Foundation repair in Bonita Springs FL - a house that stops settling and stays level

Most calls start with a crack that keeps getting longer, tile that's split across the room or a door that won't latch anymore. At Select Bonita Springs Masonry & Concrete we're based in Bonita Springs and work the cities around it, north into Lee County and south into Collier County, and on these jobs the price mostly comes down to how many piles your house needs, how deep the firm ground sits and how easy it is to reach the part that's dropped. The schedule turns on the permit and on what we find once the ground is open, and the written estimate I leave you with puts a real number on your house.

Settling has more than one cause, so I find out why your slab is moving before I'll talk to you about helical piles. I look at where the cracks run and which way the floor drops, because that points to a broken pipe, soft fill or something else under one corner. If it's a leak, that gets fixed first, or the piles end up holding a house over ground that keeps washing out. Once the cause is dealt with, our crew digs at each pile spot down to the footing, turns the piles into firm ground, bolts brackets to the footing and either holds the house there or lifts it back. Then we backfill, pack it down and clean up so your yard isn't left torn open. If the movement has stopped and a repair isn't worth the money, I'll tell you that instead.

When a house settles, the masonry on top of it usually shows it. Cracked mortar in a brick wall that shifted often needs tuckpointing, where we grind out the broken joints and pack in fresh mortar so water stops getting in. A chimney on the same footing can lean or pull away from the house, and chimney repair makes sense once the ground under it has stopped moving, not before.

In Bonita Springs, the City of Bonita Springs Community Development Department handles permits, and the city states that a permit is required no matter who does the work. We check with the city or county office for your address, file it ourselves, keep you posted, and start once the permit is in hand. The city also counts repairs to footings, pilings and slabs toward its substantial improvement rule, which applies when the work costs 50 percent or more of what the building was worth before work started, so a big pile job can bring the floodplain rules into play. On city permits for jobs over $5,000, a copy of a recorded NOC has to be in before the first inspection gets scheduled, and we plan the job around that step.

Most of what we see around here is slab-on-grade houses with block walls, so settling shows up as a stair-step crack in the block, a gap at the baseboard or a crack running through the tile. It often gets worse after the rainy season, when the ground under the slab has been wet for months, and we see the same pattern on jobs in Estero and Naples.