Oil boom mansions and brick bungalows from 1913 to 1932, sitting on brick piers, hand dug basements, and a century of clay movement.
Maple Ridge is the oldest expensive dirt in Tulsa. It runs from the Broken Arrow Expressway south to Hazel Boulevard, Peoria on the east, the old Midland Valley rail line on the west. Woodward Park sits at the southeast corner and Philbrook is a few blocks further south. Roughly 700 houses went up here between 1913 and 1932, and most are still standing on whatever the original crew put under them.
The big two story houses on Madison, Norfolk, and Owasso are pier and beam with brick piers on poured pads, and a lot of them have full or partial basements with brick, stone, or early poured concrete walls. The smaller Craftsman and cottage style houses in North Maple Ridge between 15th and 21st are pier and beam with a crawl space, usually 24 to 36 inches of clearance.
Nobody poured a slab here in 1920. If your house has one, it came with a remodel, and the joint between old pier and beam and new slab is the first place we look.
Brick piers don't fail all at once. They tilt. A hundred years of clay swelling in April and shrinking in August rocks a pier a quarter inch at a time until the girder above it is sitting on the edge instead of the center. The floor sags. The dining room door scrapes the jamb.
Basements are a different animal. A basement wall is holding back eight feet of smectite clay that swells every spring. Old brick and unreinforced concrete walls bow inward under that push. We see horizontal cracks about a third of the way up the wall, water at the floor joint, and in the worst cases a wall that's moved an inch or two off plumb. The 2015 rains were hard on Maple Ridge basements.
Then the wood. Sill plates and joists in a crawl space that's been damp since the Coolidge administration rot at the ends. Cast iron drain lines and galvanized supply lines leak under the floor for years before anyone notices. Wet dirt under one corner is a settled corner waiting to happen.
The pin oaks, sycamores, and elms along the streets are 80 to 100 years old. A mature oak pulls 50 gallons a day out of the soil in summer, hardest on the side of the house closest to it. The south and west sides of Maple Ridge houses drop more than the north and east. We measure it.
Most of these houses have been remodeled at least twice. Kitchens moved. Bathrooms added upstairs. Every one of those jobs added load to piers sized for a 1925 floor plan. We find a lot of scab posts and stacked blocks under newer bathrooms where somebody noticed a soft floor and did what they could.
For the pier and beam houses, it's crawl space work. We jack the sagging girders back to level over a few days, replace or add piers under the sections that dropped, and sister new lumber alongside rotted joists so you keep the original floor. Rotted sill plates get cut out and replaced. If the crawl space is wet, we fix the water first, because new piers on wet clay just move again.
For basements, it's wall work. Bowed walls get carbon fiber straps or steel braces to stop the movement, and the leak at the floor joint gets an interior drain and a sump. A wall that's moved too far to brace gets excavated and rebuilt. That's a bigger job and we'll say so before we start.
Push piers and helical piers come in when a corner has settled too far to shim. A pier driven to stable depth takes that corner out of the swell and shrink cycle for good.
Big houses with big problems cost more. Written number after we look.
Not by itself. If the wall is straight and dry, leave it alone. If it's bowing, leaking at the floor joint, or showing a horizontal crack, that needs attention before it gets worse.
Mostly. We lift slowly over several days and tell you up front that hairline cracks in old plaster will probably open somewhere. Big cracks are rare when the lift is done right. Plaster that's already cracked usually closes up.
Yes, on the side of the house facing the tree. We don't tell people to cut hundred year old trees. We shim and pier that side and set up soaker hoses.
Foundation work under the house isn't visible from the street, so it isn't the kind of exterior change the overlay covers. You still need a City of Tulsa permit for structural work. We pull it.
Yes. We crawl it, measure the floor, look at the basement walls if you have them, and write you a quote. No charge.
Nearby neighborhoods: Cherry Street | Brookside
Related service: Crawl space and pier and beam repair
Related reading: Basement waterproofing in Tulsa | Pier and beam vs slab in Oklahoma
We come look, you get a written quote. No pressure.