If the floors in your Wichita home feel bouncy, slope toward the middle of a room, or sag where two rooms meet, the cause is almost always in the crawl space below. Interior support posts settle into the dirt floor, wood posts rot at the bottom from ground moisture, and main beams drop with them. The fix is to replace the failed supports with engineered, adjustable steel crawl supports set on properly sized concrete footings.
A traditional Wichita crawl space home is held up by a perimeter foundation wall and a series of interior support points under the main floor beam. Those interior supports were often built as wood posts on small concrete pads, or as masonry piers sitting on the dirt floor. Both work for decades. Both eventually fail.
Wood posts in a humid Wichita crawl space rot at the ground end. The rot can be hidden inside an outwardly intact post. Once the bottom is compromised, the post compresses under load and the beam above drops. Masonry piers fail by tipping when the dirt under the pad softens, or by settling straight down into clay that was never properly compacted under the pad. The result is the same: the floor above gives.
The repair is to take the load off the failing support, place an engineered concrete footing pad on competent soil at the same point, and install an adjustable steel support that carries the beam back to original elevation.
Crawl repair pairs with foundation repair when the perimeter foundation wall has also moved, and with crack injection for crawl space wall cracks. We serve Derby, Haysville, Park City, and the rest of the Wichita metro.
Wichita Foundation Pros connects homeowners with licensed, insured local foundation repair contractors. We are not the licensed contractor of record for every job.