If you’re looking to build a home that will last for years, and last in good condition, for that matter, you’ll want to invest in your foundation. First of all, you’ll want to make sure that you choose the right kind of foundation for your property. The ideal foundation will vary from location to location. If the soil quality is poor and porous and prone to issues with erosion, you should choose a slab foundation, one of the most popular types. Other highly used varieties of foundation include the basement foundation as well as the crawl space foundation. If the soil quality is right, the latter two foundations can be great for getting some extra space in your home, be it living space or really just some additional storage space.
In addition to picking the right type of foundation, investing enough money into your foundation at the time that it is created is something of a considerable importance as well. For instance, you can invest up to 15% in your foundation – and it will pay off well indeed. At the very, very least, you should invest at least 8% of your home’s total projected cost into the foundation and the foundation alone, as this will help to ensure that the foundation is high enough in quality to withstand the coming years.
In addition to this, regular foundation inspection is a must. Ideally, you should at least have this done before selling the home or after two decades of living there, whichever comes first. If any issues are detected, you can call foundation repair contractors to remedy it. For matters of foundation repair, something like a house leveling process is likely to occur. Other issues surrounding foundation repair might also occur, which is why it’s important to have a professional foundation repair contractor come inspect your foundation if you think foundation repair might be necessary.
Of course, there are steps that can be taken to mitigate the need for any kind of foundation repair in the first place. For instance, you can make sure that your gutters are placed safely on your walls. Ideally, they will be placed so that they divert water away from your home by at least ten feet. This will help to reduce the chances of any water damage occurring to your home. It will also be important to stay on top of the cleaning of your gutters, something that far too many people forget about. Backed up gutters can actually lead to a number of different issues, making it more important than ever to clean them regularly.
Proper gardening measures should also be taken so as to ensure that your garden does not end up interfering with your foundation, something that would certainly be less than ideal in a number of different ways. For one, making sure that you keep your plants planted at least two feet from the foundation is critical, as too is making sure that they are not planted too deeply. This will prevent any of the water that you use to feed your plants from interfering with your foundation, something that can quite effectively prevent any need for foundation repair.
If you have a basement foundation, you will also have to guard against flooding and the foundation repair that that would necessitate. After all, basement flooding is incredibly common indeed, with more than 95% (around 98%, to be just a bit more exact) of all basements flooding at some point in time or another. After all, up to 14,000 people experience some kind of emergency linked to water damage on a daily basis. And more than a full 35% (around 37%, to again just be a bit more exact) of all home owners having experienced some type of water damage at some point in time or another.
If need be, foundation repair will help to get your foundation back in good shape. Foundation repair services can be obtained from foundation contractors all throughout the country. The average foundation contractor is someone who works to make sure that any issues with the foundation are detected and then fixed in as prompt of a time period as is possible, something that can be critical in preventing the problem from worsening.