Harbor Fullerton Concrete lifts a settled house back to level and holds it on steel piers bearing below the clay that dropped it, not on the clay itself. Every estimate is measured and written on site.
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How a lift is held
A house comes down when the ground under its footing loses volume, and it comes back up only when something below that ground takes the load instead. Raising a foundation is that second thing done on purpose. Steel piers go in beside the footing until they bear on ground that has never moved, brackets tie the footing to them, and jacks on every pier lift the house as one piece until the doors swing and the cracks close. The footing is not rebuilt. It is carried.
Grant Yoshida has run Harbor Fullerton Concrete since 2021, after 14 years on north Orange County crews, and he shoots the levels on every house before a pier is ordered. Half the houses that call are postwar tract slabs with one corner down. The other half are the raised-floor bungalows around downtown and Fullerton College whose footings were poured before anyone put steel in them. The two are lifted differently, and the estimate says which of the two yours is and why.
Underpinning is structural work, so it goes through the city's Building and Safety division on a drawing stamped by a California-licensed engineer, and the inspector reads the pier log before the brackets take the load. The work is done under a CSLB C-8 concrete license with liability insurance on every job, to the California Residential Code, and every raised house leaves with a written workmanship guarantee against defects in how it was built.
Symptoms of settlement
A door that swings clear all summer and binds by February is the frame racking as one corner drops. The clay under the footing takes on the winter rain and lifts, then gives it back through the dry months and settles a little lower. Planing the door hides movement that goes on.
Cracks that climb an outside wall in steps, wider at the top than the bottom, mark where one length of footing has gone down and the wall beside it has not. On a slab house they show at the garage corner first, because it carries the least weight and the sprinklers reach it.
Set a ball on the floor and it rolls the same way in every room, toward the side that has dropped. A fall of half an inch across one room is a footing that has lost its bearing, not a bad pour. On a raised floor it is a bounce over one run of joists where the cripple wall has moved.
Daylight between the footing and the wood on top of it means the footing has gone down and the wall, held up by the roof and the walls either side, has not followed. Nothing carries that wall but the framing. That is when a house is lifted this season, not watched through one more.
In every lift
Eight things are in every lift at no separate line, and each one exists because of what the ground here does: it swells, it drops back, and it does it again the next winter. A pier that stops inside that layer has answered nothing.
A laser level is run across every floor and the reading at each wall is written down, so the drop is a figure on paper before a pier is proposed.
A hand auger goes down beside the footing until it passes out of the clay, because the pier has to bear beneath it and the log says how deep it is.
Steel push piers or helical piers go in until the gauge or the torque shows bearing, and each one is proof-loaded past its share of the house.
The footing is exposed, notched square and cleaned, and a steel bracket is bolted through it, so the pier carries the concrete and not the soil.
Every jack is worked from one manifold, so the house rises as one piece and no window is twisted between a pier that moved and one that did not.
Once the level reads what it read the day the house was built, each pier is pinned at that height and the jacks come off. None stays on a jack.
The pits are backfilled and compacted, the ground is graded to run away from the wall, and the downspout that fed the settlement is extended.
We walk the rooms with you against the first day's readings, hand over the pier log, and the written guarantee goes with it before we leave.
Ways to lift
Four ways a settled house is carried again, set against what kind of foundation the house stands on and how deep the good ground sits under it. The lift itself is much the same in each, so the table is about what the house ends up resting on.
| Option | Suits | Bears on | Days on site | House in use |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Steel push piers | Slab houses with a corner down | Refusal, below the clay layer | 2 to 4 days for one corner | Throughout, lift day included |
| Helical piers | Light additions, porches and garages | The torque the engineer sets | 2 to 3 days on most houses | Throughout the job |
| New footing on cribbing | Pre-war raised floors on bad concrete | A new reinforced footing at code depth | 2 to 3 weeks on the cribs | Usually out while it sits on cribs |
| Foam slab jacking | Interior floors dropped inside the walls | The void filled, on what is there | One day, walked on inside the hour | Throughout, one room at a time |
Push piers take least time and need the house's own weight to drive them; a new footing under a bungalow is the most work and the only one that replaces bad concrete.
Ground and houses
Two things bring a footing down here: postwar footings poured 12 inches deep, so they bear inside the swelling clay rather than under it, and one wall wetted more than the rest by a sprinkler line.
Clay that swells when wet and shrinks when dry does not push a footing down. It lifts the footing in winter, draws away from it in summer, and the footing follows the shrinking clay onto ground that never packs back as it was. After sixty winters the corner that takes the most water sits lowest. On the flats between Orangethorpe Avenue and Bastanchury Road that is a diagonal crack over a window. On the cut-and-fill pads above Bastanchury it is quicker, since half the house is on fill.
The house sets the other half. Around downtown and Fullerton College the houses are pre-war and raised, on a perimeter footing under a short cripple wall, often unreinforced. Those are not pier jobs. The house goes onto cribbing, the old footing is broken out, and a new footing is poured to code depth. The slab tracts from the fifties on, Sunny Hills down to Orangethorpe Avenue, are pier jobs, since slab and footing are one piece.
From call to level
Five stages, the same crew at each, and the man who shot the levels is the man on the jacks. The permit is issued and the engineer's drawing is in hand before the first pit is dug beside the house.
Grant Yoshida runs a level through every room, augers beside the low corner until the clay is passed, and writes the figure at the house.
You pick between push piers, helicals or a new footing on the engineer's word, sign the sheet, and the permit is filed with Building and Safety.
A pit is hand-dug at each pier point, the footing is cleaned and notched, and the inspector sees the steel before a bracket is bolted on.
Each pier goes to bearing and is proof-loaded, then all the jacks rise off one manifold, watched on the level, until the readings match.
The piers are pinned at height, the pits are filled and compacted, the grade is turned away from the wall, and the pier log is handed to you.
Behind the figure
The number of piers starts the figure and the depth to bearing finishes it. Two houses with the same corner down can need four piers or nine, which the level and the auger decide and a photo cannot. Every estimate is measured and written on site.
One corner down usually means four to six piers along two walls, spaced to the engineer's plan, with the lift itself done in a single afternoon.
Twice the load on each foot of footing means piers set closer together, more of them, and a lift watched on two floors at once rather than one.
The downhill piers can go twice as deep as the uphill ones before they find bearing, and every extra foot of pier is a line on the sheet.
A new footing under a raised floor is cribbing, breakout and a pour, and it costs more in weeks than in steel. It is measured by the wall.
Nothing is charged for the visit, the readings or the written figure. Put the address on the form and the call back to fix a time comes within 1 business day. (657) 500-3759 or send us a message.
Send the form or call the yard, and someone rings back within 1 business day to book the visit. Grant Yoshida shoots the levels, augers the low corner and writes the figure at your house, and there is no obligation on you at all.
Houses we lifted
Three reviews left on Google, Facebook and the BBB, each about a foundation lift rather than a slab or a drive, and each naming the drop that was measured or the piers that went in.
“Our back corner had dropped an inch and a half and the slider had not closed properly for two winters. Grant put six piers along the two back walls and lifted it in one afternoon while we watched the crack over the kitchen window close up. The slider runs on its track again.”
“1928 bungalow, with the footing crumbling under the cripple wall on the north side. They put the house on cribs, broke the old footing out and poured a new one with rebar in it. We were out for twelve days and the floor has stopped bouncing at the hall, which it had done since we bought it.”
“The house sits on a cut pad in Sunny Hills and the downhill side had gone down enough that the floor sloped toward the garden. The piers on that side went a lot deeper than the ones on the uphill wall, which they had told us to expect. Level again, and the log shows every depth.”
Before you book
What drives the figure, how long the house is up on jacks, what the permit covers, whether insurance pays, and what is guaranteed once the piers are pinned, answered for a house on Fullerton ground.
Because the pier count and the depth to bearing differ, and neither shows from the street. A corner that has dropped an inch along one wall might take four piers; the same drop across two walls, or a house with a second story over it, takes more and sets them closer. Then each pier goes down until it bears, and on a fill pad that can be twice the depth of the one beside it. The level and the auger settle both.
Hours, not days. The jacks are only under load on lift day, and a house that has dropped an inch and a half comes up over one afternoon, watched on the level so nothing rises ahead of the rest. The pits and the piers before that take two to four days, and the backfill after it one more. A bungalow going onto a new footing is the exception, on cribbing for two to three weeks while the new concrete cures.
The lift closes most of them, and the ones it will not are named on the sheet at the visit rather than found later. Inside the figure: the pits, the piers, the brackets, the lift, the backfill, the grading and the pier log. Outside it, and said so: stucco patching over a crack that has been open for years, a door planed to fit the tilt, and the plumbing repair if a broken drain is what washed the ground away.
Yes. Underpinning changes what holds the house up, so it is a building permit from the city's Building and Safety division, and the counter wants an engineer's drawing of the pier layout, the bracket and the design load before it issues one. The inspector then sees the pits with the brackets on, reads the pier log before the lift, and comes again once the piers are pinned. We file it and stand each inspection.
Almost never, and the reason is written into the policy. Earth movement, settlement and shrink-swell are excluded on the standard California homeowners form, so a house that has come down over twenty winters is the owner's to lift. What can be covered is the sudden event that started it, a burst supply line or a broken drain under the slab, where the water damage is claimed and the settlement is not.
The lift and what holds it: the piers bearing where the log says they bear, the brackets, the pinned height and the backfill, printed on the estimate you sign. It is a written workmanship guarantee against defects in how it was built. Ground moving under a wall that was not underpinned, a new leak wetting the same corner, and cracks that were there before we came sit outside it.
Galvanized steel pipe piers driven in sections, or helical piers with a welded plate, both from a maker whose system carries its own engineering, with a bolted steel bracket at the footing and a pin through the sleeve at the finished height. Where a new footing is poured instead it carries number 4 rebar, on compacted base, to the depth the Residential Code sets. The system and the steel are named on the estimate.
Not for a pier lift. The pits are outside the wall, the jacks are worked from outside, and the rooms stay in use, though the crew will ask you to take the pictures off the wall being lifted and keep off that side of the house for the hour it rises. A bungalow going onto cribbing is different, because the water and gas are usually off while the old footing comes out, so most owners stay elsewhere.
Towns we lift in
The eight nearest of the twenty towns we cover, with the straight-line distance from the yard on Harbor Boulevard beside each. The levels are shot at the house before any figure is written.
Four jobs that sit beside a lift, done by the same crew and to the same engineer's drawing where one exists, and itemized on the same written estimate as the piers.
A new reinforced footing under a raised floor, poured while the house sits on cribs.
A new slab on a graded pad for an addition or an ADU, with the edge thickened where it bears.
Stem walls and footings poured for a new build, with the anchor bolts set in the wet concrete.
The slab opened along a straight line where a drain has to be reached or rerouted under it.
Call the yard or send the form and you hear back within 1 business day. Tell us which corner has gone down and roughly when the doors started sticking, and a morning that same week is usually free for the visit.