Foundation raising in Peoria IL - a house lifted in steady, even stages

Most folks who call me about this want their house higher, usually to get it away from water, and before anything else they want to know what it'll cost and how long they'll be out of it. The price moves with the house itself, whether it's frame or brick, whether there's a basement under it, what shape the framing is in and how much of the surrounding work sits in one contract. The schedule mostly waits on the engineer's visit and the city's sign-offs, not on the lifting, and your own figures come from the estimate once I've walked the house.

A house lift starts with an engineer looking the place over, so I get that visit set before any plan is final, because what's under the floor decides how the lift goes. Illinois only lets an Illinois licensed structural engineer perform structural services, so that's who we want looking at your house, not me guessing at your kitchen table. After that the utilities get disconnected, the house goes up in those steady stages, the foundation gets built taller or rebuilt underneath it, the house is set back down and we clean up. Before you sign anything, I spell out exactly which of those pieces are ours, so you can line our bid up against anybody else's.

Raising a house usually stirs up the concrete around it too. Sometimes a slab, a stoop or a section of floor has to come out cleanly so the work can get underneath, and that's where our concrete cutting comes in. Once the house sits higher, the old drive often meets the garage at the wrong height, so a new concrete driveway is a common next step.

In Peoria, permits come from the city's Development Center on the second floor of City Hall, and an alteration permit there doesn't cover electrical, plumbing or heating work, which each need a permit of their own. That matters on a lift, because those lines get disconnected and hooked back up. Before we schedule anything, we look into what the city wants for your job, handle the permit paperwork when it's ours to file and tell you plainly if something lands on your end. If your house is in or next to a designated Flood Hazard Area, any construction, expansion or renovation there also needs approval from the city's Floodplain Manager, and the city's Right-Of-Way Permits Section is who to call for more on it.

Liberty Peoria Concrete Construction is based in Peoria and works across the cities around it, out toward Bloomington and Normal. We meet plenty of older houses near the water here, and we see the same kind of call on jobs in East Peoria and Pekin, where the first question is usually how high is high enough.