At Vic Art Masonry, we know every basement foundation problem where water or leaks are involved is not necessarily a $20,000 repair and rebuild. Sometimes minor improvements to downspouts and basement windows can prevent an expensive repair in the future.

Various basement foundation repair projects we have worked on recently show the breadth of the solutions we offer homeowners in the Columbus Ohio area.

Inexpensive remedy for wet basement

In this Columbus area home, the homeowners were quite concerned by a wet basement and feared expensive repairs. After examining the situation, we covered the window wells from the outside to protect the basement windows from moisture and rain, and made inexpensive adjustments and repairs to the downspouts, to direct water away from the house.

These simple measures, which were extremely low-cost, will keep the basement dry and prevent the foundation from deteriorating. It may have saved the homeowner thousands, or even tens of thousands of dollars in the future.

Steel beams to repair bowed basement walls

The groundwater level and pressure in the Columbus Ohio area causes many basement walls to begin to fail as the pressure from the water pushes in and the walls begin to bow. This is an extremely common problem, but it requires expertise to fix it the correct way. At Vic Art Masonry, we are stone masons, not just “basement guys.” We can analyze the problem, understand the construction of your footer, foundation and basement walls, and help you choose the best solution to buttress the walls against further pressure and bowing.

In the home pictured here, you can see how far the wall is bowing in by looking at where the wall touches the large plastic level. You can see how far away from the level the walls are above and below that point. When walls are severely bowed, it obviously affects the structural integrity of the house, and threatens a collapse at the point when the inward bow becomes too severe to sustain the weight of the floor joists from the floor above.

In this case, we installed vertical steel beams, which we used to shore up the basement walls and prevent them from push in farther.

Finished Basements and Basement Kitchens

Sometimes a basement needs to be more than a dry storage area.

In this home in Olde Towne East in Columbus, the owner was planning a kitchen renovation, and planned to locate a temporary kitchen in the basement for several months while the main kitchen was completed.

To make the space as habitable and attractive as possible, we were tasked with working on the very old “rubble stone” walls of the basement.

To begin, our workers chiseled all the mortar from the irregular and large joints between the inconsistent stone blocks. We also removed a painted sealant that had been covering the stones, which we knew to be damaging to the historic stone.

Next we replaced the mortar (tuckpointing) between all the stones and created a backdrop for an attractive basement kitchen for the homeowner.