Digging a basement and leveling floors
I have a question thats related to Rebeccah’s thread about digging a basement.
My wife and I have looked at an old house in a small town in nothern Wisconsin. Property values in the area have grown dramatically in the past years. The house is a two story house sitting on a nice lot. The walls, ceilings and roof seem very solid. However, there are serious problems in the basement and with the sills. The price of the property reflects the need for serious work.
One very noticeable problem in the house is the floors. They are pretty wavy, sagged in places and raising up where there is a load bearing wall beneath them in the basement. A couple screwjacks have been added to shore things up, but they too seem to have added a few bumps. I have read a lot about repairing wood joists and floors, and how one might approach repairing the basement walls and sills. I am wondering about once the walls and sills have been fixed and you set the house back down a level foundation, what’s reasonable to expect from the floors? Will the floors begin to straigthen out? Can we expect that the level, solid foundation will make a significant difference? Or would we just have a nice basement with our wavy floors? Anyone have any experience or perspectives to share?
Replies
I once did some trim work (baseboard and such) on a couple early 1900's houses that had been jacked up and retro fitted with new foundations. It was actually quite a large projected; about 20 houses on a whole city Block in downtown Vancouver BC. it was actually quite amazing to see; there would be about 6 houses or so in a row, sitting up in the air on shoring while the foundation work was being done.
anyways, back to the part that relates to you. Although they had gone to great lenghs to place new foundations, when it came to doing the baseboard I remember there were still some pretty fair slopes and sags in some of the floors.
with old houses you will never get it perfect. Hey even new houses will have tolerances. It will really depend on the house, just how bad it is, and what you're able to do with it. surely you will be able to make some great improvements but don't expect to get it perfect. realize that it is an old house and get it as good as you can get.
shoe molding is not a new product, it has been around for ages. with some of todays floors you can run nice baseboard with little probelms. But back in the day they needed something to accomodate wavy floors. hence large baseboard and shoe molding. which is something I'd probably plan on
alrighty then,Thanks for your feedback. At some moments thinking about jacking up a house to put in a new foundation seems pretty nuts. And sometimes it seems like it could be great fun to see what happens. No matter how we cut it, it would be expensive and a big project. We just want to make an informed decision. And we will leave any jacking to trained professionals.