Pier & Beam Foundation Repair in Mobile, AL

Most of Mobile's character homes — the Midtown bungalows, the Oakleigh district cottages, the shotguns and four-squares — stand on pier-and-beam foundations that are pushing a hundred years old. It's a repairable, serviceable system, which is exactly why those houses are still standing. But the parts wear out: wood sills rot, joists sag, masonry piers lean or crumble, and past 'repairs' with stacked blocks and scrap lumber give way.

We work under old houses for a living. That means replacing rotted sills and girders with treated lumber, sistering or replacing sagging joists, resetting or replacing failed piers, and getting the floor system back to solid and level — while respecting what makes an old Mobile house worth owning in the first place.

Pier & beam work we handle

• ✓Crawl space inspection with photos you can actually see
• ✓Rotted sill and girder replacement (treated lumber)
• ✓Joist sistering and replacement
• ✓Masonry and concrete pier reset or replacement
• ✓Added supports where spans were built too long
• ✓Termite and moisture damage evaluation
• ✓Shimming and releveling of the whole floor system

How it works

1. 1

   Call about your house

   Age, neighborhood, and what the floors are doing — older homes have patterns we recognize by phone.

2. 2

   Under-house inspection

   We crawl the whole footprint and photograph what we find, so you see what we see.

3. 3

   Itemized written plan

   Exactly which sills, joists, and piers need work, what can wait, and one written price.

4. 4

   Repair and relevel

   Damaged members replaced, supports set, floor system shimmed back toward level, re-measured.

Old bones, wet air

A pier-and-beam house in Mobile lives with the wettest crawl space conditions in the country: months of tropical humidity, a high water table, and storm rain that pools under houses on flat lots. Untreated old-growth lumber held up remarkably well for decades, but where moisture found a home — near plumbing, at beam ends, behind blocked vents — rot follows. Termites follow the moisture too; soft, damp wood is an open invitation on the Gulf Coast.

The good news is that pier-and-beam was designed to be repaired. Unlike a slab, every part under there can be replaced, and a properly repaired system with moisture handled (see our crawl space page) will outlast another generation of ownership.