Foundation Repair Miami
Foundation repair Miami homeowners commission is structural work on an existing building, and it starts with someone else's signature. An engineer or architect seals the documents that define the repair. We hold the license that pulls the permit and builds what they call for.
What the license covers, and what it cannot sign
Foundation repair Miami homeowners search for is two different jobs sharing one name, and the line between them is a licensing question before it is a construction question. One is specialist remediation — piering, resin injection, slab leveling — run by crews who own that equipment. The other is structural repair of an existing building, pulled on a permit.
Gaven does the second one. There is a third party here too: the documents that define a foundation repair are signed and sealed by a Florida professional engineer or a registered architect. We build to them. We do not sign them.
What a Gaven structural repair covers
What it isn't
Why foundation repair here is not the national playbook
Most of what is published about foundation repair was written for a different piece of ground — expansive clay soils, and houses with something underneath them. South Florida has neither, and that changes the diagnosis and the fix.
Start with what the word covers. Florida law does not leave “structural” to interpretation: a structural component is any vertical or horizontal load-bearing member of a structure which supports dead or live loads in addition to its own weight, and the statute's own list opens with a foundation before naming load-bearing walls, columns, beams, floors and roof structures. In Florida the scope is set by license, not by size. Cosmetic patching over a structural component is neither repair nor alteration — it is a finish.Florida Statutes §489.105
Six phases, one licensed team
Foundation repair runs the same six phases as every Gaven project, with one difference that shapes all of them: the scope is set by someone else's sealed documents.
Discovery
A free site visit, no trip fee. We walk the condition, pull the permit history and flood-zone determination, and say plainly whether this is a structural question — an engineer's call first — or a finish problem that looks like one.
Design and scope
The engineer of record leads here. We coordinate with them, read the sealed documents, and turn them into a written scope with a fixed number. We do not price a foundation repair from a photograph.
Permitting
We pull the permit under our license, with the sealed set in the application. The building department verifies the contractor's certification before a permit issues, so the license and the permit are tied together from day one.
Demolition and rough trades
Selective demolition, shoring where the documents require it, removal of unsound concrete, reinforcement treatment or replacement, and the structural rebuild — inspected in the order the permit set specifies.
Finishes and installation
The structure is half of it. Substrate, waterproofing, and finish go back over the repair, because work that leaves a building looking repaired is half done.
Punch and closeout
Final inspection, permit closeout, and a written labor warranty. One walkthrough, one punch list, one team accountable.
The license is the difference
Gaven is a Florida Certified General Contractor. Under Chapter 489 of the Florida Statutes a general contractor's services are unlimited as to the type of work he or she may do. That is the whole distinction: a Building Contractor is limited to buildings which do not exceed three stories in height, and a Residential Contractor to residences not exceeding two habitable stories above no more than one uninhabitable story. On an existing building of any height, the class matters.Florida Statutes §489.105
The statute then puts structural work on the contractor by name. A general, building, or residential contractor shall be responsible for any construction or alteration of a structural component of a building or structure. Read it precisely: the responsibility is not the general contractor's alone, and any page telling you otherwise has quoted half the sentence. What the general class adds is the absence of a ceiling on the building it may take.Florida Statutes §489.113
The boundary in the other direction deserves the same precision. Florida law carries no single sentence reading “every structural repair must be designed by an engineer.” The requirement emerges from how the practice of engineering is defined and from the rules on who may sign and seal structural documents. It is explicit for recertification, where older buildings are inspected on recurring cycles and the report has to come from an engineer or architect registered in Florida. Verify us before you sign: our license is public on the state record, and our permit history is public on BuildZoom — 500+ projects since 2015 · 37+ BuildZoom-verified permits.
Structural repair is one scope inside general contracting
Foundation repair rarely arrives alone — it usually sits inside a larger permitted project on the same building. See what a Miami general contractor covers.
Foundation repair questions
QDo I need a structural engineer, or is a general contractor enough for foundation repair in Miami?
You need both, in that order. A Florida professional engineer or a registered architect signs and seals the documents that define the repair; a Certified General Contractor executes it, pulls the permit, and carries the inspections. Gaven is the second.
QDoes Gaven do foundation repair?
We do the structural repair of an existing building under our license — concrete restoration, slab and beam work, load-path repair — built to an engineer's sealed documents. We are not a remediation specialist: if the job is standalone piering or resin injection, that crew is the right call.
QWhy does foundation repair advice keep mentioning basements and crawl spaces when Miami homes sit on slabs?
Because most of it was written for other markets and republished with a city name swapped in. South Florida builds slab on grade over shallow limestone, so there is nothing down there to waterproof or jack. A page selling foundation work in Miami with sump pumps on it is the tell.
QWhat causes foundation settlement in South Florida?
Not the clay swell-and-shrink cycle the national industry is built around. The USGS maps the Miami Limestone at surface across 92 percent of Miami-Dade County — a highly porous carbonate platform, not a deep soil profile. Movement traces to conditions under and around the slab, which is why the diagnosis belongs to an engineer.
QCan structural damage be repaired, or does the building have to come down?
Most of it is repairable. Concrete restoration removes the unsound material, treats or replaces the reinforcement, and rebuilds the section; members can be reinforced or replaced. Whether that is right for a given building is an engineering judgment the sealed report settles.
QDoes a foundation repair need a permit in Miami-Dade?
Structural work does. The building department verifies the contractor's certification before issuing, and the engineer's sealed documents go in with the application. We pull it under our license — owner-builder permitting is not how we run structural scope.
QCan a large structural repair trigger flood-zone requirements for the whole building?
It can, and it is worth checking early. Under 44 CFR §59.1 a substantial improvement is any reconstruction, rehabilitation, addition, or other improvement costing 50 percent or more of the structure's market value before the start of construction, and the term includes structures which have incurred substantial damage regardless of the actual repair work performed.
QWho leads a 40-year or milestone recertification, and does Gaven do it?
An engineer or architect registered in Florida leads it and signs the report. A general contractor cannot, and we do not. We do the half that comes afterwards — the repairs the report lists, permitted, built, and inspected under our license.
QAre you licensed and insured?
Yes. Gaven is a Florida Certified General Contractor, license CGC1524886, verifiable on the state record at MyFloridaLicense. General liability and workers' compensation certificates issue before work starts, and on condominium projects we name the association on the certificate of insurance.
Start with the diagnosis, not the quote
If something has moved, cracked, or spalled, the first call is a licensed engineer's and the second is ours. Gaven executes foundation repair and concrete restoration on existing buildings across Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach County — permitted, inspected, built to the sealed documents. Free site visit, no trip fee, and an honest answer if the job belongs to a specialist.
Last updated August 2026.