Geobear Stabilizes Historic Essex Home Foundation in Just Two and a Half Days

The first thing they wanted me to do was to show them where all the services came into the property - I.e., the water pipes, the gas, the electric and everything like that. Where all the drains were. So that they were satisfied that they wouldn't be drilling into or pumping resin into something that they shouldn't. That was the first thing they did. They were very good with regard to the safety aspect of everything. I was very impressed by their workmanship and their general behavior, actually, was really very good. Hello, I'm Malcolm Sewell and I live in Hockley in Essex. I've lived in this house for a long time since the early 1980s and we've always suffered from a certain amount of seasonal movement as it's sitting on clay. It's an old house with shallow foundations and it's been made worse by having an enormous oak tree next to the house. So, we have a number of minor cracks open and close during the seasons. And at one point back in the 1990s, the site dried out very much because of a housing estate that was built behind us and that caused the back of the house to crack considerably. So, that was when we had some structural work done. We made an insurance claim and they just came and checked it all out and eventually repaired the cracks. Subsequently, to cut a long story short, we lost our cover for subsidence and heave and therefore have had to live with just repairing the cracks every time they open up and redecorating which has become quite an issue. But we have decided to restore the house now and that's when we got in touch with Geobear to see what they could do for us. Initially, they did a video record - video survey. But because the house is quite an unusual structure and a fairly complicated problem, they decided to visit and the first engineer who visited was very good, actually, really helpful. And suggested that we would probably need to go down a meter with their resin treatment. However, that was thrown out once we had the test spores done. The test spores which we had to pay for initially proved that we would have to go down into the clay 2.8 meters. Then we had a new structural engineer from Geobear and he came on a couple of occasions and was extremely helpful. And In the end, we decided on a particular plan that we thought would help us solve the problems that we've been experiencing over all these years. and once we paid the deposit they were onto us pretty quickly, really, within two or three weeks. They said they had a space free and would come and do the work and it took them two and a half days to do it. So, it was very interesting see what they did. Well, initially the treatment was going to be along the outside of the house along the wall that faces the oak tree around one of the bay windows. However, we decided to have two of the internal walls done as well, which were supporting walls in the hall - were always cracking. And then there was a floating wooden floor above the concrete so I had to take all that up as well simply because, although they said they would be able to drill through it, I wasn't satisfied that they would miss all the pipes underneath, which there were a lot of central heating pipes and gas pipes, etc. So, I had to get that all prepared, which, it's quite a big hallway so it took quite a lot of work. But it was absolutely essential in the end because once I saw what they had to actually do, I was very pleased that we had made good preparations internally. And then once they drill the hole they then have to hammer a steel tube down through the hole before they can then start pumping the resin in. It took us a long while to make our minds up to actually spend the money because it's not cheap but we felt that the professionalism and the way they went about the work did convince us that we'd made the right choice.