Foundation Problems

Fondex can give you the knowledge to secure your home for the future. By giving you the information to identify whether your property has foundation problems we enable you to help protect your home for years to come.

Symptoms
Cracked walls, cracked floors, sticking windows and doors, leaking ceiling or roof and outside mildew areas can all be symptoms of movement in your building’s foundations. Often, poor expansion joint design, masonry shrinkage, unstable soil conditions or poorly constructed foundations are the cause of the problems. Much of the time it is more than just one of these affecting your building, resulting in structural weakness. In this section we help you identify the symptoms of failing foundations before it’s too late. More Symptoms Internal / External
What causes Foundation Problems?
Foundation Movement
This typically results in stepped cracking of brickwork, often emanating from the corners of windows and doors or horizontal cracks along the brick mortar. Another area of cracking occurs when extensions are built and the new brick work is NOT toothed into the original brickwork correctly, resulting in no continuity of footing reinforcement, resulting in foundation failure and cracking walls.
Support Structure Deflection
Masonry over openings (windows, doors etc) is usually supported by steel or concrete beams which carry the load to the ground via the brick or concrete. Any movement of these support structures will lead to structure weakness and cracking of masonry brickwork, thereby requiring underpinning, soil stabilisation or hydraulic jacking.
Thermal movement and moisture uptake or loss
Clay bricks take up moisture and grow in size, whereas silica and concrete bricks lose moisture and shrink overtime, thus the mortar between the horizontal and vertical joints shrinks or grows, and if expansion joints have been incorrectly designed cosmetic and structural cracks will appear.
Site Excavation
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