What Bowed Walls Mean For Your Home
It feels like it happens overnight. One day you’re walking through the house and everything is fine, and the next day you feel like Alice in Wonderland traipsing through a crooked house. What’s going on? Evidently, your walls are starting to bow.
Walls that seem crooked are bowing, leaning, or bulging due to decreased stability, which is often a symptom of a greater problem. Your walls could be telling you:
- There have been prolonged vibrations from traffic or from machinery on the house.
- There is an increase in floor loads. This is where additional floors were added to a building, resulting in more weight on the walls than was originally intended.
- That the wall is simply not thick enough compared to how tall it is.
- That there could be issues with the external wall restraint to the floor joists, beams, and partitions.
- That there is dirt pushing against the walls, in the case of the basement.
- The foundation is shifting.
Although this type of problem can occur any time of the year, it’s quite common in the winter and early spring. Why? Because the soil exerts pressure when it is saturated and freezes, and this then pushes up against the walls of your basement and/or your foundation.
If you happen to notice bowed walls, you have a few options to take care of them. First, you can install steel beams to add extra support, although this is generally considered a temporary fix. Wall anchoring is used by many homeowners, and it involves three separate pieces that situate themselves on and around the foundation walls. However, to truly take care of the issue at its core, resolving your current bowed walls and preventing it from happening again in the future, you should first contact a professional contractor. If your foundation has sustained so much damage that the your home’s walls begin to warp, then don’t just do whatever seems easiest at the time. A basement waterproofer can help transform your home into a safer place and protect your foundation and your family.
If you’ve noticed bowed walls in your home, you can get a free quote from AA Action Waterproofing today. Call us to figure out how we can help waterproof your basement and fix your foundation issues. 888-922-5517