The diagram below shows a contour map of our previous floor plan.  To create this map, a structural engineer walks around the first floor of your home with a fancy instrument called a manometer.  You can read more about contour maps and manometers from manufacturers like this one.  In our case, there was no high-tech device just a bucket of water, a yardstick and siphoned hose taped up against the yardstick.

The numbers depict how many inches out of level the point on the floor plan relative to the measured baseline point, which is the bottom right corner of the house measured at “0.0″.  The wavy lines basically illustrate the rough slope and direction of the settlement of the house due to the foundation.  I’ve added the green line to show the division between where our home’s foundation sat on bedrock (everything right of the line) and where it sat on the fill (left of the line).   The red X marks was where there were cracks in our perimeter foundation.  You can see where our house was “hinged” on the fulcrum point illustrated by the green line.

To get a better idea of what this looked like from a side profile, you can see the elevation diagram put together by our structural engineer below.

To fix the foundation would mean to buttress the part of the foundation that was resting on fill by putting in piers that would cut through the fill into the bedrock that the foundation would rest on.  The money spent toward doing this alone would mean we would prevent our house from further sinking but have nothing to show for it, other than to say we did a whole lot beneath the dirt.

It was decided that if we had to do any foundation work, we would bite the bullet and remodel the entire home while we were at it.