During the summer, many homeowners love spending time outdoors and tending to their flower beds. On the downside, maintaining a beautiful flower bed can take a lot of time and effort, especially during the hot summer months. Luckily, there’s a much easier way to work more efficiently, so you can spend more time enjoying your flower bed than tending to it. And it all starts with choosing the right flowers, plants, and trees.

Poor drainage and uncontrolled water runoff are two factors that could cause water to collect near your home. Water pooling around your foundation can lead to various issues, including pest infestations, wood rot, mold growth, and extensive damage to your home and additional structures like walkways, driveways, porches, and patios. All these can significantly lower the value of your property. 

With the summer fast approaching, commercial property owners, facility managers, and homeowners alike should consider the most effective ways to protect the structural integrity of their properties before the hot weather sets in. To help, we’ve put together a succinct guide that explains how you can prepare and maintain your lawn in order to prevent foundation damage during the hottest summer months.    

Piping materials and plumbing systems are designed to last for decades. However, all pipes will eventually wear out and require repairs or replacements. While replacing an entire plumbing system is one of the scariest projects for most homeowners, repiping your home as soon as you observe the first signs of a major plumbing problem can save you money, give you peace of mind, and even improve your overall comfort. Here are a few telltale signs that can help you determine when you should upgrade your plumbing system. 

House lifting can be a scary phrase - especially when it comes to imagining the cost of doing the lifting. Any foundational repair has a range of costs - but usually, the benefits far outweigh the costs of the repair. Foundations are an essential part of a home’s integrity, and without it, you lose some peace of mind. A secure foundation can be what keeps a home standing during a natural disaster, so it is imperative to make sure that foundations are in good standing at all times. Flooding can weaken a foundation immensely, so being sure that a foundation is above the flood lines is something that every homeowner should consider. In this blog, we will outline the benefits of house lifting in Houston, and exactly what the costs are. 

It is about that time of year when floods are prevalent, and everyone is dealing with the reality of needing to prepare to deal with flood damage or look into ways to try and prevent the flooding from happening. One way to prevent flooding is to make an investment into home elevation. Home elevation is a key way to keep flooding from wreaking havoc on your home, though many do not consider it as an option. While costly, over time, the benefits can far outweigh the negatives of having to spend a large sum of money to meet elevation requirements. 

In a perfect world, all houses would be built perfectly - with the correct grading, the proper foundation, and the exact elevation needed to avoid flooding! However, not all houses are built perfectly, and sometimes, adjustments need to be made afterward to create the perfect house. This can be done through retrofitting your home, something that has a world of opportunity and a lot of different possibilities. In this case, we are going to be talking about retrofitting your home for flood prevention. 

With April showers come May flowers, but also the chance of flooding! Frequent rain, and lots of it, can mean that your foundation is not able to withstand the extra water and potentially end up damaging not only the foundation but also the integrity of the house. There are a few different ways that your home can be elevated, whether by raising and extending the foundation or by building a new upper story. Both have their pros and cons, and we will go over exactly how this is done in the rest of this guide. 

Drainage issues can not only be annoying in their own right, they can be something that impacts your foundation! If water is kept too close to a home, and left to sit around a foundation, it can weaken the soil or sand that it sits on, or it can cause wooden beams or piers to start to rot and lose their ability to keep your foundation where it should be. There are a variety of different drainage problems that you should look out for, but we are going to focus on the top five most common landscape drainage issues that might impact you!

Trees are a wonderful addition to any home's landscape - they are beautiful to look at, they can offer shade and reprieve from the elements, and they can even do things like filter your water, and reduce erosion and greenhouse gases! While all of these are the perks that make trees a valuable asset to your lawn, there is a downside - when the tree roots start to take over your sewer pipes. This can be a major problem, not only because it can impact your plumbing, but because plumbing leaks and issues can lead to foundational problems, and a whole other slew of costs to do those repairs. In order to avoid breaking the bank, you need to know how to stop these roots, which is why Allied has put together this guide on how to prevent tree roots in sewer pipes.