Hattiesburg Foundation Co. provides foundation repair across six counties: piering, slab repair, sloping floor correction, drainage, crack repair, and concrete leveling. The elevation survey is free and the written scope is yours whether or not you hire us.
The five questions we ask, and why each one matters
1. Which rooms are fine? Not which are damaged — which are not. On interbedded ground the contrast locates the buried boundary, and owners almost never volunteer it because it feels like the irrelevant half of the story. It is the more useful half.
2. Which way do the floors fall? A marble answers this in thirty seconds. Falling one way and dipping through the middle mean completely different scopes.
3. Roughly when was it built? Within a decade. It tells us whether we are looking at a house on an engineered pad or one placed on natural grade, which shapes what we expect before we take a reading.
4. Does it change between summer and winter? Reversal points at water rather than at support. It is the difference between a $2,000 answer and a $12,000 one, and only the owner has watched the house for long enough to know.
5. Is it a slab or a crawl space? On raised housing the failure is often the supports rather than the soil, which is a smaller and cheaper job. An inspection that never goes underneath cannot establish it.
What we do with the answers
They tell us where to concentrate the survey, but they do not replace it. Every one gets checked against the contour, and where an owner's impression and the readings disagree, the readings win and we say so. Several times a year the house turns out to be moving somewhere nobody had noticed, because the damage shows up where the finishes are weakest rather than where the ground is worst.
What the answers cannot settle on their own
Owners are reliable about what they have observed and understandably unreliable about what it means, which is the same for everyone and not a criticism. Three patterns come up often enough to name.
The worst-looking room is rarely the worst-affected one. Damage surfaces wherever the finishes are least forgiving — a tiled floor, a long unbroken drywall run, a masonry fireplace. A room with carpet and short wall spans can be sitting on more movement and showing less of it. The contour routinely relocates the problem by twenty feet.
"It happened suddenly" usually means it was noticed suddenly. Ground here moves across seasons, not overnight. What changes abruptly is a door that finally binds after months of getting tighter. That is not a wasted observation — it dates the point the movement crossed a threshold, which is genuinely useful — but it is not the start date.
A neighbour's diagnosis is weak evidence. On interbedded ground the house next door may be over different material. It is a good source for who was straight with them; it is a poor source for what your house needs.
What we will not claim
That we know what is under a specific lot without measuring. The Hattiesburg Formation is mapped regionally and MDOT lists it among high-volume-change soils — that is context, not a site investigation. Anyone who tells you what your ground is doing before taking a reading is describing a map, not your house.
We also do not publish invented credentials. Where our operator name and licence number are not yet on this site, they are marked unverified rather than filled in. See what the licence actually proves — which is less than most companies imply.
About us, answered plainly
How long have you been doing this locally?
[VERIFY: operator tenure not yet supplied] That field stays marked until it can be substantiated rather than filled with a plausible number. The questions above are the part of our process you can actually judge, and you can judge them on the first phone call.
What is your licence number?
[VERIFY: license number not yet supplied] Ask before we quote and we will give it. Mississippi requires a Remodeler licence for improvements to an existing residence over $10,000, which most full repairs exceed. Verify it with the State Board of Contractors rather than accepting it from us.
Why is the survey free?
Because a charged visit gets paid whatever it concludes, and a free one only earns anything if work follows. That is an incentive worth naming out loud rather than hiding - which is why the readings are written down as numbers another company can check against its own instrument.
Will you tell me if another company's quote is better?
Yes, and it has happened. Bring the quote. If theirs shows readings and a layout tied to them and ours does not improve on it, saying so costs us one job and is the only position that makes the rest of this page mean anything.
Get a free Hattiesburg elevation survey
Tell us which rooms are affected and which are not. On interbedded ground that contrast is the most useful thing you can give us — a house where the front is fine and the back bedroom is dropping is telling us something about what each end is sitting on. Same working day reply.