Foundation Repair in Montgomery, AL

Four landscapes inside one city limit

The U.S. Geological Survey describes Montgomery County as containing parts of four Coastal Plain divisions: the river terraces, the Black Prairie, the Chunnenuggee Hills and the flood plains. Pleistocene terrace deposits from the ancestral Alabama River overlie the older rocks across the northern part of the county, so a great deal of the older city, north toward Maxwell Air Force Base and the Gunter Annex, sits on sands and gravels. Move south and west and the ground shifts into the chalk-derived clays of the Black Prairie. Head southeast and it turns sandier again as the Chunnenuggee Hills begin.

Underneath all of it, in ascending order, sit the Coker and Gordo formations of the Tuscaloosa Group, the Eutaw Formation, and then the Mooreville and Demopolis chalks, the Ripley Formation, the Prairie Bluff chalk and the Providence sand of the Selma Group. The Clayton Formation of Tertiary age crops out in a small area at the south end of the county.

Practically, this means a slab in a north Montgomery neighborhood founded on terrace sand and a slab out past the Southern Boulevard founded on prairie clay are not the same engineering problem, and they do not have the same fix. Anyone quoting from a photograph, without knowing which of the four you are standing on, is guessing.

Drainage runs uphill of the geology

The county drains north and northwest into the Alabama and Tallapoosa rivers, except for a small southern area that drains toward tributaries of the Conecuh. That matters inside the city because a lot of interior lots are flat, and flat lots in a place that averages roughly 52 inches of rain a year give water a long, slow path off the property. Whatever the soil is doing, water sitting against a footing for two days after a storm is doing its own damage on top of it.

Montgomery is also where Interstate 65 and Interstate 85 meet, and the corridors along both have seen substantial grading, fill and commercial development. Residential subdivisions built on cut-and-fill pads carry the compaction question regardless of the underlying formation.

Housing stock is as much of a variable as soil

Montgomery was founded and chartered in 1819, named for General Richard Montgomery, and its neighborhoods span two centuries of building practice. The older sections near the Alabama State Capitol, Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church and Old Alabama Town include raised construction on brick and masonry piers, stem walls, and foundations laid long before anyone thought about perimeter drains or vapor barriers. Post-war and later subdivisions out east and south are predominantly slab-on-grade. Newer construction sits on graded pads.

Each of those three groups fails differently. Raised houses give you sill rot, pier settlement and sagging joists. Mid-century slabs give you seasonal cracking and under-slab plumbing leaks. New builds give you backfill settlement and reversed grade. A contractor who leads with the same proposal for all three has not looked at your house.

What Montgomery homeowners typically call about

• Stair-step cracking in brick veneer at a corner, usually the elevation with the worst drainage
• Interior doors that bind through August and release by December
• Damp crawl spaces in older neighborhoods where grade has crept up over the decades
• Driveway and garage-slab panels that have dropped at the control joint
• Water standing along a foundation wall a day or more after a heavy rain
• Gaps opening between the ceiling and crown molding in one room only

Permits and jurisdiction

Work inside the city limits goes through the City of Montgomery. Work in unincorporated Montgomery County, which is most of the county's land area given that Montgomery and Pike Road are the only two incorporated municipalities, goes through the county. Confirm which one applies to your address before a contractor tells you no permit is needed, and confirm the residential home builder license separately with the Alabama Home Builders Licensure Board.

Comparing quotes in a market this size

Montgomery is the largest market in this service area and you will have more than one option, which is an advantage only if you compare the right things. Bottom-line numbers are close to meaningless on foundation work because two contractors can price wildly different scopes. Line up the proposals side by side and compare the pier type, the pier count, the spacing, the stated target depth or torque, the expected lift, what happens to interior finishes, and whether any drainage work is included or excluded.

Then compare the diagnosis. If one proposal says the north wall has settled three quarters of an inch because of a downspout discharging at the corner, and another simply lists a pier count, you are not looking at two prices for the same job. You are looking at one contractor who investigated and one who measured the perimeter. Ask both what they think caused it. The answer, more than the number, tells you who to hire.