST, its permitting portal, or in person at its office. 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.

The ground changes from lot to lot. The county's soil survey describes soil types across New Hanover County, but it dates from 1977, so I treat it as background and look at what's actually under your footing. We're based in Wilmington and work across the cities around it, and we see the same mix of slab houses and crawl spaces on jobs in Myrtle Grove and Ogden.