Drive through Highland, Queensborough or Cedar Grove and you’ll see plenty of houses sitting a couple of feet above the ground with vents or skirting along the bottom. Those are raised homes, built on piers with wood beams spanning between them and joists carrying the floor. They handle clay soil differently from a slab, and when something goes wrong, the fix is different too.
Signs from inside the house
- A floor that dips toward the center of a room or toward one wall
- Floors that bounce or creak more than they used to
- Interior doors that swing open or shut on their own
- Cracks above door frames or in plaster walls
- A musty smell coming up through floor vents or around the baseboards
What the crew does underneath
The repair depends on what failed. Sometimes piers have sunk into soft soil, and the fix is new or deeper piers. Sometimes the piers are fine but the wood shims stacked on top have rotted or squeezed flat, so the crew jacks the beam and resets it on steel or hardwood shims. When a beam or sill plate is rotted through, that section gets cut out and replaced. Sagging joists get a new board fastened alongside them, called sistering, or a new support beam underneath.
Crawl space repair
A lot of the damage under raised homes starts with water. Rain that runs toward the house instead of away from it collects in the crawl space and keeps the wood damp. Blocked vents don’t help. Crawl space repair can mean clearing and adding vents, laying a vapor barrier on the dirt, adding a sump or drain, or fully sealing the space. Before paying for encapsulation, ask the company to show you photos of the moisture or rot they found.
Leveling a raised house without changing anything underneath is covered on the house leveling page. If water is getting under the house, start with drainage correction.