Starting Off On The Right Foot(ing)

All homes sit on a footing. Not all footings were created equal. Our home's current footing is of the inferior sort  - there's a picture to prove it. All footings run around the perimeter of a home. Newer ones are made of concrete with steel (rebar) embedded. If you reside in a very old home, this may not be the case. Your house may be perched upon a brick foundation with a beach sand mortar or some other type of a footing which is no longer deemed safe. Inferior footings cause greater settling or uneven downward or upward movement of a home. This will result in interior and exterior cracks - and that's no joke. Plus, you could have doors and windows that don't open and close properly. If you live in California or another earthquake prone state, you should be particularly concerned about having a solid footing. The footing locks the home into the earth which helps reduce movement and damage. A good footing should be coupled with proper shear walls with hold-downs. A shear wall is a wall in a home that has plywood anchored to the studs, the top plate and the foundation (from the ceiling down to the foundation). A hold-down anchors the shear walls to the foundation. After that very brief and non-technical explanation of footings and shear walls, let me tell you what I'm dealing with.

Our present footing is too narrow for the home and it's not deep enough. We're digging underneath the existing footing without destroying it. This saves money and time. Then we're pouring a wider and deeper concrete footing with rebar. This has to be done in sections and we'll install lots of hold-downs and shear walls around the house in the process. In our case, the hold downs will anchor our shear wall to both the existing and new footings.