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Which foundation cracks to worry about

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1The short version

Every foundation is quietly doing an enormous amount of work under your feet, spreading the whole house's weight over the soil, fighting frost heave and wind and its own slow settling. Nearly every one of those jobs involves some small amount of expected movement over the decades, which is exactly why almost all concrete eventually shows a hairline crack somewhere.

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2What goes wrong

The real damage almost never comes from the crack itself; it comes from what the crack lets through. Water is both a necessary ingredient in the original concrete mix and the thing that continuously works to force its way back through any opening afterward, which is why a dry, stable crack and a damp, active one get treated completely differently even at the same width.

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3The first hour

Mark both ends of any crack worth watching with a pencil line and today's date, or a strip of tape across it. That single low-tech step turns next season's inspection from a guess into an actual measurement of whether anything has changed.

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