Foundation Repair, French Drain Installation & Crawl Space Encapsulation in Fort Myers, FL

A crack you can follow across the slab, floors that run downhill toward one wall, stucco splitting where it turns a corner. On a slab house the concrete did not shrink. The ground beneath one part of it went somewhere, and the slab came down into the space that was left.

What we do about it depends how far it has gone. Where a section has settled, underpinning is the answer: steel piers driven down through the sand until they reach something that will carry weight, then the house moved onto them. Where the slab has voids underneath but has not broken up, grout goes in underneath and lifts it back, which is the usual answer to slab settlement around McGregor. The Whiskey Creek houses from the seventies usually want piers.

Neither one dries the ground out. If a downspout, a leaking service line or the grade is still feeding water under that corner, the same thing happens again a few years on. We look at where the water goes before we quote the repair, because fixing the slab without fixing that is buying time rather than buying a repair.

A strip of lawn still soft three days after rain, water standing against the wall in the same place every storm, a fan of sand across the driveway once it dries. On the flat Whiskey Creek lots and a high water table, rain here has nowhere to be, so it sits. While it sits it is quietly moving material out from under the edge of the slab.

A drain gives it a route out. We open a trench above wherever the water keeps turning up, lay filter fabric so sand cannot choke the pipe, then perforated pipe on a steady fall packed in washed stone. Water reaches the stone, drops into the pipe and leaves. In sand the depth matters more than the length, because the pipe has to sit under the level the water actually travels at.

Where it lets go decides whether it works at all. Ending a line in ground that is already saturated achieves nothing. This handles groundwater and surface water, not a crawl space damp from humid air, and on some lots regrading is the cheaper answer. We will tell you when that is the case. Around Fort Myers Shores it more often is.

A smell that meets you in the hall, humidity the air conditioning cannot bring down, insulation sagging wet between the joists. Under the older raised houses around McGregor the crawl space floor is open sand, and open ground gives off water without stopping. What comes off it has one direction to go.

Encapsulation shuts it off. A heavy liner goes across the whole floor, up the piers and up the walls, taped at the seams and sealed over the footing so nothing gets in behind it. Vents get closed, because the air outside here carries in more moisture than it takes away. Whiskey Creek crawl spaces are nearly all like this. A dehumidifier sized to the space holds it there and drains itself. Sized wrong it runs all day and never quite catches up, which is the most common thing we find already installed.

This is not structural. A floor that already sags needs supports as well as a liner. Where water genuinely stands under the house, drainage has to go in first, because sealing over standing water only puts a lid on it and the smell comes back.

A chalky white bloom along the bottom of the wall, a stain that comes back every wet season, damp showing at the slab edge inside. Water is sitting against the foundation instead of moving past it. With the water table as high as it is around McGregor, that is most of the year rather than a few weeks of it.

Waterproofing the foundation means working on the outside face of it. The wall gets excavated down to the footing, cleaned off, and coated, then a dimple-board membrane goes over the coating so any water that arrives runs down the sheet instead of soaking in. A perforated drain sits at the footing in washed stone and takes it away from the house entirely.

This is not the same job as a french drain in the yard, and it is not a fix for a slab that has already dropped. It keeps water off the foundation. Where the ground under the slab has already washed out, that gets dealt with first and this stops it happening again around Fort Myers Shores.

A dip in the grass a few feet back from the wall, a gap opening where the cap meets the panels, a wall starting to lean out. Off McGregor Boulevard and through the canal network this is the failure that costs the most, because a seawall is not only holding water back. It is holding your yard up.

The cause is usually not the concrete, it is what is passing through it. Once a joint opens, every tide and every heavy rain pulls sand out through the gap and drops it in the water where nobody watches it go. We seal the paths first, then inject material to fill the voids that already formed behind the wall, working along it until the ground stops taking any more.

Where the wall itself has moved, tiebacks anchor it back into solid ground behind. What grout cannot do is rescue a wall that has failed structurally, and we would rather say replacement than patch it and be back in two years. Catching a washout early is the difference between those two numbers, and on the Fort Myers Shores canals we see both.

Cracks you have filled more than once that keep coming back, one corner that has carried on dropping while the rest has not shifted, doors on that side that never sit right again. A lot of low ground around Fort Myers Shores was filled before anything was built on it, and fill that was never properly compacted keeps settling for decades.

A helical pier is a steel shaft with wide plates near the bottom, turned into the ground under power rather than hammered. The useful part is the reading the machine gives while it turns: it measures the force the turning takes, and that number says how much weight the plates will hold. So the ground decides the depth, not a figure on a drawing.

Once it reaches a layer that holds, a bracket ties the footing to the shaft and that part of the house rests on steel instead of sand. Piers answer a house going down and nothing else. Around McGregor it is normal for one side to want twice the depth the other did.