Foundation raising in Duluth MN - your house lifted and set down on firm support

Most calls start with an old foundation that's cracked and crumbling, or a house someone wants to keep but sit higher, and if you're building new instead, that's foundation installation. The price turns mostly on what the house sits on now, whether the old foundation can be kept, how deep the new concrete has to go and how much room we have to work around the house. The schedule turns on the permit and its inspections, the weather and curing, the days the concrete needs to gain strength before it carries a house. You get your own figure at the estimate, and I'll show you what it pays for before we start.

First I look at what your house sits on now and what shape the old foundation is in, because that tells us whether we extend it or tear it out and rebuild, and that decision shapes the rest of the job. Before anything gets poured, I also check where water runs around the house, since a new foundation with water draining toward it starts out with a problem. Then we separate the house from the foundation, lift it on hydraulic jacks and hold it on temporary supports while we dig out, form and pour what goes underneath. If the budget gets tight, I'd rather spend it on the footings, the wide base the walls stand on, and on the drainage than on anything you'll see, because you can redo a finish later and you can't easily redo what's under a house. Once the concrete has cured, we set the house down on it and clean up.

A raise usually touches the concrete around the house too. When a step, a slab or a piece of wall has to be separated from what we're keeping, our concrete cutting work makes a straight saw cut so no crack runs back into the good part, and if the higher house leaves the garage and the driveway out of line, we fix that with concrete driveway building on a packed base.

The City of Duluth requires a building permit for structural work and counts the foundation as structural, so a raise here goes through the city. Either you or the contractor doing the work can be the one who gets it, so it's worth settling which early. When we do the job, we pull the permit and book the inspections, and if you'd rather apply yourself, I'll tell you what the city will want to see from us.

The bigger local factor is frost. The state's rule for St. Louis County sets footings at least five feet deep for frost, unless an engineer who knows soil mechanics finds otherwise, so the new foundation under a Duluth house gets planned to that depth from the start. Plenty of the houses we look at here are older and sit on basements or crawlspaces, often with neighbors close by, so we plan where the jacks and supports go before anything moves. We work across Duluth and the cities around it, we plan to the same depth on jobs in Hermantown, and in Superior we check what Wisconsin asks for before we set the depth.