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

Floors running away from level toward one wall, cracks opening above the doors, a door that stopped closing properly last winter. On the raised houses through San Marco the load runs down through posts and piers into sand, and where that sand was never compacted it keeps giving way slowly for decades.

What we do depends how the house is built. On a raised house, underpinning means new steel supports turned down until they reach material that carries weight, then the load transferred onto them. Near the river the depth can run to twenty feet or more before anything holds. On the slab houses further out it is the same principle, with the supports taken down to the footing instead of the beam.

None of it dries the ground out. If a downspout or the grade is still putting water under that corner, it happens again. Around Avondale we look at where the water goes before quoting the repair, because the two problems arrive together and fixing only the visible one buys time rather than settling it.

A smell that meets you in the hallway, humidity the air conditioning cannot bring down, insulation sagging wet between the joists. Under the older houses through Avondale the crawl space floor is open sand with the water table close beneath it, and ground like that gives off moisture without ever stopping. What comes off it has one direction to travel.

Encapsulation closes it off properly. 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 Jacksonville air brings in more moisture than it ever removes. Murray Hill crawl spaces are almost all like this. A dehumidifier sized to the space holds it there and drains itself, and sized wrong it runs all day and never catches up.

This is not a structural repair. A floor that already sags needs new supports as well as a liner. Around San Marco, where water actually stands under the house, drainage goes in first, because sealing over standing water only puts a lid on it, and the smell finds its way back within a season.

A strip of lawn still soft three days after rain, water standing under the house where it used to drain, a low corner of the yard that has become permanent. With the water table sitting where it does through Murray Hill, rain has very little room to go anywhere, so it stays and works its way under the floor.

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

Where it discharges decides whether it works at all. Ending a line in ground already saturated achieves nothing. This handles groundwater and surface water, not a crawl space damp from humid air, and on some lots regrading the yard is the cheaper answer, which we will say plainly when it is the case.

A dark band along the bottom of an exterior wall that never dries, chalky white powder that comes back after you brush it away, damp showing where the framing meets the foundation. Water is standing against the wall rather than moving past it. On the low ground near the river through San Marco that is a condition rather than an event.

The work happens on the outside face. The wall is excavated down to the footing, cleaned and coated, then a dimple-board membrane goes over the coating so any water arriving runs down the sheet instead of soaking in. A perforated drain sits at the footing in washed stone and carries it clear of the house.

This is a different job from a french drain out in the yard, and it will not dry out a crawl space that is damp from the ground beneath it. What it does is stop water reaching the foundation. Around Murray Hill it is usually the part everything else depends on, and doing it later costs more than doing it once.

A floor that runs downhill across a room, a place near the middle that gives when you walk it, doors that have started catching. Under a raised house something a few feet below has moved. In the Murray Hill houses the posts have pressed down into sand that was never compacted, the beam has sagged between them, and joists that have breathed damp air since the forties are nothing like what they were.

We pull the old posts and set adjustable steel ones on fresh concrete pads, so the load rests on concrete rather than sand. The beam comes back to level over several days instead of in an afternoon, because lifting it quickly cracks plaster upstairs. Weak joists get new lumber bolted alongside, soft ends are cut back to solid wood, and anything rotted through is replaced outright.

Lifting a floor does nothing about why it dropped. If it stays damp under there the new lumber ends up exactly like the old lumber. In the Avondale houses we look at both on one visit and say which part needs doing now.

A smell coming up through the floorboards, insulation that feels damp when you press on it, or an inspection that flagged open ground under the house. Lift that insulation in an older San Marco home and what is underneath is usually bare sand, giving off moisture without a pause, every day of the year.

Sheeting goes across the whole floor, overlapped and taped at every seam, cut around each pier and run a short way up the walls rather than stopped at the edge, because that joint is where a great deal of the moisture was escaping. Weight matters more than people expect: builder-grade poly splits the first time somebody crawls over it, so we use reinforced sheeting rated to take a knee, fastened down at the edges.

This brings the moisture down without sealing the space. Where water genuinely stands under there, encapsulation with drainage is the honest answer and we would rather say so than sell sheeting twice. In the Murray Hill houses the piers sit close enough that cutting round them takes the longest part of the day.