How To Use Soil Grouting To Level Your Property
When you own a home on an island, you generally have soft soil that shifts and moves a lot. While you can easily brace your home's foundation to accommodate this problem, your property is going to have problems all its own. There will be mounds, lumps, and holes where the soft soil moves up, shifts, and drops.
You will also have lots of problems with large standing pools of water where the soil has sunk lower than the surrounding soil. Thankfully, you can either try to build up the soil on your property, or you can use soil grouting to level your property. Here is how to use the latter to accomplish a more even and level yard.
Hire a Contractor That Knows How to Do Soil Grouting
Soil grouting involves injecting the soil with a concrete slurry. The slurry mixes with the softer soil, making it quite a bit firmer. If done by someone who knows how to do it, and do it well, the results are fantastic. If you hire just anyone to do it, you might not get the desired results. Therefore, be sure to hire the right expert contractor for the job.
The Contractor Takes Samples of the Soil
To get the correct "recipe" for the soil grout for your property, the contractor has to take samples of your soil. The samples will tell him/her how much grouting powder to add to the slurry mixer. Then the contractor can prepare several small batches of the grouting mixture according to the "recipe" developed specifically for your property.
Soil Grouting Injection
The next step in this process is drilling and filling to elevate. The contractor's crew will drill through the lowest points of soil in your yard, creating injection points for the grout mixture. Then the grout mixture is injected into these pre-drilled areas to help push the soil upwards. When the dips in your yard are almost to the point of mounding or "bubbling" up themselves, the grouting injections stop.
Pushing and Leveling the Mounds
The next step is to push dirt off of the mounds that were already present. Usually, a front loader/excavator is used to remove the top layers of soil from these mounds. The dirt is either lifted or pushed onto the lower areas of your property that were injected with grouting material.
Then the whole of your property is relatively level. If there are any remaining mounds or low areas, the process is repeated, and the moved dirt flattened until your entire yard is quite uniform. The grouting will prevent the low areas from sinking again, and the leveled mounds cannot get bigger.