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

A crack that climbs the mortar joints in steps, a floor that sits low toward one wall, doors that stopped latching on the same side of the house. On the slopes around Betton Hills the water comes off higher ground and keeps arriving at the same corner, and the ground under that corner gives up its support before the rest of it does.

What we do about it depends on how far it has gone. On a slab, supports go down to soil that will carry the weight and then get loaded to bring the corner back toward level. Under a raised house it is beam work instead, replacing timbers and footings that have rotted or sunk. Where the ground itself is the problem, drainage comes first, because anything set into ground that is still taking on water will move again.

We start by working out which one you have, whether the house sits on piers or on a Killearn Estates slab. That means levels taken through the rooms, a look underneath, and the outside grade checked to see where the water ends up. You get told what is moving, what is only cosmetic, and what the work costs before any of it starts.

A smell that meets you in the hall, air conditioning that runs and runs without the house ever feeling dry, insulation sagging wet between the joists. More people in Tallahassee call about this than about anything else we do. The ground under a raised house near Lafayette Park is open dirt, and open dirt gives off moisture the whole time. All of it has one way to go, which is up.

Encapsulation shuts that off. A heavy liner goes across the entire floor, up the piers and up the perimeter walls, taped at every seam and sealed at the top. Vents that were letting warm outside air in get closed. Where the ground is wet enough to pond, a drain and a pump go in underneath the liner first, because sealing over standing water only hides it.

The rooms above it change within a few days. The smell goes, the floors stop feeling cold and damp, and the air conditioning stops working against the crawl space. It also keeps the joists dry, which is the part that matters longest in a Betton Hills house built on piers.

On a slope the water does not have to fall on your property to become your problem. It runs down from above, reaches the first thing in its way, and stops. That is usually a wall. Through Betton Hills you see it as ground that stays soft on one side of the house for days, or water sitting at the corner where a downspout lets go.

A french drain gives it somewhere else to be. A trench is cut along the side taking the water, lined with fabric, and a perforated pipe is bedded in washed stone so silt cannot pack it solid. It is set at a depth and a fall that carries water away under its own weight, then daylighted well clear of the house, which on the wider Killearn Estates lots is easy enough to do. Downspouts get tied into it rather than left to dump at the corner.

Distance from the wall matters, and so does what the pipe is packed in. Both are the reasons the drains people dig themselves stop working after a couple of years. Done properly this is often the cheapest thing that fixes a foundation problem, because it removes the cause instead of repairing the result.

People here search for this more than in any other market we work, and there is a reason. Sealing a crawl space stops the ground from feeding it, but the air already in there still holds moisture, and every time somebody opens a hatch more comes in. In a climate this humid a sealed space can still sit high enough to grow mold on the joists, and we see it in Lafayette Park houses that were sealed properly.

A dedicated unit fixes the level rather than the source. It sits on the liner, drains to the outside or to a pump so nobody has to empty a tray, and runs on a humidistat that only calls for it when the reading climbs. It is sized to the square footage of the crawl space, not guessed at, because a unit that is too small runs constantly and never gets there.

This goes in after encapsulation, not instead of it. Sealing is what removes the water coming out of the ground; the dehumidifier holds what is left at a number that keeps wood dry. Together they are what stops the smell coming back, in Killearn Estates or anywhere else in town.

A vapor barrier covers the dirt floor and nothing else. It is the smaller version of encapsulation, and for a crawl space whose floor is dry but is still giving off moisture it is often all that is needed. The old builder-grade sheeting most Killearn Estates houses got is thin, torn by anyone who has crawled through since, and rarely covers the corners.

New sheeting goes down heavier than what came out, and in the older Betton Hills crawl spaces that means working around low clearance. It is overlapped at the seams and taped, run up the piers far enough that moisture cannot come round the edge. Anything left under there gets cleared first, and any sheeting that is already shot comes out rather than being covered over.

It is worth being honest about where the line is. A barrier handles moisture rising out of the ground, and that is all it handles. It does nothing about humid outside air coming in through open vents, and it does nothing about water that is actually running in from somewhere. If either of those is happening, this is not the job you want, and we will say so on the visit rather than take the work.

A floor that gives when you cross it, or reads downhill toward the middle of a room, is telling you about the structure underneath rather than the flooring. In the Lafayette Park houses on piers the usual causes are a beam that has taken on too much moisture over the years, a joist gone soft at the end where it sits, or a support pier that has settled into ground that got wet.

The work is straightforward once it has been looked at. Rotted joist ends are sistered or replaced, a sagging beam is picked up on new posts set on proper footings, and piers that have dropped get rebuilt on ground that will hold. Where a floor has to come back up it is jacked slowly over several visits rather than forced in one go, because forcing it cracks everything above.

It is worth dealing with the water at the same time. Wood under a house only rots because it stays damp, so repairing the timber without sorting out why it got wet puts you back here in a few years. Most of the time that means drainage outside, which on the Killearn Estates slopes is where it starts.