910 Crawl Space Pros provides sagging floor repair across Wilmington and the Cape Fear region. Sagging floor repair addresses floors that bounce, slope or feel soft underfoot by correcting what is happening below them — a failed girder, a settled pier, decayed joists, or inadequate support that was never right to begin with.
What we do on the first visit
Measure the actual deflection with a level across the affected area, then get underneath and find which member is not doing its job. The symptom upstairs rarely sits directly above the cause.
Four causes, and they need different fixes
Bounce without slope usually means joists that are undersized or over-spanned for the load — common in older homes and in rooms that were converted. The fix is additional support or sistering, not lifting.
Slope toward one point usually means a settled pier or a failed footing under it. Slope along a line usually means a girder that has sagged or decayed. Soft, localised give usually means decay in the subfloor or the joist directly beneath.
- Bounce, no slope → span or joist capacity
- Slope to a point → settled pier or footing
- Slope along a line → girder failure
- Localised softness → decay in subfloor or a single joist
Lifting is slow, and rushing it cracks the house
A floor that has settled over twenty years cannot be lifted back in an afternoon. The structure above has adapted — plaster, drywall, tile and trim have all moved with it — and lifting fast simply transfers the movement into cracked finishes.
Correct practice is incremental: a small adjustment, then time for the structure to relieve, then another. Depending on the amount of settlement that can mean weeks. Anyone offering to level your floor in one visit is telling you what will happen to your walls.
Sometimes the right answer is support, not lifting
Where the settlement is old, stable and not progressing, adding permanent support to stop further movement is often the better purchase than attempting to return the floor to level. It costs less, risks nothing upstairs, and addresses the actual problem — which is movement, not the absolute position.
What's included
- Level survey establishing actual deflection, not an impression
- Identification of the specific failed member
- Adjustable steel jacks on poured footings sized to the load
- Sistered or replaced joists and girders where decayed
- Incremental lifting over an appropriate period where lifting is agreed
- Correction of the moisture source where decay is involved
- Written explanation of cause, not just the remedy
- Before and after level readings