I’m buying an old craftsman style house built near a lake in the early 1930’s. The house is built on a pier foundation and over time the piers have settled at different rates leaving the floor a wavy mess. Any recommendations on how to flatten and straighten this beast?
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Leveling up an old house is certainly doable. It can be a moderate to advanced DIY project.
First, how much room do you have in the crawl space? This job means spending a lot of time down there. Clear the crud out so you can crawl to all the piers and posts. Draw a sketch of the crawl space with the locations of all the piers. Then buy or rent a laser level, and set it up near the middle of the crawl space in such a way that you can hit all the posts with it. Crawl to each one with your drawing, a pencil, and tape measure. Mark your laser level line on each post, and on the drawing note the distance from that mark to the bottom of the sub floor. Don't measure to the girders or bottoms of the joists, because their width can vary in a building this old. Get all your stuff out of the crawl space and get cleaned up. On the drawing, measure and sketch in where the interior walls are relative to the piers and posts.
Now you need to spend a bunch of time studying the drawing and the numbers on it to get a real good idea of what you have, and deciding what you want to do with it. How much variation is there around the perimeter? Under the bearing walls? In the middles of floors? Oftenthe middles of the floors get big humps, like walking on the back of a whale, because there's less weight on the piers that only support a little floor than there is on the ones under bearing walls. Just straightening out those floor humps isn't so bad, but anything that involves moving walls up and down gets into potential plaster falling, doors and windows sticking or breaking, and is a bit more than anyone can advise how to do over the internet. If you do decide to go for it, be sure to get a good quality bottle jack like a Norco, not one of the third world cheapies. Bear in mind that you'll be trusting the thing to hold the house up with you under it.
-- J.S.
Check the Gallery -- I just posted some pictures of my crawl space work under "New Footing in the Middle of the House"
-- J.S.