Base­ment Foun­da­tion Cracks: Fix Them Prompt­ly in Kenil­worth IL 60043

Sep 20, 2014 • By Matthew Stock.

Kenil­worth IL was dif­fer­ent from oth­er towns right from the start.

Unlike oth­er North Shore sub­urbs that grew organ­i­cal­ly from small begin­nings around a uni­ver­si­ty or rail­road sta­tion, Kenil­worth was a com­plete­ly planned com­mu­ni­ty that sprang from the imag­i­na­tion and for­tune of one man, Joseph Sears.

Sears, a Chica­go man­u­fac­tur­er, bought 223 acres on the North Shore in 1889 that rep­re­sent­ed the last unde­vel­oped acreage in the area. A trip to Eng­land had inspired him to cre­ate a planned com­mu­ni­ty with large lots and high stan­dards of home con­struc­tion and also pro­vid­ed the name for the new town after a vil­lage that had impressed Sears.

Kenil­worth today is one of the wealth­i­est sub­urbs in the Unit­ed States and has remained small and exclu­sive, with few­er than 3,000 res­i­dents. The homes, many of which were designed by promi­nent archi­tects of Sears’ day, includ­ing pro­tégés of Frank Lloyd Wright, are large, beau­ti­ful and well-main­tained but many of the 800 home­own­ers that make up the Kenil­worth com­mu­ni­ty are deal­ing with main­te­nance and repair issues, par­tic­u­lar­ly those that are com­mon in old­er homes.

In fact, many Kenil­worth home­own­ers have dis­cov­ered base­ment foun­da­tion cracks in their homes and need to repair them.

Diag­nos­ing and Fix­ing Base­ment Foun­da­tion Cracks in kenil­worth Homes

Base­ment foun­da­tion cracks in Kenil­worth homes, just as in homes every­where, fall into one of two cat­e­gories: struc­tur­al and non-structural.

Struc­tur­al cracks are ones that indi­cate move­ment of foun­da­tion walls suf­fi­cient to com­pro­mise the sta­bil­i­ty of the foun­da­tion and the home it sup­ports. They are wide cracks, more than 1÷8”, and gen­er­al­ly occur in a pat­tern. In poured con­crete walls, a ver­ti­cal crack usu­al­ly appears near the mid­dle of the wall with angled cracks across the upper cor­ners. Invis­i­ble from the inside are two more ver­ti­cal cracks at the cor­ners where the wall has begun to sep­a­rate from the adja­cent ones.

In mason­ry walls, cracks usu­al­ly run in stairstep pat­terns along mor­tar joints and lead to a bulging or bowed area in the cen­ter of the wall.

Non-struc­tur­al cracks are small­er, less than 1÷8”, and do not indi­cate struc­tur­al dam­age but are very com­mon sources of water that seeps into the base­ment. They gen­er­al­ly do not appear in a pat­tern but may occur any­where, often ema­nat­ing from doors, win­dows and oth­er open­ings in the foun­da­tion wall. 

The approach to repair­ing a struc­tur­al crack depends on whether the crack is a sign of walls that have moved or rotat­ed inward due to lat­er­al pres­sure from expan­sive soil or of a foun­da­tion that has dropped, sunk or set­tled because of des­ic­cat­ed soil that no longer sup­ports it.

Sta­bi­liz­ing a wall that has moved inward can be done with car­bon fiber strips that are epox­ied to the wall but only if the wall has moved less than 2 inch­es. Walls that have moved more than that must be sta­bi­lized by installing low-pro­file steel chan­nels to hold the wall in place. Both repairs are eas­i­ly cov­ered by fin­ish walls.

Sta­bi­liz­ing a dropped foun­da­tion is done by installing hydraulic steel piers under the foun­da­tion, lift­ing the house back to lev­el and sta­bi­liz­ing it there.

Repair­ing a non-struc­tur­al crack is much sim­pler. The best method is to inject the crack from the inside, fill­ing it with expand­ing polyurethane that seals the crack and remains flex­i­ble when cured to pre­vent minor foun­da­tion move­ment from reopen­ing the crack.

If the crack is inac­ces­si­ble from the inside, it can be repaired on the exte­ri­or by cre­at­ing an under­ground bar­ri­er against the wall with sodi­um ben­tonite clay.

A Kenil­worth home­own­er who has found base­ment foun­da­tion cracks in his or her home will need the advice and assis­tance of a foun­da­tion repair expert, base­ment water­proof­ing con­trac­tor, or both. At U.S. Water­proof­ing, our foun­da­tion repair team uses engi­neer­ing data and the lat­est repair tech­nol­o­gy to sta­bi­lize foun­da­tions per­ma­nent­ly and cost-effec­tive­ly. Our base­ment water­proof­ing experts can rely on 57 years’ expe­ri­ence in keep­ing base­ments dry and healthy with more than 300,000 sat­is­fied cus­tomers to our cred­it. Why not ask us for a free con­sul­ta­tion?

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