Sunken Floors Raised

Sunken floors are usually a sign of a loss of support in the foundation ground below a house.

This is especially prevalent in Australia at this time. Many years of too little rain – actual drought in many areas – has resulted in the drying out of foundation soils. Most of all where the soil contains an amount of reactive clay the soil has shrunk, causing all or parts of the house footings to lose support.

When this loss of support increases the house footings and floors sink. This hardly ever happens unevenly so sunken floors are usually out of level.

Then cracks in walls often appear inside and/or outside. Doors and windows can stop working properly and sometimes a gap develops between floors and skirting boards. This is because the house goes out of square.

Raising and Relevelling Sunken Floors

If the sunken ground floor is concrete, this normally means that the house is built on a concrete slab footing. Such a floor is very quickly and easily raised by the Uretek Method called ‘Slab-Lifting’: that is injecting structural resin under the slab.

The resin expands in the ground, raising the sunken floor and relevelling it.

The expansion of the resin is very powerful, quite enough to lift any house, but it is carefully controlled to ensure just the right amount of lift in every place that it is required. Control is effected by the Uretek technician who constantly monitors each injection by watching the results on his laser level receiver.

Not just concrete slabs: Uretek can raise concrete (or other) strip footings too.

Many houses have strip footings, of concrete, stone or brick. Some strip footings have a wide enough base area to allow Uretek Slab-Lifting. Where that is not possible Uretek Deep-Lifting is applied. That involves injection well down into the foundation ground to heave the ground and so raise the footing back to its correct level.

Uretek Deep-Injection can also be used – to compact foundation ground and so ensure a firmer, more stable base for a building, thus helping to preclude future problems of movement in the foundation ground. In certain ground conditions, the ground bearing capacity, or its ability to continue to support your house, can be increased by up to 500%.

Wall cracks usually close up when the sunken floor is releveled.

Doors and windows usually return to working as they should.

Gaps between floor and skirting board usually disappear.

Why have Uretek raise your sunken home?

Simple: The Uretek Method is state-of-the-art, but like the best modern solutions, it’s  SIMPLE!

• There’s minimal inconvenience to the household:
• Most jobs are done in just one day, or less.
• No one needs to move out.
• There’s no excavation, no water, no mess.
• There’s minimal, if any, disturbance to your pathways, lawns or gardens.
• The injection is done through small holes.
• It’s done from outside the house as much as possible, using small, 16mm, tubes.
• Inside injection can be done through even smaller tubes of just 6mm diameter, positioned to be completely unobtrusive, whatever the floor surface.

Compare that with the old-fashioned method of concrete underpinning, which takes many days and usually creates a huge dirty mess! Or the forcing of concrete slurry in large hoses, under hydraulic pressure, through large holes cut out of your floors… and even messier still!

How do costs compare?

 If more than just one small corner of the house needs to be raised, Uretek is usually cheaper than concrete underpinning… and Uretek is much more convenient!

On the other hand, concrete underpinning can be cheaper than Uretek where only one small corner of the house needs to be relevelled. But concrete underpinning has some other problems, including the potential for cracks to develop in many NEW places in your home, if only one part is concrete underpinned! 

For more detail see Comparisons of Methods.

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