Foundation repair in Salinas CA - a fix sized to what your house actually needs

Most calls start with a crack in a wall, floor or ceiling, a floor that's begun to slope, or a door or window that sticks or shows a new gap around its frame, and any of those can point to the foundation. The price moves with how much support your house needs, how deep we have to dig and how easy the footings are to reach. The schedule turns mostly on which method the job calls for and whether a permit is involved. The estimate lists the work, the materials and the reason for each, so you see your own figure and can compare it fairly with other bids.

Some settling is normal, so I'd rather keep an eye on a crack with you than jump straight to digging under the house. We start by looking at where the cracks run, which doors and windows stick and how the floors sit, and then we watch whether the cracks grow, because that tells us whether the ground has stopped moving. If it has, the fix is usually smaller than people expect. If the ground is still moving, I'll say so plainly and walk you through the bigger options below. Either way, we put the most care into the support itself, since it's the part of the job nobody sees once the dirt goes back.

Foundation trouble rarely stays in the foundation. When a house moves, the chimney often moves with it, and chimney repair can follow once the support under the house is steady. Brick walls that shifted usually crack along the mortar, so we rake out the cracked joints and pack in fresh mortar, which is tuckpointing, the careful work on older brick we're best known for.

In Salinas, Salinas Permit Services reviews and issues building permits and inspects the work. I can't tell you from a photo whether your repair needs one, so we sort that out with the city before work starts. When a job does need a permit, we handle the application and the inspections and keep you posted on where it stands. State law also has cities use liquefaction zones when they issue permits. Those are the areas where strong shaking can make loose, wet ground behave like liquid. In those zones, the soil under a foundation has to be checked for stability when building for people to live in, and steps have to be taken to deal with what the check turns up. That's one more reason the ground under your house shapes the repair as much as the crack does.

We're based in Salinas and work in the cities around it, and we do the same foundation work on houses in Prunedale and Marina. Many of the homes we're called to are older, with brick steps, chimneys or block that moved along with the house, so we look at all of it before calling something a foundation problem. If your city isn't on our list, call and ask.