This post is about a DIY (Do It Yourself) repair I did on my home foundation. I had several problems with the foundation of my house after a massive storm, and then a few poor choices by the builder that made it much worse.

I’ve never built a wall before, but I can’t let it go unposted. Home repairs are often overlooked, even though many homeowners have little experience in fixing their houses themselves. In the post below, I discuss how to get your home repair project started, whether you’re an expert or a novice.

Home Repairs 101: Foundation Repair Guide

The most important part of a repair is the foundation. Any building will eventually fall down, but it’s cheaper to put up a good foundation in the first place.

But foundations can be tricky. You need to make sure they are properly prepared and then be careful not to disturb them too much. If you do, that can cause more damage than a new foundation would have cost to build in the first place.

If you want to find out how I repaired my foundation, read my blog, Home Repair 101 , or follow me on Twitter . I have a lot of pictures, and I’m sure you could learn from them.

Home repair is a series of small choices that can lead to disaster. If you want to avoid making those choices, you will have to get a lot smarter about them.

The thing to remember is that your house is only as strong as the foundation it rests on. To do a good job of foundation repair, you will need to know about foundations and how foundations work, about what materials are suitable for foundations and how they work, about the problems with each kind of foundation, and so on.

But there’s a catch. This kind of knowledge is not readily available to most homeowners. It takes time and study to find out what you need to know. And even once you know it, it can be hard to put into practice: no one wants to spend their time fixing their foundation when they could be playing golf instead.

In the early 1990s, I was working on the foundation of a large house in New York. I had spent over a year trying to get the property owners to do something about it. They had ignored my advice about how to fix it, and now it was too late. My job was to see that the foundation would not fall down in the next big storm.

On that deadline I suddenly found myself doing one of those things I love: making decisions by taking actions. I knew that if I didn’t act fast, the house would be ruined. But what could I do?

I decided to turn to soil cement, a product that had been around for nearly a hundred years, but which seemed new to me. The problem was that no one makes soil cement here anymore; it’s made in England and shipped here for repair work with a two-month lead time. On top of that, there are several kinds of soil cement and each is formulated differently. Which one should I use?

The basic concept is simple: make an artificial base layer of some kind of non-permeable material such as sand or gravel, then spread some kind of mortar on top of that. There are thousands of formulas for each concoction, many based on trade secrets bought

There is a general rule that when you buy an expensive item or service, it will cost more. This is because there are some fixed costs involved – like the cost of a building permit – that don’t vary with how much the item is worth. And there are some variable costs – like the labor to cut grass along the foundation – that can be spread out over many items, and so they don’t vary with how much those items are worth.

When you fix your foundation, you’re paying for both categories. You’re paying for the fixed costs of the foundation, like buying a permit and hiring a contractor, and for the variable costs of mowing the lawn. So if you think about it, what you really want from your foundation repair is something that eliminates both categories of cost.

We had a contractor come in to fix our foundation. He came up with a fascinating idea: The basement walls were full of water because the foundation was poorly installed, so he wanted to blast a hole through the foundation and bury a pipe beneath.

The problem was that we were not on the main sewer line but rather on a lateral drain line, which could be clogged by tree roots, but it wasn’t clogged this time. I asked him if he could try blasting through it first, and he agreed to do that.

He came back after three days, excited about what he’d found. He said we had pipes and wires running all through the basement floor, and another one leading out under the patio into the neighbor’s yard.

He said this was how they used to run telephone wires before they put underground wiring in houses. This is not how they did it anymore, but there were signs of what was probably an old telephone line running along the outer wall of the basement. He said he’d been planning on widening his blast hole to accommodate it when he found this other line instead. He was excited about getting past all this stuff and digging deeper into the ground for further evidence of phone lines or gas lines or water lines or sewer lines or whatever else might

You’d be amazed how many problems people have with their foundations. If they’re not having structural problems, they’re having plumbing or electrical problems, or they have a problem with water infiltration or a tendency to sink. And then there’s the problem of the foundation being an object of interest to burglars, who will often break in just to see what it is.

And yet these are the things people tend to do themselves. The trouble is that foundations aren’t complicated. They’re basically a matter of following instructions and doing some basic math. A lot of people think you can’t do this job right without needing a PhD in civil engineering, and so they go looking for a professional to do it for them. But that’s like hiring a plumber because your house is too complicated for you to understand the workings of your own toilet.

The basic idea behind a foundation is that you provide extra support to a building so it doesn’t settle; if you don’t have enough foundation (or if there’s more than one layer), you can end up with sagging floors and cracking walls. Most building codes now require foundations, but if you want to build on top of an existing foundation, it may be difficult to convince everyone that your new foundation is needed.

The best