Foundation raising in La Palma CA - a settled house brought back toward level

Most older houses around here are a little out of level and get along fine, so a sloping floor on its own isn't a reason to lift one, and the real question is whether that slope is still changing. If it is worth raising, the price mostly turns on whether you're on a slab or over a crawl space and how many piers the house needs. The schedule turns on those same two things plus the city's permit review, and when I come out you get all of it laid out in a written estimate for your house.

We start by working out whether your house is still moving or settled long ago and stopped, because a house that quit moving decades back may not need lifting at all, while one that's moving now does. If it's worth raising, the method depends on what's under you. On a house with a crawl space, we go underneath and shim or replace the piers that hold up the floor framing. On a slab, we dig along the outside of the house, drive piers down to soil firm enough to carry the weight and lift the slab on them a little at a time while I watch the floors inside. I'll tell you up front that patching drywall, trim and paint after the lift usually isn't part of our job, so you can plan for it.

Getting to the foundation of a slab house often means going through concrete first, which is where concrete cutting comes in, so we can set piers through a patio or walk and patch it neatly afterward. Once the house is back up, the driveway can end up sitting low where it meets the garage, and some owners pair the lift with a new concrete driveway poured to match the new height.

In La Palma, the city's building and safety office requires a plan check on almost all improvement plans before it issues a permit. Its list doesn't name foundation work, so whether your lift needs a permit isn't settled until the city says so, and that's the office to call if you want to check for yourself. When a job needs a permit, we handle the application, book the inspections and tell you ahead of time if you need to be home, which helps because the city inspects Monday through Thursday, 8:30 a.m. to noon, and not on Fridays. State law also has the city use California's mapped earthquake hazard zones in permitting, and inside those zones the soil under a house people live in has to be investigated for stability, so it's worth typing your address into the state's EQ Zapp map before we plan the job.

We're based in La Palma and work the cities around it, and most of the houses we're called to are single-story homes on slabs, with some older ones over crawl spaces. It's the same mix we see raising houses in Cypress and Buena Park, so the first thing I check at the curb is which kind you have.