Q&A 8 – Common Issues We Run Into While Remodeling

Welcome back. Alex Schenkar, Schenkar Construction Design Build here in Seattle. One of our Instagram followers wrote in with a great question, Alex, what is one of the common issues in existing homes today that we run into when we’re remodeling? It’s a great question and it’s bearing capacity. What does that mean? What is the condition of the existing foundation? There’s cracks, there’s differential settlement, many of the homes that turn of the century to 1930s, 40s, and 50s, have very unstable foundations that do not achieve the bearing capacity allowed in order for us to build a second story addition, and or remodel above. How do we do that? We need to augment the foundation to stabilize that. We do that by using a pipe pile method. It’s a scheduled [??? 0:41] steel pipe that we drive vertically down the face of the foundation and attach it with a bracket.

What does that do? It establishes the bearing capacity that we need to have the structural calculation in order to stabilize that building to add a second, third or fourth story. This is a critical mass situation because many of these homes do not achieve that structural engineering capacity. So, we want to take a look at that, we run our calculations with our structural engineer, we run our soil content and our research with our geotechnical engineers, we establish what that bearing capacity needs to be, and then we come up with a plan to augment the foundation in order to stabilize it. This is a pretty critical component in remodeling. It’s something that you should think about. We’re here to help you along with this process, and we can’t wait to get started. We’ll see you soon. Thanks for coming by.