All commercial buildings have foundation, and many commercial property owners encounter foundation challenges at some point of ownership. While commercial foundation challenges can be unsettling for owners, the sooner we deal with them, the less costly and stressful they are. Here, Techniblock discusses navigating Melbourne’s commercial foundation challenges. The biggest challenge faced by foundation experts is generally movement of the foundation.

If a house doesn’t have proper footings that extend deep into the ground, the foundation is therefore based on unsuitable soil which is likely to move. Moving foundation is the complete opposite of what any builder or homeowner wants, as this leads to a whole plethora of problems which we’ll explain now.

As soon as you notice that your foundation is sinking or moving, there’s always a safety concern, whether it’s a small one or a larger one. Sinking foundation, if left long enough, can lead to serious structural distress, resulting in total dilapidation of your home. There’s no way to truly assess the safety of a sinking building without performing a full-scale foundation safety inspection.

Concrete underpinning involves extending the footings of a building foundation so that it reaches more stable founding material, preventing the foundation from shifting. This can be established once a soil report is completed to determine where the geotechnical specialist requires the footings to be founded. Carrying out concrete underpinning is the only way to avoid structural distress if its footings are shifting.

If you’ve got some shifting foundation and cracking walls, , then this usually calls for underpinning. Your engineer will first inspect your building and assess what’s going on beneath it. The underpinning required for this type of foundation repair won’t take very long but varies depending on the extent of the distress.

The material of the home you’re building on dramatically affects the foundation selection criteria for buildings. This is because each material has a different loading condition. Brick, stone, steel, concrete, timber – these materials are different in weight and flexibility, which affects the construction of your foundation and needs to be assessed individually.

The complexity or straightforwardness of the foundation footings are perhaps the main factor that determines how long it takes to build a foundation. There are many types of footings and they take various amounts of time to complete. Traditional strip footings are often use in these cases, which are the quickest way of building foundation footings. Sloped blocks often require a bit more time and effort. Creating foundation footings for sloped blocks isn’t as easy as flat sites; extra work is needed in the form of stepped footings.

When inspecting an old foundation, it’s difficult to tell how it has been constructed. For example, the old foundation may or may not have been built with steel reinforcement, which greatly determines the construction of the new wall. Building a new foundation for the wall is usually the best option.

Think about what happens when humans have to navigate any other type of steep slope; we put stairs there. The same thing happens when constructing foundations for your home or building on a sloped site – we use stepped footings in order to overcome the steepness.