Maintaining Your Foundation To Prevent Damage And Costly Repairs For Your Home
The foundation of your home is vulnerable to damage due to wear, water, and erosion. Therefore, you want to do routine maintenance to prevent high repair bills when your foundation becomes damaged. It is important to inspect your foundation for damage, keep drainage clean, and do repairs before problems get worse. The following maintenance tasks are some of the things you can do to prevent damage to your foundation.
Inspecting Your Foundation for Signs of Leaks, Cracks, and Erosion
Leaks are a problem that you want to look for in your foundation, especially if your home has a finished basement. The leaks can be a sign of a more serious problem, such as damage to waterproofing or cracks. Look for watermarks on foundation walls or on floors. In addition, you will want to look for obvious signs of damage due to cracks, which can be caused by settling due to soft soils and erosion or due to static water pressure from groundwater.
Improve and Maintain Drainage to Prevent Erosion and Static Water Pressure Problems
Drainage systems are an important component of foundation designs. The drainage outside of your home should minimize the amount of groundwater from runoff that filters through soil near your home's foundation. Good landscaping drainage around your home will also prevent problems with erosion that can lead to settling and costly structural damage to your home.
Update Foundation Waterproofing to Prevent Failures, Leaks and Water Damage in Your Home
You also want to regularly inspect and maintain your foundation waterproofing, especially if it has an asphalt-based sealant. To inspect your foundation waterproofing, expose a small area of your foundation below the ground level, and then look for signs of wear like dry seal coating and cracks. If the waterproofing is damaged and beginning to fail, you can update the exterior with modern systems, although this can be costly due to excavation work that will need to be done. Another option is to update the foundation with waterproofing and drainage systems inside your home.
Repairing Minor Damage and Regularly Inspecting Old Repairs for Failures That Need to Be Fixed
Often, foundation damage is minor, such as a small crack, a leak, or isolated settling problems. These problems are usually affordable repairs that you can have done if you take care of them as soon as you notice there is a problem. In addition, once you have foundation repairs done, it is important to check them regularly to ensure they are doing what they are supposed to do. If you have had foundation repairs done in the past, it is also likely that you will have to have repairs done again in the future as part of preventive maintenance that needs to be done to your foundation.
Maintaining your foundation will prevent serious problems that are costly to repair. If you need help with repairs and improvements to protect your foundation, contact a foundation repair contractor to ensure problems do not become worse and costlier to fix.
Share