The Wonderful Uses and Benefits of House Pilings

[Posted on January 2nd, 2014 by Aaron Presley]

House pilings are incredibly important when building and refurbishing waterfront properties. Pilings are often referred to as elevators, stilts, and pier construction materials. The primary benefit of using these types of stilts is to elevate homes away from beachfront soils that have a tendency to erode due to increased exposure to rain and bodies of water. Homes built using pilings will be much more resistant to flooding, which can save potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in costly repairs that can result from hurricanes and other natural destructive forces. Here at Bayou City Lumber, we are a leading provider of this excellent building material to the bay and surrounding areas.

WHY USE PILINGS?

Nearly all seaside properties are built using house pilings. The reasons for this are obvious and many. Firstly, properties along lakes, rivers, and large bodies of water have a typically softer soil base with a top layer similar to beach sand, followed by soft clay at lower levels. Laying a regular concrete foundation on this type of ground comes with many complications. Concrete foundations are best suited to standard urban residential and commercial properties because of the strong bedrock located below the topsoil that prevents the ground from shifting. As seen in poorly constructed homes that don’t uses house pilings, shifting ground will cause foundations to move and crack. As any home-buyer will know, a cracked foundation is the first issue that leads to a broad range of destructive forces on a home. Cracked foundations will cause slanting floors, cracking walls, off-kilter doors, expensive plumbing problems, and many more. This issue, left unchecked can render a home completely unlivable and is very expensive to fix. These fixes however, are typically only temporary solutions, such as pouring new concrete over cracks that will only mask the destruction of the foundation.

A PERFECT SOLUTION

For homebuilders in waterfront areas, house pilings provide an excellent alternative to foundation setting that resolves all of the above problems. Pilings are long wooden structures that serve to hoist the home up away from shifting ground. Pilings will be spaced a set amount apart from each other and work as a gripping mechanism in the ground, which divides the ground into quadrants that will shift far less, and independently of the others. Entire counties have been ravaged by storms coming in from the Gulf of Mexico. The primary cause of the destruction of these homes is the poor construction of foundations by large plot developers. Not only will home builders add greatly to the selling price of new construction homes, but will also avoid expensive insurance claims in the event of property failure. Bayou City Lumber is one of the leading lumber yards in Houston, providing large quantities of house pilings to developers and home-builders at great prices.