Pier Restoration - Providing Peace of Mind
Whether you’re watching the sun set on a warm summer evening or waking up to a beautiful sunrise, there is nothing quite like a peaceful waterfront view. The pier that supports your home is a vital part of enjoying these moments and ensuring your property remains protected from damage. If your pier is showing signs of distress, a pier restoration will restore your pier’s ability to protect your home or business and provide you with years of stress-free enjoyment.
Like all buildings, piers require regular maintenance and upkeep to ensure proper performance. Over time, the salt-laden marine environment and heavy wave action can cause erosion that affects pier strength. This erosion can lead to cracking and deterioration, resulting in the need for repair or replacement of parts.
Piers are generally built with a main sill beam on the perimeter and shaker sill beams underneath to support the walls, floor and ceilings of your home. The main sills and shakers are constructed of long 4" by 6" boards that are stacked to form a pier structure. The piers are then topped with a concrete cap to protect the pier from further damage.
Over time, these wood structures can be affected by the rising and falling of the soil beneath your foundation. This can create an unstable surface for the structure to rest on and can lead to settlement, shifting and buckling of the floors and walls of your home. The type of pier and the square footage of your home will usually play a role in how much movement occurs. Larger homes tend to settle and shift more than smaller ones.
In addition to restoring and replacing damaged or rotted piers, re-shimming your pier and beam foundation can help stabilize the floors of your home and correct any unevenness in them. Re-shimming involves raising the floors of your pier and beam foundation and inserting steel shims between the floor and joists. Sometimes the joists or the floor itself might need to be replaced, particularly if they’re infested with termites or have rotted out due to water seepage. It’s also important to treat a pier and beam foundation for rodent or insect infestation, which can cause rot or even structural failure of the wood.
The first step in a pier restoration is to perform a thorough inspection of the structure and its foundation. An elevation is taken around the flooring using a "Zip Level" and crawl spaces are inspected. Then the project coordinator will mark the areas where push piers need to be installed. Soil is excavated to the foundation’s footer in those areas, and piers are driven into the ground using a hydraulic bottle jack. Each pier is installed to a depth that exceeds the pier’s verified bearing stratum, and is tested under load after installation to ensure its stability.
Once the pier restoration is complete, M/V Pacific Hope will once again be able to dock at Cabrits National Park and provide needed medical services in the local community. Range Developments is proud to be a part of this historic project that will serve the community for generations to come.
Precise Restumping & Underpinning successfully maintains a reputation for delivering quality, reliable and sound services to clients all over New South Wales, with a licensed builder that personally oversee all work.














