The joy of homeownership

Nothing about Gwen this time, sorry.

We had a bit of a shock early this winter when all of a sudden our front door wouldn't open anymore.  We also saw a bunch of cracks in the walls where there weren't any before, and Gwen's balls would roll to the South side of the room without any help from her.  I saw giant dollar signs falling into a black hole; I got it checked out and it turned out our house had settled pretty badly on the south and west sides.  The hole got bigger.  And blacker.

Given that this is a very popular malady around here given the dry weather earlier, it took a while before we could get started.  It all got wrapped up last week, finally.  Here's some pics of the process:

My side of the driveway.  There are two very deep holes, one under the plywood and one right in the middle of the driveway.

More of the same.  Walking on that plywood was quite freaky, since it was just barely on the lip of the garage.

Trying to look down the hole in the middle of the driveway.

What we have supporting the driveway is a two foot diameter column about 6 feet deep right in the middle.  That's it.  Between the edges of the garage and that pole, there is a short, narrow wall that drops down about 2 feet into the dirt.  They tell me that there's supposed to be a wider, deeper wall that plunges down 4 feet or so that actually supports the entire front edge of the garage.  So when the ground dried up, this column acted as a punch and just drove down into the ground rather than support the house.

The hole in the garage.  Two pylons were added, one on each wall.

Notice that the stuff dug out of the hole in the garage is sand.  Sand is not supposed to be under a garage.  The contractors believe that this house was not built to code, even by 1964 standards.  Before laying new concrete, they laid down a layer of gravel, which apparently is the correct thing to do.

And some poor guy had to jackhammer out the concrete and dig the hole by hand.  With a shovel that probably got very heavy as the day wore on.

Dirt!

"Free" brush removal.  I'm sure I could have found cheaper options though...

Hole on the North wall.

Note the tubing along the North side.  Between our house and the one on the North, we have a swamp every time it rains.  We attempted to mitigate it by dumping our gutter out towards the street, but that tube was just ugly, difficult to mow around, etc.  We contracted the company to install a drainage system that would take our gutters along that side plus the sump pump and discharge it on the other side of the sidewalk.  We'll see how it works next time it rains.

The giant ditch along the front of the house. That's a six foot ladder in there.

This is the "mistake".  The ditch was supposed to be on the North side of the house, but this is, in fact, not the North side of the house.  And no, Kansas isn't sloped quite as much as the picture shows.  I'm just terrible at photography.

Pylons being driven under the front stairs.

 The front stairs were just floating on top of the ground, there was no support under them whatsoever.

Pylons in the front of the house, from the porch.

The process they used is to drive a pylon into the ground until it hits bedrock.  Once all of them are installed, they lift the house using hydraulics, while using a sensitive barometer inside the house to make sure it's all being raised to the same degree.  If all the dirt from under the house was removed (except the North and East sides, where there is only 1 pylon), it would be perfectly content to stand on stilts.  Impressive technology.

The first pylon was driven 17 feet deep.  I didn't ask how deep the others went.

And now, for the wrap-up:

New concrete in the garage.

The unpatched holes in the driveway.  Since the driveway is coming out soon, I told them not to bother patching these. Wish I had, now.  It's hard to drive over in a car with such tiny wheels.

 You can't see it super well, but that tree on the left is a huge portion of the reason the house settled.  As they were digging around the house, they were cutting through tree roots the diameter of my thigh.  During the drought, the tree sucked up as much water as it could, even from around the house.

Even more fun, that tree is demolishing the driveway.  We've been here for 5 years, and the driveway around there went from being a little elevated to being a 6 inch drop.  Jenni has to drive around it to get in and out of the garage.  So the next step, very soon, is to have the tree removed and the driveway completely replaced.  More dollar signs and black holes.  However, I console myself knowing that we would never be able to sell the house without making these repairs anyway.

Front of the house.

Final egress of our new drainage system.

Beginning of the new drainage system. Note how the drainpipe from the back drops into the ground.

Another angle of the lawn, with the front drainpipe dropping into the ground.

"The mistake", filled in.  It could have turned out worse...

Front of the house from the porch.

Overall, the house was lifted about 2 inches or so, which apparently was a pretty decent amount.  More importantly, it's not going anywhere in the near future.

Now I need to get some seed and try to make the front lawn look decent again.  Yay.