Diagnosing Structural Problems

so here we are taking a look at a foundation problem on a property in Lincoln Nebraska this is a former military owned military housing and it's now owned by the housing authority in Lincoln and there's a lot of damage in this neighborhood this particular property has pretty significant damage both from settlement and bowing walls want to walk you through and show you exactly how we diagnose this and what our solution is for the repair so when I walk up to a house like this oftentimes I'm taking note of exactly what I can see that's obvious this particular property has cracks that are caulked like this one really they're almost all all around as I walk around I'm seeing that horizontal crack that's that's pretty indicative of the wall moving I'm seeing a lot of vertical cracks as well that's fairly indicative of settlement and having been in these type of properties before I know that that it's fairly common for both of these to be occurring here's another diagonal crack here with clock over it so I want to do my laser work out here i also want to do it on the inside i want to check doors and windows floors thing because i think there's probably quite a bit going on here okay so now we're outside and I've got my laser set up here I'd like to set it up on a corner if I can that way I can take measurements down two sides of the house in this case we have a brick facing on the house so it's going to be really easy to check check this house out and see where we are off of a mortar joint that's definitely going to be your most common is either brick or block if you're going to be using laser on the outside so right now I've got the laser set up where it's right on the corner I'm going to go ahead an do some measurements from the corner down this way I'm gonna do from the corner down this way and we're gonna see what we've got so here I'm at the corner I've got my dot right here and i am using the single dot mode with the laser because I'm outdoors and there's a lot more light it's a lot harder to see this when it's in 30 and 60 degree mode so I'm on the single dot mode so myself and the customer can both see it all so I'm going to go ahead just measure off of either the top or the bottom of one of the bricks like we did off the block back in the basement and in this case off of this top of this brick i'm at about three and a sixteenth 23 and and eight and with this laser i am going to use the remote you have to point the laser at the you have to point the remote at the laser and as i do that i'm going to be able to move the laser on down the wall and i usually like to go about every six or eight feet with my measurements so i'll just walk over here and in this case i'm at about two and seven-eighths and now you can actually see where my laser is actually going up onto the next brick so I'm definitely getting some movement here and now at this point I'm at two and a half inches so we definitely have some significant movement I'm going to continue to do this around the rest of the house and identify exactly what we've got going on so when we're out diagnosing foundation problems one of the things we're looking for is cracking patterns damage to foundations and there's actually a type of crack that it's probably one of the most commonly misdiagnosed I hear this from sales people all the time and we're actually looking at one of those cracks right now we have a horizontal crack running on the exterior brick here and I have people especially if there's much of a gap here at all I have people diagnosed this as a settlement problem quite regularly and obviously if we're running a laser along the brick and and there's a difference in elevation then we may have appearing problem but this particular crack is a clear sign of a Boeing wall and so we don't want to miss diagnose that even if we have a settlement issue we also have something going on here with the wall so what's actually happening is this wall whether it's block or poured is actually leaning in at the top and as it leans in at the top it's pulling the framing of the house with it and as it does that it creates this crap right here so it's really important that we don't miss this because putting in peers is not going to solve this problem what we need to do is we need to stop this wall from tipping into the top and bowing in in the middle whether we're using a Geo lock anchor power brace those are going to be your best options for this type of problem here in the basement we've got a wall that's bowing in pretty significantly we've got some beams here that have been here for a long time and talking with the homeowner it sounds like they've been here at least 30 years probably longer and they were done by someone that you know obviously was trying to stop the wall from coming in there's a few things I would have done differently one you can see here they cut a lot of the beam right where it's supported at the top and so there's not a lot of a lot of beef in the in the steel up here and they they poured into the Kyrie down here they did a you know a pretty mediocre job in that and in this case the homeowner wants the once the wall straight they want us to avoid damage were we're going to make it clear that without excavating and straightening this wall we're not going to get it flush but what we are going to do is we're going to do a wall anchor system here and we're going to see channel anchors to make sure that down here at the bottom this doesn't come in anymore and we're going to make it clear the customer that we can't guarantee that this inch and a half or so of deflection of the bottom is not going to go back without excavating and straightening this wall to save costs they don't want to do that but we are going to use the C channel anchor just to be safe that it doesn't get any worse and all the walls in this basement actually look about the same so we're going to be doing them all the way around all right I want to take a look at doors and windows now and the floor in the main level of this house something to keep in mind is if you don't have mortar joints to go off of if the laser is not real helpful this is going to be your primary way to check for settlement so I'm going to go ahead and look at this door here just to give you an idea when I hold the four foot level here I want to use the four footer as much as possible because it's going to give me the most indication rather than a two-footer when I put this here I'm able to see that in this four feet I've probably got a little more than a quarter of an inch I'm probably pushing half an inch down here on the end and so what that tells me is I've got settlement this direction and that it makes sense it's similar to what we saw in the basement it's similar to we saw outside starting to get a pretty good indication at the settlement going that direction and I'm going to check other doors and windows oftentimes you'll find that if you have a door here that's showing settlement that direction and let's say we had a door here a lot of that door won't show anything because it's actually just kind of the door itself is kind of rotating the frames not going out of square and that helps you kind of figure out to exactly what's going on so something important to keep an eye on now I said I like to use the forefoot level as much as possible which is true something though to keep in mind is I want to have my two foot level with me because sometimes when you're in hallways and tight spaces you can't fit the four foot level you still want to use it you still want to show the customer exactly what's going on so I like to have both the two foot level and the four foot level so I can give my customer and idea what's going on everywhere in their house so at the end of the day they can make an informed decision I'm actually out in the backyard here and you can see we have a patio that's in pretty good shape here and they want to avoid any damage to this so what that means is a couple things one we're actually going to install our peers from the inside of this property so that we don't have to do any excavating out here we have to carry any concrete out and they wanted a sump pump and some waterproofing done on the inside anyway so we're going to go ahead and while we're removing the concrete get that taken care of and also what it means is we have to deal with if we're going to use power braces or wall anchors exactly how we're going to do it in this case they don't they want to use a geo locking Kerr because they had I beams that didn't work very well for them they really weren't installed very well I think that's the issue looks like they've been there for 30 years or so probably longer so at the same time if this is what they want that's we're going to give them so we're going to put wall anchors in something to keep an eye on on something like this is how far out you have to come in order to avoid the concrete so you know on average you know we're coming out 12 feed ish 12 13 feet and in this case the edge of the concrete is 13 feet so I'm just going to make sure that we come out at least you know 15 feet or so so I want to make sure that that's on my paper where that they're going to need at least a partial extension on the wall anchor that ends up in this area and I also want to make sure that I charge accordingly when I write my bit my proposal so after looking over this entire property inside and out it has become pretty evident that there's a problem with both Boeing walls and settlement after talking with the owner of the property what we're doing is actually installing a teen wall anchors and we're going to be removing the existing I beams that were done pretty poorly and we're also going to be installing eight peers on this side of the of the duplex and the part of the building that you didn't even see on the video is the other side of the duplex where they need a whole bunch more work on top of that so all in all we're going to probably be doing about forty thousand dollars worth of work on this property and we actually have a couple of other projects we're gonna be doing properties right here in this neighborhood all for Housing Authority which is a type of organization that it's clearly great to get a good relationship with because their work can come year after year as their budgets are approved they just continue to call back and get more work done so a good project and we look forward to doing many more for the Lincoln Housing Authority you

Channel: Perma-Seal Basement Systems

Views: 8,293

Rating: 4.909091 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: JgZGic-Ef-8

Length: 10min 15sec (615 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 10 2017