Plaza Orange Concrete jacks a raised-floor house from its own crawl space and sets the girders on new concrete piers, the street face untouched. Every estimate is measured and written on site.
5.0 Stars Rated by our customers · Google, Facebook and the BBB
Under the floor
A raised floor drops from the inside out. The perimeter footing runs unbroken round the house and spreads the walls over a long strip of ground, but the girders that hold up the middle stand on posts, and each post stands on a pad about a foot square that was set on whatever the topsoil was in 1910. Those pads carry a third of the house on a fraction of the area, so they go down first, and the floor bows toward the center of every room while the walls stay where they were.
Plaza Orange Concrete has been under houses here since Curtis Ballard opened it in 2018, with 18 years on central Orange County crews behind him, and he is the one in the crawl space with the jacks. Old Towne and the blocks around Chapman University hold the county's biggest run of pre-war houses, nearly all of them on a crawl space, and the ones with a hall floor that runs downhill and doors that swing shut on their own are the houses this service was set up for.
The work runs under a CSLB C-8 concrete license with liability insurance on every job. A foundation is structural, so Building and Safety Services wants engineered drawings on the Civic Portal and inspects the new footings before the load goes onto them. In the historic district the Old Towne Design Standards govern the face of the house, one more reason the lift happens beneath it. The piers carry a written workmanship guarantee against defects in how it was built.
Read the floor
Set a marble down in the hall and it runs toward the center of the house, away from the outside walls. That is pier settlement rather than perimeter settlement, because the edges of the floor are still where the footing holds them and the middle is where the posts have gone down.
An interior door that swings closed when nothing touches it is hanging in a frame that has tipped. The header is pulled down at one end as the girder under the wall settles, and the latch stops meeting the strike. Planing the door fixes it for a season and leaves the girder alone.
Where the floor has dropped away from a wall standing on the perimeter, a dark line opens between the baseboard and the boards. It is the floor going down while the wall stays up. Caulk fills it for a year, then the floor keeps traveling and the line returns wider each wet winter.
Look into the crawl space with a torch. A post shimmed on a stack of bricks, or one with daylight under it and the girder resting on nothing, means a pad sank far enough that somebody tried to catch it up. That is the urgent one, since a girder hanging free has no path to the ground.
In every lift
Eight things are in every lift at no separate line, each aimed at the way a house here fails: pads set on topsoil that give while the perimeter holds, and a hundred years of shims and bricks put in by somebody trying to catch them up.
Old shims, brick stacks, loose pads and any debris under the girders come out first, so the jacks bear on what the house actually stands on.
Each post is measured for drop against a laser line run across the crawl space, so the lift is planned from figures, not from the worst room.
New pad holes go below the topsoil into the wash, 18 inches square at least and larger where the girder carries a bearing wall above it.
Screw jacks on the girders take the floor up a fraction of an inch at a time over days, so the plaster above moves as little as it can.
Concrete pads with a post base cast in, new posts cut to length and fixed top and bottom, replacing the bricks the house was left standing on.
Where a length of the outer footing has gone too, it is pinned with new concrete poured beneath it rather than lifted on its own from above.
While the crawl space is open the mudsill is bolted to the footing and the short walls above it sheathed, work the old house never had.
Building and Safety Services signs off the footings before the load goes back on them, and the written guarantee is handed over after that.
Four ways up
Four ways to bring a floor back to level on a lot here, set against what kind of floor it is and how far it has gone. The drawings, the permit and the inspection are the same in all four, so the table is about what goes under the house.
| Option | Suits | Lifts from | Bears on | Days on site |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| New piers and posts | Sagged floors on a crawl space | Screw jacks on the girders | New pads dug into the wash | 3 to 5 days, house occupied |
| Perimeter underpinning | A run of outer footing that has dropped | Jacks on brackets against the footing | Concrete poured beneath the old strip | 4 to 6 days, a length at a time |
| Full lift and new footing | Footings past saving on a pre-1920 house | Cribbing and beams under the whole frame | A new reinforced footing all round | 2 to 3 weeks, house empty |
| Foam injected under slab | Tract slabs from the 1950s on | Polyurethane pumped through 5/8-inch holes | The soil already under the slab | 1 day, walked on the same hour |
Re-piering costs least where the house is on a crawl space and a full lift most; foam under a slab is the one that leaves the wash beneath it exactly as it found it.
Why the middle goes
Pier pads and perimeter footings on the same lot were never given the same ground, and a hundred years of lawn watering has found the difference between them.
The perimeter footing on a pre-war house here was dug as a trench, so it reached below the garden soil into the creek wash, where sand and gravel bear a footing well once the weight on them has packed them. The pier pads were something else. A carpenter set them on the ground inside the trench line, on a few inches of dug topsoil, often on a brick with no concrete at all. Topsoil watered by a lawn for a century compresses, and a pad the size of a dinner plate compresses it fastest.
Then the ground changes across the city. On the flat between the Plaza and the Santa Ana River the wash is deep, and a pad dug 18 inches into it stands on what the footing stands on. Toward El Modena and up into the hills the surface is finer and holds water, so a pad in it moves with the seasons rather than settling once. So a lift here is planned from a level run across every post, and pads on the east side go deeper. New footings under an addition are dug to the same reading.
From crawl space to sign-off
Five stages, Curtis Ballard under the house at each, and the drawings filed with the city before a jack is set. The house is lived in through all of it apart from the weeks on cribbing that a full lift takes.
Curtis Ballard runs a laser level across every room and every post in the crawl space, and the drop at each is written on the plan before he goes.
An engineer details the new pads and any underpinning, the set goes through the Civic Portal, and you take a week for the work once it is stamped.
Old bricks, shims and loose pads come out, and each new pad hole is dug past the topsoil into the wash and probed with a bar before steel goes in.
Girders come up on screw jacks over two or three days, the pads are poured with bases cast in, and new posts are cut to length and fixed in place.
The inspector sees the footings before the load goes on, the sill is bolted while the space is open, and the papers change hands as we leave.
Behind the number
The count of posts that have dropped starts the figure and the perimeter finishes it. Two houses with the same bow can be days apart once the crawl space is read, so nothing is quoted from a photo. Every estimate is measured and written on site.
Fifteen to twenty posts under a house of 1,200 square feet, most of them reachable, and the work is the count of pads that have gone.
A second floor doubles the load on each girder, so the pads are larger and the bearing walls above them are checked before they are jacked.
Where a run of the outer footing has settled or split, underpinning that length is a separate area on the estimate, dug from outside the house.
Bolts through the mudsill and plywood on the cripple walls are itemized on their own, because the house may have had neither since it was built.
The level run and the written figure cost nothing, and the call to book a morning for them comes within 1 business day. (657) 236-3410 or send us a message.
Send the form or ring, and someone gets back to you within 1 business day to set a morning. Curtis Ballard levels the floor, goes under it with a torch, and writes the figure before he leaves your house. It is yours to keep.
Floors we lifted
Three reviews left on Google, Facebook and the BBB, each about a lift rather than a slab or a patio, and each naming how far the floor had gone or how many posts were replaced under it.
“Our 1915 house on the Plaza blocks had a hall floor you could feel going downhill and a bedroom door that closed itself. They found eleven posts on bricks, jacked the girders up over three days and poured new pads under all of them. A marble sits still in the hall now.”
“The back corner of our two-story had dropped about an inch and a half and the plaster upstairs had cracked over the window. They underpinned twenty feet of the footing from outside and re-set four posts inside, and the crack has stayed closed and painted for two winters.”
“We had been told the house would need to come off the lot. Curtis went under it, found only the interior pads had gone, and did the whole job from the crawl space without a thing on the front porch changing. He bolted the sill and braced the short walls while he was down there.”
Before you book
What sets the figure, how long the house is on jacks, what the city wants filed, whether a policy pays and what the guarantee holds, answered for a raised-floor house on a lot here.
The number of posts that have dropped, and whether the outer footing has gone with them. Re-setting a dozen interior pads under a bungalow is the ordinary job; add a run of perimeter that needs underpinning from outside and the estimate grows by that length. A second story adds load, so it adds pad size rather than pad count. All of it is read off a level run at your house and written down before you decide.
Two to three days for the lift itself, inside a job of three to five. The girders are taken up a fraction at a time, morning and evening, because a floor that dropped an inch over forty years does not want to come back in an hour, and plaster moved slowly mostly stays put. The pads are poured while the jacks hold, cure for the days the mix needs, and the load goes onto the new posts before the jacks come out.
Yes, wherever the sill is reachable while the crawl space is open, and it is itemized so you can see it. A house built here before the 1930s was set on its footing without anchor bolts, and the short walls between footing and floor were never sheathed. Both are cheap to do while the jacks are in and dear to do as a job of their own. The drawings show the bolt spacing and the inspector checks it with the pads.
Yes. Replacing or adding foundation supports is structural work, so it goes to Building and Safety Services with an engineer's drawings, filed through the city's Civic Portal, and the new footings are inspected in the hole before any weight goes on them. In Old Towne the outside of the house is covered by the Old Towne Design Standards, which a lift from below leaves alone. We file the set and meet the inspector.
Not for settlement. Policies written here treat a floor that went down over decades as earth movement or maintenance, and both are excluded, so the pads under an old house are the owner's to replace. A sudden covered event is different, a burst supply line washing out the ground under a pier being the usual one. Photograph the crawl space before we clear it and ask your carrier first.
The footings and posts we put in: the depth they were dug, the concrete poured, the bases and bolts fitted, and the level the floor was set to, all written on the estimate first. It is a written workmanship guarantee against defects in how it was built. Ground moving under parts of the house we did not touch, and cracks in finishes the lift opened, sit outside it. Where the fault is ours we put it right.
Concrete, steel and pressure-treated posts. Each pier is a poured pad on a footing dug below the topsoil, with steel in it and a galvanized post base cast into the top. The post is pressure-treated timber cut to length on the day, fixed to the base below and to the girder above with a steel cap, so nothing bears on a shim. Underpinning is concrete placed beneath the old footing and doweled into it.
No, for a re-piering. The crew works from the crawl space hatch and the rooms above stay in use the whole time, with the furniture moved off the run being lifted and the cabinets checked before a jack turns. The exception is a full lift onto cribbing, which needs the house empty for the two or three weeks it stands on beams. You are needed for the level run at the start and the walk-through at the end.
Towns we lift in
The eight nearest towns to the Tustin Street office, each with its straight-line distance beside it. Every house is leveled and read from the crawl space before a figure is written.
Four jobs that follow a lift or come up while one is being planned, on the same footing detail, by the same crew, and put on the one written estimate.
New footings under a post or a bearing wall, dug to the same reading the piers were.
A new perimeter footing and stem wall under a house lifted onto cribbing.
The slab for an addition tied into the leveled house at the same finished floor.
An opening sawn through a stem wall for crawl space access or a new duct run.
Call or send the form and you hear back within 1 business day. Say what the floor is doing and roughly when the house was built, and a morning for the level run can usually be set inside the same week.