Structural Support & Jack Posts
If your floors are bouncy or unlevel, your crawlspace supports may be failing. We install adjustable steel jack posts to stabilize your home.
When a floor feels soft, bouncy, or visibly unlevel, the instinct is often to look at the finished flooring above. The real cause is almost always in the crawlspace below. Wood rots when it stays wet — a condition common in the vented, unencapsulated crawlspaces found throughout older Surrey and Langley housing stock — and rotten joists, beams, or posts cannot carry the floor loads they were designed to support. Over time, the result is a gradually deflecting floor that may feel like a minor inconvenience but signals real structural deterioration that will worsen.
Our structural assessment identifies the specific elements that are failing. The most common scenarios we encounter are: center beams that have sagged at mid-span because the supporting posts have rotted or settled; main girders bearing on deteriorated sill plates that have compressed or rotted away; individual joists that have notched or cracked from water damage or improper cutting by trades; and original wood posts resting directly on soil or on concrete with no moisture barrier, allowing wicking that rots the post base while the visible portion still looks intact.
Remediation depends on the specific failure mode. For sagging center beams, we install adjustable galvanized steel jack posts on concrete footings. These posts are set initially lower than the target elevation and then raised by small increments over a period of weeks — the slow adjustment is important because forcing a settled structure back to level too quickly can crack drywall, bind doors, or stress plumbing connections above. For rotted joists, we sister new lumber alongside the compromised member, properly sized and bearing on solid supports at each end. For heavily rotted posts or beams, full replacement is necessary, which involves temporary shoring, removal, and installation of pressure-treated or engineered lumber appropriate for the conditions.
Post material matters. Original wood posts in crawlspaces built before 1980 were often fir or hemlock with little or no treatment. When we replace posts, we use hot-dip galvanized adjustable steel column bases (which elevate the post off the concrete footing, breaking the moisture wicking path) and pressure-treated lumber rated for ground contact, or steel jackposts rated for the design load. These are not cosmetic upgrades — the difference between an original wood post and a properly installed steel jackpost in terms of service life in a wet environment is measured in decades.
Structural repairs are an area where proper sequencing matters. Installing new posts and repairing beams in a crawlspace that still has active moisture problems means the new wood will face the same deteriorating conditions as the old. We strongly recommend addressing drainage and vapor management before or alongside structural repairs, so that the repaired structure stays in good condition long-term.