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Foundation Repair

Understanding Foundation Settlement: Causes, Signs, and Solutions

By September 25, 2024October 30th, 2024No Comments

Whether you work from home or commute to the office daily, you want to return to a safe and calming space that feels like “home, sweet home.” Your home reflects your style, from the colors on the walls to the arrangement of your furniture. However, beneath all the design choices lies a crucial element that ensures both safety and stability: the foundation. Ensuring proper foundation settlement is essential to maintaining the integrity of your home and preserving its comfort and value — and that’s where R&R Foundation Specialist, your regional foundation expert, comes in. 

While foundations are built to last, they can occasionally settle, causing significant structural damage. The health of your home’s foundation is absolutely crucial to the structure, integrity, and preservation of your home. Although you can take preventative measures to reinforce or stabilize the foundation, the primary causes of foundation settlement are out of your control, and foundation repair services may be necessary. 

What is Foundation Settlement?

Foundation settlement, also known as subsidence or foundation sinking, is a condition where a building’s foundation, the part of a structure that supports and distributes its weight to the underlying soil, moves or sinks downward relative to its original position. This movement can result in an uneven or unstable foundation, leading to structural problems in the building.

All buildings, including both residential and commercial, experience some settling within the years following original construction. This natural phenomenon is usually harmless when the settling is uniform across the building’s foundation, or through all of its pier supports. However, when one section of the structure settles at a faster rate than other sections, it can lead to major structural damage to the entire building. This is called differential settlement.

There are different types of foundation settlement that may impact your home. The two most common types of settlement are Differential Settlement and Uniform Settlement.

  1. Differential Settlement occurs when one part of the structure’s foundation settles more, or faster, than another part. The earth’s soil is constantly shifting, expanding, and contracting irregularly, which can force the foundation built on top of the soil to subsequently shift in an uneven fashion or at various rates. This often appears as a tilting structure, which can be subtle or more dramatic, like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. 
  2. Uniform Settlement occurs when the settling, expanding, and contracting of the soil evolves in a more consistent way at a steadier pace. When a building experiences uniform settlement, there are no uneven stresses or tilting of the structure, so it is less likely to lead to damage and structural problems. 
3-types-of-Foundation-Settlement graphic

The Primary Causes of Foundation Settlement

Poor Building Site Inspection or Construction Practices

Although settlement typically derives from natural causes, carpentry or construction flaws can often be attributed to settling foundations. While this is case-by-case basis, the villain is not often the carpentry construction practice, but rather the prior evaluation and preparation of the building site, including the construction of the foundation, before the home’s construction.

Weak Soil with Low Weight-Bearing Capacity

Some soils are weak and highly compressible by nature, and buildings erected on such soils require special footings to spread the load over a wider area. This tends to be an issue about which local building architects are well familiar, and it is generally addressed during the excavation and construction of the foundation.

Poorly Compacted Soil

Building sites for commercial or residential structures often consist of land that has been artificially leveled and filled for ease of construction. When properly compacted, this filled soil can provide a solid base for supporting foundations, but when not compacted, the soil may settle and compress unevenly under the foundation, leading to structural damage.

Changes in Soil Moisture

Soil that is either too dry or too wet can cause foundation settlement. When moisture builds up, soils saturate and lose their load-bearing capacity. Dry soils shrink in volume. Either situation can cause uneven settling of the foundation. Soil moisture changes can come about due to prolonged drought or by mature trees and other plantings that draw moisture from the soil. In rare instances, leaking in subfloor heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning ductwork can affect the soil moisture beneath the foundation.

Trees and Vegetation

Large trees, shrubs, and other vegetation planted along a building's foundation or close to it can gradually draw the moisture out of the soil and cause it to shrink. This situation is more common with shallow foundations than with basement-level foundations that extend down many feet. When foundation settlement begins to occur several decades after construction, the soil has likely shrunk because large trees are drying out the soil.

Soil Consolidation

The weight of a building on the underlying soil, especially fill soils that were added just prior to construction, will naturally compress the soil. Clay soils, in particular, become very dense as moisture is squeezed out. As the soil consolidates and shrinks, the foundation settles downward, a movement that can cause cracks and other structural damage.

Vibration or Seismic Events

Vibration of the soil from seismic activity, such as earthquakes, or even from nearby road traffic can cause soils to settle or shift unevenly, leading to structural damage to the building.

What are the Common Signs a Foundation May Be Damaged or Settling?

  • Cracks in the drywall or foundation
  • Cracks in bricks or concrete
  • The foundation is sinking or appearing sloped
  • Sloping and uneven floors and staircases
  • Gaps in the floor, between floorboards and baseboards or walls
  • Bowed or buckling walls
  • Windows and doors do not operate properly, such as getting stuck, not closing completely, or won’t open
  • The chimney is leaning, crumbling, or settling

What to Consider When Assessing Your Foundation

If you suspect foundation damage, ask yourself the following questions when considering next steps:

  1. Have there been any recent seismic events, such as earthquakes in your area?
  2. Has there been heavy rainfall, flash floods, or other occurrences of flooding?
  3. Is drainage running properly or have there been clogs or floods surrounding exterior drains?
  4. When was your house built and when was the last time you had the foundation expected?
  5. What kind of soil is the home built on and has the condition of the soil appeared to change?

Read more about how to best identify foundation issues and how to ask the right questions to your future foundation repair contractors.

How Can You Prevent or Repair Foundation Settlement Damage?

Some preventative measures may include enhancing the landscaping of your home to improve the route and terrain for drainage, adding or reinforcing retaining walls to address and even out different points of elevation on your property, keeping your roof updated and gutters cleaned to prevent clogging in drainage systems, reinforcing the foundation using push piers, and remediating the soil beneath the foundation by preparing pre-constructed foundations with clay-rich soils. 

However, homeowners today aren’t always able to get ahead of structural damage or control shifting soils. At R&R Foundation Specialist, we provide services that reinforce your current foundation, such as corner and crack refinement or repair, and chimney restoration with the use of carbon fiber applications. We also restore critically damaged foundations by using piers to raise and level the structure.

We work with structural engineers to develop a plan to restore your foundation using the proper piering system to support the load of your home permanently. In many cases, our solution will use a variety of pier types depending on the condition of your home, the soil under the foundation, and environmental access. 

Get your foundation inspected for damage by an expert and we’ll provide you with a free estimate. Contact our team of expert foundation repair specialists today!

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