Sloping Floors & Sinking Piers

Sinking floor piers don’t tend to crack masonry walls. But if your home features cracked Gyprock walls, the possibility of unevenly sinking floor piers under your home is strong. Your floor piers are sinking at different rates, forcing pressure upwards into the walls, causing cracks.

One of the easiest ways to tell if you have sinking floor piers is to place a ball or a children’s toy with wheels on the floor. Different floor piers sink at different rates causing an uneven shift throughout your entire home. If these objects happen to roll one way or another down to a certain point, there’s a likelihood you have sinking floor piers.

If the bottom of a door has started jamming against the floor when you open it, there’s a likelihood the floor directly underneath is suffering from a sinking pier.

Some floor piers may have sunken faster and deeper than others causing the floor to slant downwards. In some cases, these physical slants aren’t obvious. But if you and your family can feel or even see it, you need to get your floor piers inspected.

Furniture that sits on uneven floors are likely to rattle as the feet of the furniture aren’t placed on the floor properly. Cupboard doors may rattle when you open them. Your couches legs may rattle when you sit at one end or the other. This may mean your floorboards are failing due to sinking floor piers.

With some floor piers sinking more than others, pressure is being exerted on the floor of your home. This force travels up the walls into the ceiling to cause cracks. Sometimes ornamental cornice may crack and fall from the ceiling corners too.

When excess water soaks into soil, the soil becomes saturated and weak. When it comes to house piers, water leaking from cracked, broken or unconnected bathroom and kitchen drains are a major cause of soil erosion, soil aeration and voids. The water from the leaking drainage travels through the ground, around your piers and pools into the soil, causing movement.

If roof gutters around your home have overflowed with rain, excess rain can find its way towards your home’s foundations and house piers. Rain may stop, but the excess rain water will have nowhere to go except into the ground where your house piers are built. This weakens the soil upon which your house piers sit and begins downward movement.

Reactive clay soils expand and contract under different weather conditions. They expand in cooler, wetter weather but contract when it’s hot and dry. If you’ve experienced a long drought, the reactive clay soil under your home may have contracted, causing sinking.