Fixing fieldstone foundation issues on old Michigan basements is about 90% of our work for about 4 months out of the year. We have a lot of fieldstone basements and crawlspaces in Michigan and they need some maintenance from time to time. I wanted to share some of the most common things we run into when inspecting stone foundations for repair. Below is a photograph of a fieldstone foundation wall that has some obvious issues:
You can see most of the mortar joints have crumbled away and some are missing altogether, this is actually pretty common. This wall looks like it is leaning pretty badly in the photo, but it actually wasn’t. If it were, addressing that type fieldstone foundation issue would be for another post all together.
Tuckpointing Is The Most Common Fieldstone Foundation Issue in Basements.
I would say 75% of the fieldstone foundation issues we see are mostly tuckpointing. In other words 7-8 out of ten fieldstone foundations we inspect are mostly just in need of tuckpointing. There are almost always an area or two that need some minor repair. Areas around windows or duct work pass throughs were a stone or two has come loose or fallen from the wall. The other 25% of he projects (1-2 out of ten) require more extensive work.
How we Fix Fieldstone Foundation Issues
Usually, like I mentioned above, the mortar joints between the rocks or stones will need to be given some attention. That attention in this case is tuckpointing. Here is a framework we use for evaluating fieldstone foundation issues:
- Is the wall safe to be and work around?
- Are the walls generally where they should be? Are they leaning, bowing, or shifted?
- Have the joints crumbled away and mostly missing?
- Are the mortar joints intact but loose and crumbling, are they failing?
- Is this fieldstone foundation a good candidate for tuckpointing?
Usually the outcome after going thru this checklist I use to evaluate fieldstone foundation issues is that the walls are good candidates for tuckpointing. I go over how we tuckpoint stone basement walls in another article and won’t go into that here. There is almost always some tuckpointing involved in dealing with fieldstone foundation issues, especially in basements.
Wall Collapses are a common Fieldstone Foundation Issue
Often there are other concerns as well. Many times customers have us update the windows in their old Michigan basements. We do a lot of crawlspace repair and it seems like most often the collapses occur in the fieldstone crawlspaces. It’s pretty common for the fieldstone crawl space foundations to almost be dry stacked on the inside portion of the wall. There is mortar there but it was very thin to begin with and was often un-tooled and unsealed. For this reason they don’t hold up as well as the fieldstone basement walls. Fieldstone wall collapses are less of an issue that they appear to be. They are usually localized and aren’t really that difficult to repair. I think I will follow up with another article on fixing fieldstone wall collapses. I have some pretty cool photos I need to find.
