You’re mid-foundation repair with Anchor and you notice some blue tape up on your exterior walls at some point. What does this mean? Why are they doing this? You just want to know what’s up with your repairs and what this is all about.
No, it’s not too much to ask, and it’s a great question that we can explain.
At Anchor Foundation Repair, we’ve been fixin’ Brazos Valley foundations since 1985. We’ve develolped a few things over the years that we do just for you, and this is one of them.
In this article, we’ll explain why we use blue tape on your walls during your foundation repairs and what it means. You’ll have a better understanding of what’s being done at your home and ultimately how much your home has settled.
What’s With the Blue Tape and What About the Shovel??
We use a couple of pieces of painter’s tape – usually blue – for a couple of reasons. First, on places around the home where we plan to place the bell-bottom piers that will support your home. So the first time you see it, it’s just the tape, and it’s simply showing the locations of the piers where the guys are supposed to dig.
But later, there is more tape with another purpose and a shovel will be involved. You might be like, “Hmmm, what’s going on there?” The end goal with this tape and shovel setup is to show you how much your home gets raised in different areas during the repairs.
Let’s walk you through our slab foundation repair process and the blue tape logistics.
Where Are You In the Foundation Repair Process
You won’t see this blue tape and shovel combo from the get-go. It appears later in the repairs. Here are the steps of our typical foundation repair process and when blue tape enters the picture:
- Before We Arrive: Pre-Job Setup
- Day One: Meeting the Crew and Getting Started ← Blue Tape to Mark Pier Locations
- Work Phase 1: Digging, Drilling, and Pouring Concrete
- The Waiting Period: Concrete Curing Time
- Work Phase 2: Lifting and Leveling Your Home ← Enter the Blue Tape/Shovel Era
- Plumbing Repairs (If Needed)
- Work Phase 3: Mud-Pumping and Final Cleanup
So during the stage where we are lifting and leveling your home, you would start to see tape appearing around the outside of your home in a number of locations.
Side Note: Some homes don’t get raised, but most do. In some cases, we only stabilize the home where it is but don’t do any lifting. So if your home is only having stabilization done, then you won’t see the *blue tape and shovel* thing in your case.
What’s stabilization and why would you only have that done? If you’re curious, check out this article about stabilization vs. raising. Hopefully, you should already know whether this is being done at your place.
Stages of Tape/Shovel Usage in Your Anchor Foundation Repairs
Blue tape shows up on the outside walls of your home at different points during your foundation repair. Here’s what each stage means and what the crew is doing at that moment.
First: The Tape Goes Up
You’ll see blue tape stuck to your outside walls. No markings on it yet. That just means we haven’t started raising your home yet, but we’re fixin’ to.
Next: The Starting Point Gets Marked
We set a shovel up so the head makes contact near the highest point of the tape. Then we draw a horizontal line just above the top of the shovel. That mark is your starting point, and it shows where your home is sitting before we begin lifting. This marks its sunken position.
If you only see one mark on the tape at this stage, the crew is getting serious about lifting or has just started. And maybe don’t touch that shovel . . . 😉
Then: The Lifting Begins
Raising your home happens in gradual stages around the perimeter — section by section, not all at once. We’ve got a separate article for why we don’t raise it all at once here.
From this point, it takes a bit of visualization to imagine what’s happening. The home is moving up, your wall is being lifted, and therefore the tape moves up with it. The shovel will stay in place and doesn’t go up with the home.
As lifting progresses, the tape and that first horizontal mark move upward with your home. The shovel stays put. So what you’ll see is a widening gap between the top mark and the tip of the shovel. Gosh . . . a video sure would be nice here to show you . . . coming soon!
Finally: The Bottom Mark Gets Made
Once the crew decides lifting is complete, they’ll shim your home to secure it at that elevation. Then a bottom horizontal mark gets made where the tip of the shovel is now touching the tape. Two marks on the blue tape mean the lifting is done.
How Do We Know When to Stop Lifting?
So how do we really know when the home is “done” being raised? That’s a topic for a deeper dive in another article, but the quick answer is that we watch the signs. The diagonal wall cracks, stair-step brick cracks, trim separations, and gaps around windows that brought you to us in the first place, those should start closing back up.
Cracks and gaps won’t all close perfectly, but realignment is what we’re aiming for as long as your home allows it without creating other problems.
Interpreting The Marks On Your Blue Tape During Repairs
Now you’ve got a piece of tape with two horizontal marks on it, one above the other. The top line marks where your home started compared to that stationary shovel. The bottom line marks where your home ended up. The distance between the top mark and the bottom mark is how much your home needed to be raised.
For me, it gets a little confusing in my poor little brain when we talk about the top line being the low point and the bottom line being the higher point (surely I’m not the only one!). That’s why we are planning to make a full video to show you the whole concept too.
The distance between the two marks could be one inch, two inches, three inches, or even a bit more. Some homes we have repaired have been lifted as much as 5 inches in some spots (in case you’re wondering, 9 ⅞ inches is the most we’ve ever raised), but that is not the norm. An average or typical amount of raising might be from 1.5 to 3 inches in general, which is a fairly normal amount of raising we see around here.
Not every spot around your home will have equal distance between the two marks. That’s because some parts of the home needed more or less raising than other parts. When your home settles and sinks, it does not do so in a uniform fashion. It moves down at different rates in different places. This just shows you how much your slab has flexed and gotten out of whack (called deflection in engineer-y terms).
It’s never going to be a consistent distance between the two marks all the way around your home. That would be highly unusual. It’s most often a little different at every taped location. Plus, it’s not really the distance that things get lifted that’s important. It’s really about what your home needs to be well-supported. But people like to know the numbers anyway out of curiosity . . . ya know?
How Does the Blue Tape Help Your Foundation Repairs?
So, what does the blue tape and shovel help with, what does it really do for us here at Anchor? Honestly, it’s not as much for us, as it is for you. Sure, it helps us a little bit so that we can track that the amount of raising matches up somewhat with the amount of damage, but that’s not really why we do it.
We do it for you, the homeowner.
We want you to see how much the elevation has changed in your home. It’s kinda hard to “prove” that we lifted up your home, because you likely weren’t home when we did this stuff. It’s not always going to feel or look super different other than cracks and gaps closing up. It *might* feel different, and it *might* look different, but it also might not be super obvious.
So this gives us another way to show you what we’ve done and how much your home was raised.
At some point we learned that it’s helpful for homeowners to know how much their home was lifted. We typically inform you of things like this in our daily logs as well. But now you know what it means when you see this tape with markings around your home too – don’t you feel 10x more informed now? Feel free to look them over and ask any questions you may have about them.
More importantly, the marked blue tape also lets you know that you were not imagining things or being dramatic about needing foundation repairs. If your home needed 2 to 3 inches of lifting, that’s not nothing. That’s work that needed to be done to get your home back to its proper elevation and secured there.
Another side note: homes that have sunk more than a couple of inches, particularly in areas near any under-slab plumbing lines, may also end up with some compromised drain lines that need repair too. We don’t ever leave leaking plumbing lines under your home. We make sure plumbing gets checked with a hydrostatic pressure test before we continue from here.
So if you do need any plumbing work at this point, that’s the next step. This doesn’t apply to everyone though, maybe about 30% of folks need plumbing work after the home is raised.
What Happens Next In Your Foundation Repairs?
Now you know what the blue tape is all about, it shows you just how much your home settled and needed to be raised back up. The distance between the lines can often be surprising.
But if your blue tape era has ended and you don’t need any plumbing repairs, what’s next? Well, the good news is that your repairs are almost complete!
At Anchor Foundation Repair, we’ve been raising and leveling slab homes for 40+ years. We want homeowners to feel comfortable and knowledgeable about what’s happening during the repair process and beyond. We even add little things like blue tape to help you see what’s going on.
After raising and securing your home (and plumbing repairs if needed), next is mud-pumping. Mud pumping is one of those things that makes Anchor unlike any other foundation repair company that serves the Brazos Valley area. We fill the space under your newly-raised home so it’s not just an empty void under your slab.
Why would other companies be okay with leaving a big gap under your home?
We absolutely don’t want to leave you with a void and here’s why: Why Do I Need Mud Pumping With My Foundation Repairs? 5 Benefits.
