-
Structural Repairs
-
Inspections
-
Escrow Transactions
-
Clean Outs
-
Insulation
-
Vapor Barrier
-
Preventative Maintenance
-
Waterproofing
-
Rat Slabs
Crawl spaces that require minor to major structural or clean out work that can stop a house sale cold in its tracks. We offer flexible scheduling and payments to work around escrow.
Whether your house is 10 years old or over 100, the foundation is at risk of water damage, rot, cracks, and more. These problems can go unnoticed for years, increasing the likelihood of more severe issues in the future from sagging to total structural collapse.
Chumley Construction, LLC is a local full-service contractor that specializes in these hard-to-reach areas of your home. For more involved repairs, we can assist with any permitting, architectural drawings, and structural engineering required by your project.
Insulation
Insulation is critical to keep your house warm, but does no good when it’s not secured and falls down. This is commonly due to rodents or poor installation in the first place. Proper supports and regular maintenance helps insulation stay in place for the long term!
Utilities
Exposed electrical wires in crawlspaces are common safety hazards and should be secured to the under-framing of a home, not laying on the ground or have exposed splices.
Debris
It is not uncommon to find old food and beverage containers left over from previous trades that conduct work in crawlspaces. This can attract rodents and pests, and it’s just not professional to leave garbage and debris behind!
A common characteristic of old homes is the marriage between new and old materials. This is true with newer ABS plastic drain pipes and old cast iron pipes. This coupling was used but was too short and allowed leaky sewage and grey water to seep into the crawl space
Structural
Pier pads are critical to help support the floor system of your home. With poorly suited soil or installation there can be depressions and lack of good support for the very things supporting your home! Insufficient supports under your home can lead to settling, uneven floors, and other structural issues.
We encounter homeowner fixes all the time under crawl spaces. Improper brackets and fasteners, and sloppily applied adhesives are common with these efforts. Hire us to do a clean and professional job!
Poorly installed gussets, which are severely undersized in this picture, are a cause for concern in any crawlspace. As you can also see, the beam is poorly cut and not fastened to the post supporting it.
This cinder block footing creation is not code compliant, nor is the leaning 4×4 post!
Featured Project:
Puyallup Rot, Repair, & Raising
This project started off as a post real estate sale clean up and remediation project. It included all of the normal culprits: Bad debris, deteriorated vent ducting, and insect damage.
Upon my inspection I could see that there was some pretty substantial damage to the floor framing, but wouldn’t know the full extent until I started to open it up.
Unsurprisingly, insects can cause major damage to wood when left untreated for long periods of time. This home was no different. In fact, the front corner of the house was sinking by about 2”, and this was why:
The rim joist beam was completely rotten and deteriorated. The floor joists were so badly damaged that they didn’t support the exterior wall any longer, and the subfloor sheeting was practically a Rice Krispy-like texture and very brittle.
The fix required temporarily supporting the floor joists in order to do the removal and replacement work. We lifted the home, replaced the rim beam, cut back the joists, removed and replaced the plywood subfloor, and then installed the exterior finishes, which proved a final challenge to overcome.
The siding that we had to remove was nearly 100 years old and very brittle. But our solution was to use a modern product, James Hardie paneled siding, made out of fiber cement. It was almost a perfect match after we custom cut the dimensions to match what the existing siding looked like.
