Local Expertise Foundation Repair and Waterproofing for Colfax's Older Homes
Mineral Springs Day still draws Colfax neighbors back to the park every summer, a nod to the era when this Jasper County town was a celebrated mineral-springs resort along the South Skunk River. Today Colfax reads as a quieter bedroom community for families commuting toward Des Moines, with the Colfax Historical Society and Museum and Quarry Springs Park anchoring a small town that grew up around stone, water, and rail. JLB looks after the homes here from our Des Moines office at (515) 717-8560, roughly 25 miles down Interstate 80, so the same crew that diagnoses a leaning resort-era wall can come back and finish the concrete.
Much of Colfax's housing dates to the resort and railroad years, which means a lot of basements rest on rubble stone, brick, and lime-mortar walls rather than modern poured concrete. The trouble with that older masonry is the mortar: decades of moisture from the river-valley water table dissolve the lime joints, stones loosen, and the wall starts to lean or shed material onto the floor. Jasper County's loess-over-clay subsoil adds its own pressure, swelling against those weak joints in wet springs and pulling back in dry spells, so on historic Colfax homes we treat the mortar and the soil load as one problem, not two. Repointing, carbon-fiber or steel reinforcement, and corrected drainage usually do more here than any single fix alone.
Concrete work rounds out what most Colfax projects need by the time the structural piece is sorted. Frost heave and that same shifting clay leave driveways, sidewalks, and garage floors sitting unevenly, and we relevel them with polyurethane foam rather than tearing out and repouring slabs that are otherwise sound. Newer additions near the I-80 interchange and out along Iowa Highway 117 tend to need slab and apron leveling, while the older grid closer to Mineral Springs Park more often needs cracked walk and step repair. Either way, foundation, waterproofing, and flatwork all come from one in-house JLB team.
