https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qOsdFSkNj0&t=3s
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Good morning michael massarang here again and this morning we’re at one of our
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existing job sites uh we’re up in rowan county uh which is kind of northeast of charlotte
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north carolina one of our customers here is doing some work inside his crawl space
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uh we have some foundation drainage issues as well as some issues with the floor this house was
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built in the early 80s pretty much a big rectangle and as with many homes of this vintage
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no footing drains installed on the home as well as the crawl space does have some spanning issues
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we have water intrusion issues that are coming in as you see the way this is sloped
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uh the high side is here at the carport and water i think over many many years has seeped in
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through the back side of the carport section here the crawl space does span out
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into a small section behind the carport and water has bled in here over the years and made its way along the
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foundation uh and has collected
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uh all the way down here if you’re facing the structure at the left side of the home
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the house is in really good shape good gutters and downspouts the things i like to see
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extended downspouts oversized gutters with oversized discharge points with proper
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six foot gutter extensions on this home this homeowner uh has done a really good job maintaining uh this
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house over the years the bushes are maintained to a reasonable size again
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here good downspout extensions and unfortunately the way the soils are here
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in rowan and cavaris it’s very rockies which forces a lot of the water to the surface so a lot of homes that are on
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crawl spaces will have foundation drainage problems uh here
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in this part of the state as well as the piedmont in general so
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what we’re going to do today the guys are in production we’ve removed the old vapor barrier and all the trash
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and right now we’re doing some structural repairs some couple of boards that needed to be sistered that were
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rotten and we’re working on that as well as digging footers for our custom drop girder system
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as with many homes of this vintage uh the floors tend to be over spanned you get to 12 14 foot spans between the
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load points and floors will flex this homeowner reported
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some pretty severe deflection issues inside and so basically what we’re doing is doubling
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the amount of crawl space piers that we’re going to install here and i’m going to turn the lights on here
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so we can see everything well and
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let’s see here as you can see here uh we are installing a
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structural steel drop girder system and you can see he’s standing inside of a footer that
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we’re building a 24 inch by 24 inch by 10 inch uh dimension footer
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and our cmu pier will be constructed on top of that so
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you know we’re using proper uh proper concrete mix well here they bag that this is a good
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a good crawl space to review since it’s pretty much stand up now we all don’t always have the stand-up crawl
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space to deal with so uh another reason why i want to be here today
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uh we can see as we’re going along here another footer that’s being prepped and also
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if you’ll see uh there’s the existing drop girder line that supports the middle of the
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structure and that’s all we have as far as support
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you can see these footers are poured here and they’re gonna have to cure out for a
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couple of days and also you’ll see here
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to address the water intrusion issue we’re going to do [Music]
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a pipe and gravel foundation drainage system as you can see we are prepping this area this is properly dug out a lot
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of the companies will just scrape a little soil out throw a little rocks and a pipe on the
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surface and call that a footing drink we’re not doing that this is a real footing drink
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everything will be covered with a geotextile sock a pipe wrapped with geos textile stock with a generous amount of
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aggregate with a minimum of two inches of clearance at the top of the drain
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so you can see when we do this stuff we do it right we can bring in engineers and inspectors
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to inspect our work and we take this very seriously so
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we’re also going to do an industrial cleaning service get rid of some of this microbial growth that’s noted here on
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the floor system as part of why we’re here and we’ll install
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a vapor barrier uh once we’re all finished once the structural supports are in place and when i get back here
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for stage two of the video you’ll see the finished product the structural steel drop girder all of
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the cmu piers that we’re building as well as the finished product with the footing drains
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we are also putting a sump pump here at the left front corner here’s our new sump basin
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that you’ll see here and we’ll feature that here on the return visit when we complete
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the sump system and our connecting grain tiles so again we’re
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doing foundation drainage structural modifications and repairs on this home as well as solving the drainage problem
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that’s been here a long time and cleaning this crawl space up so this homeowner
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will have a good moisture free crawl space we’ll see you here soon for stage two
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uh here we are for the second half of the video uh the guys are here today finishing up
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the project and uh we’re gonna go inside and see how things turned out uh
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what a major change uh we’ve we’ve installed the new liner
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and we’ve got our foundation drains
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have also been installed a pipe and gravel system with a minimum of
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two to three inches of rocks over the top of the pipe make sure that this drain will last a
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good long time you can see here our
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cmu piers constructed on 24 by 24 by eight inch footings we’ve got uh structural steel
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over the top of these cmu piers two separate girder lines here to remove spans out of the floor system
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we’ve also added a third ply to this girder here uh the main girder going down the center
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of the uh center of the crawl space uh the original builders only put two plies here and engineers like to see
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three so we just went ahead and added a fly all the way down uh which gave us uh a much better
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platform to do some jacking and shimmy we did jack and shim on this house
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you can see here the and the industrial cleaning service
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went very well the microbial material has been removed and the floor system has been cleaned
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uh all the duct work wiped down we can see here the liner this is a
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standard 10 mil contractor class liner it is not fiber reinforced as the fiber reinforced liners tend to off gas odor
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that many customers will report we did decide to do a closed crawl space on this home
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and we also did
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install a sump pump here and you can see here our sump pump and
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extra large drainage field for continued long-term longevity this is our exit line
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uh this is uh you know within 10 15 feet of the sump pump the shorter the exit line the
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better i like these little bubble pot assemblies where the water can just bubble up and flow away
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i hate pop-ups they’re terrible they break and they’re a maintenance nightmare for a service so
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i really like to see these and the guys did these today so
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certainly a standard exit line making sure your downspouts are extended away will help keep this crawl space dry
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for many many years to come and there’s our pipe and gravel system we did do a full
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perimeter pipe and gravel system on this home even though the customer did uh do some
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improvements with the gutters and so forth which are important for solving foundation
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drainage issues uh we did decide
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to do a drain system i don’t always recommend them unless it’s the absolute last resort but this old house i think
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has been leaking for years and this became more necessary
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to control foundation drainage and to keep this pretty white liner clean for hopefully a long long time
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[Music] you can see here the second drop girder line
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metal shims uh that’s what engineers like to see structural steel is chosen as opposed to
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doing lumber dimensional lumber these five-inch i-beams get better capacities uh i think we talked
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about that in the first part of the video you know making sure uh also when you do these
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uh fuller uh protocol uh in-cap type protocols you wanna make
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sure you leave your gap so that the termite companies can inspect for termites
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we did terminate the liner at the edge of the drain so that water that’s bleeding in through
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the wall can make it into the drain so we’re not uh being counterproductive here and going working against ourselves
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but uh yeah you can see here
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a very uh this drop girder went all the way to the back all the way to the carport wall
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i’m sorry the garage wall [Music] and
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uh we cut this stand uh in half uh to create performance this house was built with a standing issue as many
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houses in the 80s and 90s tended to be so this
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by doubling the amount of support here we certainly have improved
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the floor performance by quite a bit uh and today by jacking and shimming on the existing girder as well as the new
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structural steel drop girder that we have deployed pretty
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pretty major difference upstairs crawl up underneath here we have deployed a commercial
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dehumidifier on this control uh we’ve been starting to use these at
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first we couldn’t get them for a while but i really like these watchdog dehumidifiers they’re
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fairly simple and we’ve been using these more and more the cabinets are pretty robust easy
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handles for uh for carrying in and out of the crawl space uh it’s also got
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uh a filter that is fabric so it can be cleaned out uh and
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we certainly like that so you can recycle the same filter or buy a second filter
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to clean out uh and every six months to 12 months you can come in here and
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take the dirty filter out slip in the clean one uh so
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yeah these uh these dehumidifiers are
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very easy to install and to maintain i’m gonna adjust this one up a little bit here for
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uh you know a lot of times i see um you know these things are improperly uh calibrated um some of the encapsulation
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waterproofing companies will set these units uh at 30 40 percent sometimes you find them on
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continuous and you can see today uh it is the end of the winter here in
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the carolinas the relative humidity is 46 there’s no need for this unit to be
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running but what happens with the folks with closed crawl spaces they don’t realize that
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and they super dry the floor system we certainly don’t want to do that with this customer and if you start off dry
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it’s easier to keep it dry over the course of the wet months as they approach which in another two months it
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will be humid here so so a very uh effective starting point to begin our moisture control program
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all the vents have been sealed on this crawl space and
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extraordinarily clean and very uh very different than the first time we
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were here and uh uh we certainly appreciate this customer uh working with us on this and
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improving this floor system to make the upstairs perform uh as as much to this customer’s liking as we
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can the good news uh is if we need to bring these floors
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up higher we certainly can a common misconception is that you have to have some sort of smart jack or
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or adjustable posts to be able to adjust floor systems you can put dunnage on either side of
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these piers lift it slightly and you can change the size of these shims so you know if you
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have a traditional cmu pier setup on your crawl space it’s better
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to install cmu piers just like came from these these are the original piers that came
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with the house why would you want to switch to some sort of jackpot this is what a structural engineer would
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recommend in an engineering report so they prefer cmu block piers that are built constructed
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per code eight by 16 cmu pier with a concrete footing and instead of using wedges or pieces of
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wood that you’ll see smacked in there using uh four inch by four inch metal shims
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uh to create proper interface with uh the floor joist above and of course the pier
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girder interface and so
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you know this is a really really clean installation that
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i’m happy to feature and it’s because it’s almost stand up in here this was really a good
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situation to use uh for uh this educational video so people can see what structural steel
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looks like what a cmu pier looks like what a footing drain looks like or a
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piping gravel pressure relief system some companies will call it or pipe and gravel system i like to call it a crawl
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space foundation drain which is what it really is and we’ll put a picture of that up on
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the screen for you but you know the these interior drain systems are a very effective way of controlling drainage uh
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sometimes you got to do sump pumps especially on a house like this that probably was built without footing
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drinks but certainly keeping the gutters clean and free-flowing outside and maintaining a good flower
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bed with controlled plants and proper grading
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that is another great way to keep water out of crawl space so and
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i think that kind of covers i mean if you want to talk about encapsulations liners
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uh structural repairs uh cutting spans down doing drop girders uh adding structural beams either triple
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two by ten uh custom drop girder or structural steel we do all that stuff uh and you
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can see the quality of the work of these guys though that they do is absolutely incredible i think it’s some of the best
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in the city here in the charlotte market uh and when the rest of the company seems to be getting worse and worse is
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they’re having severe staffing shortages so be aware of that as you’re getting estimates and so forth don’t
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always pay attention to the glossy brochure or the you know the fancy google reviews
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dig down a little bit ask for uh ask for a referral from your local engineering firm
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uh and and they don’t recommend companies that are terrible you know so most of the work we do these days is
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cleaning up other people’s messes so be careful who you work with and
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you know ask for references ask for referrals
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and you know work with a company that may be a little bit harder to find because generally it’s the smaller
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companies that are gonna pay attention to these little details like using real shims and
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uh using structural steel doing nice clean work on the masonry pier having access to the to the liners
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you know this is an independent group we are not a franchisee organization so we are not manipulated by the manufacturing
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sector to use a certain product we can use what we want that makes us cheaper than everybody else in a lot of
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cases and so we can come into these situations there were five companies that tried to get this work
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the customer actually chose us not because we were cheaper but because we did a more thorough evaluation and
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provided a much more detailed operational uh set to this thing to make it make sense
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i mean you know some of the companies that bid on this didn’t even offer the drop curve
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system they didn’t do structural repair so we were able to come in as a bundled a bundled approach and offer this
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customer all check all the boxes of everything that they wanted to do with cleaning the mold adding the extra ply
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to the dropper or to the existing drop critter system adding our additional piers and structural steel
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there aren’t very many companies here that do the full package so it’s important to ask about the full package
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if you know instead of using different companies uh to kind of
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cobble together your project if you know if you can work with a company that does it all under the same warranty it’s
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gonna be easier to maintain the service on the account so you know we’re really excited about this installation we
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appreciate you watching today you can contact us at the number below on your screen contact us directly for
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competitive quote a consultation on the phone or you know even a visit out to your home if you’ll have us but we
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really appreciate you watching today uh and uh you know if you have questions about encapsulations controlled
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ventilation footing drains peers liners so forth you know give us a call and we’ll be happy to answer those
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questions so i hope you have a good rest of the afternoon we appreciate you visiting with us and seeing this great
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result on this installation and we will see you on the next one [Music]
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