LESLIE: Heading on over to Idaho to have a chat with John about a crumbling foundation. Tell us what’s going on.
JOHN: Yeah, it’s an old house. About two feet up from the ground, maybe where the sprinklers hit it, just the face of it is crumbling and I just wanted to know what’s the best thing to be to clean it well and resurface this.
TOM: Mm-hmm. So it is a block foundation or a brick foundation?
JOHN: It’s cement.
TOM: It’s cement? OK. Very common. You may be right about the sprinklers but, more commonly, you get overflow from gutters and you get rain that hits the ground and bounces up; so that particular area of the foundation is common to have cracks and loose, falling concrete and that kind of thing.
The key here is that you want to break off anything that’s loose. You want to clean it really well. I would use something like a JOMAX, which is a siding cleanser, to clean any mildew that’s attached to there. Then you’re going to mix up a new mix of stucco and you’re going to patch right over that.
Now, there are epoxy patching compounds that are stucco with sort of an epoxy mix. They’ll tend to be a lot stickier. They may not match in color – I’ll warn you there – so if that’s the case, once the patch is done, you may want to paint that section of the foundation.
JOHN: Good, good. And so any particular epoxy brands or …?
TOM: Well, QUIKRETE is a leading brand in that category and they have a variety of stucco products that are designed to be used for repair, where they stick to places like that.
JOHN: That sounds great. Thank you very much.
TOM: (overlapping voices) Alright, John? You’re welcome. Thanks so much for calling us at 1-888-MONEY-PIT.
It’s a good thing I read this transcript, because I was under the impression that I had to save whatever was left of my foundation, and try and “glue” it back together. Instead, you’re supposed to chip off everything that is falling off, and then go from there. This seems easy enough, and I can probably do this by myself with no help from my wife.