The Best Ways to Fix a Sinking Front Porch
In a previous article, we discussed the common concrete problems around your home. From driveways and garage floors to pool decks and patios, concrete slabs endure various types of damage that impact their performance and safety.
This page outlines the warning signs and best ways to fix a sinking porch.
How to Fix a Sinking Porch
Concrete lifting methods raise and stabilize slabs, often returning them to their original position. They involve drilling holes and injecting a specialized material beneath the concrete slab.
This material fills voids and gaps, creating a more stable, level surface. Concrete lifting repairs sinking porches, driveways, garage floors, pool decks, and other concrete surfaces. In severe cases, underpinning may be used.
There are several concrete repair techniques. The chosen method depends on the extent of the damage, the age of the home, and other factors.
2 Methods for Repairing a Sinking Porch
There are several concrete lifting and leveling methods, each addressing concrete damage differently. These repair techniques include:
1. Concrete Lifting and Leveling
Concrete lifting and leveling involves an environmentally friendly, waterproof polyurethane foam injection beneath the sinking porch slab. The lightweight foam strengthens the underlying soil, fills voids and gaps, and lifts the porch to a level position. It is less messy than traditional methods like mudjacking and repouring and cures in just 15 minutes, allowing for same-day use of the treated areas. Polyurethane foam is a minimally invasive, cost-effective concrete repair solution that delivers long-term results.
2. Underpinning
Foundation piers may be necessary in cases of severe concrete sinking, damage, or settlement. This repair involves installing helical piers beneath the porch foundation, each extending deep into the ground until they reach solid bedrock or more stable soil layers. These piers distribute weight evenly and provide strength for the affected areas.
Helical piers are used on porches because they can be installed with minimal disruption to the existing structure. They are also effective in various soil conditions, including soft or unstable ground.
Each concrete lifting method has its advantages. Contact a concrete lifting expert for an inspection to determine which is best for your sinking porch.
Warning Signs Your Sinking Porch Needs Repair
If you’re unsure whether your porch needs repair or if the damage is severe enough, watch for these warning signs:
- Gaps between the porch and the house
- Cracked slab foundation
- Sticking doors and windows
- Cracked bricks
- Steps detaching from the porch
- Water pooling near the foundation
Sinking porches worsen over time, stressing the foundation and surrounding structure and causing cracks, structural instability, and potential collapse. So, the sooner you implement repairs, the better. Contact a concrete repair expert for a free inspection and customized solutions to prevent more significant damage.
What to Do Next
Is your front porch sinking, cracked, or damaged? Regain peace of mind by contacting Groundworks for a free, no-obligation inspection. Our concrete repair experts will diagnose the problem and provide customized solutions tailored to your home’s unique needs.
Click the button below to get started!
Concrete Lifting FAQs
Once you call a Groundworks concrete repair expert, you’ll get a full understanding of what’s happening, and you can move forward in your concrete repair process. Here’s how an expert will help you with your cracked porch or patio concrete.
- More Information
To the untrained eye, all concrete and all cracks may look the same. For your everyday life, this is fine, but if you’ve just bought a home with a concrete porch or patio, this lack of knowledge may quickly develop into a problem for your entire home. After all, if you don’t spot the early warning signs of soil erosion or tree root problems that crop up with your porch or patio, you can easily overlook similar cracks in your foundation, basement, or crawl space.
Because of this, Groundworks concrete repair experts can give you peace of mind with more information. They offer a free inspection that not only assesses any complications with your patio’s concrete but also early warning signs of damage to the structure of your main home. While you may think tree roots bothering your front porch is a small issue, an expert can quickly spot if that’s about to become a huge problem for your foundation as well.
- A Variety of Options to Fix the Problem
After that, an expert will provide you with a range of options to choose from. These will be customized to your exact problem, your area, and any future complications that may arise. For example, you may need to invest in foam lifting, weather-resistant seals, or even ways to stabilize the soil around your patio without damaging your landscaping.
After the no-obligation quote, you can think over the best option for you and let the expert get to work. Depending on how extreme the damage is, an expert can return your patio to its former glory in under an hour. If you need something more extreme, it’s possible to fix all the damage in a single day. That’s backed up with a quality guarantee, so that any updates or tweaks needed to make sure the solution is long-lasting won’t affect your budget.
Every concrete patio or porch crack is a problem because it indicates there’s something wrong. Your concrete patio or porch can’t crack for absolutely no reason, which means there’s almost certainly something going on. Here’s what you can do when you address your concrete patio and porch cracks immediately.
- Finding the Underlying Problem
The first step should not be to fill or repair the cracks. Instead, you need to locate the real issue that’s causing this instability and damage in your porch or patio. This may involve checking for soil erosion, thinking about sudden weather changes that happened in the last few days, or checking if the surrounding trees or bushes may be disrupting the area.
Once you have a list of possible causes, you can then work on bringing those issues to a halt. Maybe the tree roots need to be removed, perhaps the patio or porch should be reinforced, or you might have to stabilize the soil underneath the entire area. If you just try to patch the damage first, then you’ll find these solutions only last a short while before they crack as well.
- Addressing and Fixing the Problem
Once you’ve found and addressed the problem, now you can move on to repairing the surface-level damage. If the soil was unstable, for example, a professional can use a foam solution that lifts the concrete off that shifting soil. This gives it a more stable base, where old slabs can be filled in and secured in place. Likewise, new slabs can be laid down and you don’t have to worry about these cracking for the same reasons as the old ones.
If the issue was weather changes, then a professional can use high-grade sealants that are compatible with cement and fill in any cracks. This sealant will be mixed to resist the weather changes, so the next heat wave or cold snap won’t leave you with cracks all over again.
A concrete patch or caulk might be something that you’re thinking about, especially if you feel like it’s too much effort to fix the underlying problem. The thing is, putting a patch over these cracks or just caulking over them won’t work. At the most, you’re postponing the issue.
- Not Addressing the Real Problem
Cracks in your patio or porch are a tripping hazard and an ugly flaw. If you want to get rid of the aesthetic disaster or make sure that feet won’t get caught up in the damage, you can just patch the cracks. Caulking will be a cheap way to fill them in, and concrete patches will last longer. However, this won’t fix the real problem; DIY will be more costly in the long-run, you’ll be causing very real damage to your porch or patio, and you’ll only hide the damage for a couple of days or weeks at the most.
That’s because your porch or patio isn’t cracking for no reason. If the slabs aren’t properly supported, or the cement was poured badly, then the cracks will just get longer and deeper. This will make your DIY solution null and void, as the concrete will develop additional cracks that are even more dangerous than the originals. You will eventually need a professional solution, and if you keep applying more patchwork in the meantime, the slab may need a full replacement by the end.
- Only a Fix for a Few Months
As the caulk or concrete patch dries, it will only maintain its veneer for a few months at the most before it starts to crack again from the underlying issue. Because of this, even your DIY solution itself will need repairs. Weather changes, the expanding cracks, and the soil shifting may leave your patches to develop cracks. The caulking will even shrivel and fall into the cracks, making the low-cost fix completely useless.
Worse yet, if you were trying to save the aesthetic appeal of your patio or porch, these fixes will quickly become an eyesore. Patches will leave marks on your existing concrete slabs, drawing your eye to the damage and revealing the DIY solutions as a poor fix. When a professional does intercede to fix the main problem, they will then need to cover up or remove your DIY fixes, which may take additional labor and drive up the cost. It’s far better to contact a professional at the beginning.
Shaye Glisson
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Disclaimer: “Concrete leveling” means the process by which cracked, uneven concrete is stabilized, and in many cases lifted, by means of PolyRenewal™ polyurethane foam. Groundworks does not guarantee that PolyRenewal™ can make your concrete perfectly level.