Midtown Memphis home with significant settlement issues being rehabbed
An old Midtown Memphis home has been rehabbed over the last year in order to become a SafeFamiles home starting this month. Towards the end of their rehabbing process, the home’s owner asked us to take a look at the settlement issues that were very apparent around and throughout the home. Upon inspection, we did find that quite a bit of work needed to be done to stabilize the home. Many of the typical signs of settlement could be found: the windows were pulling away from the brick, vertical, horizontal, and stairstep cracking was throught the brick exterior, and a significant amount of deterioration had occured at many of those points. We could also see that there had been a few attempts to patch over the exterior cracking, however, the house continued to settle making that effort futile.
Because of the amount of work needed to both stabilize AND attempt to lift back to level, the homeowner chose to simply stabilize the home and not to worry about lifting back to level. It is important to note that because the home was being rehabbed, the new interior sheetrock, flooring, etc. hide some of the aesthetic flaws that could be seen. On the exterior, they planned to repaint the brick which would hide some of the exterior flaws from settlement. Often times, homeowners do want to attempt lift, where possible, to help with those aesthetic flaws from settlement.
After our Specialist determined that push piers were the appropriate solution for this particular home, our crew was able to successfully make the home stabile. 9 push piers were installed around the home’s perimeter. Piers can solve settlement problems by transferring a structure's weight to strong, competent supporting soils at greater depth.
We did not attempt a lift back to level with this home, as it would have required approximately 3-4 more push piers in order to do so. The team leader placed the piers around the perimeter of the home, spacing them appropriately to achieve stabilization.
In this case, the homeowner is happy the home is now safe, and can used used for the SafeFamilies program in Memphis.