Ask the Builder: Misconceptions About House ‘Settlement’

Building a strong foundation with strong materials will protect your home from mother nature.

Note the vast differences in the thickness of the growth rings on the two pieces of lumber. The old-growth timber with the narrow bands experiences much less movement as it reacts to changes in moisture content. Tim Carter/Tribune Content Agency

Roy subscribes to my free newsletter. He reached out to me about a month ago for one of my phone consultations. He needed help engineering a drainage system around his house to stop water from infiltrating his basement. My college degree is in geology with a focus on hydrogeology and geomorphology. Hydrogeology is the study of groundwater movement. Geomorphology is the study of the earth’s surface where we walk and build things.

I shared how to stop the water infiltration. Roy emailed me a few weeks later to report my advice yielded a dry basement. He was very happy. He asked for additional advice based on some information given to him by a neighbor. All of a sudden we were on the topic of house settlement. His neighbor wandered into the murky depths of a problem that’s misunderstood and misdiagnosed perhaps tens of thousands of times a day across the USA and the world.