Message from Jeff Kennedy

I will tell you straight out — there is no company in North Alabama that knows more about moving heavy structures and repairing a building’s foundation than we do at Kennedy and Sons Structural Solutions. It is just a fact. My Dad (Don) did it up until I bought the company from him in 1990, and his father (Harry) did it before him when he started the company in 1945. For 70 years my family has been moving houses and repairing foundations and in all those years, we have moved what some people said were unmovable, without a single glitch.

I guess it’s a generational thing. I dug my first hole when I was 10 years old, into which we sunk piers so we could raise a house up off its foundation. I spent a lot of time crawling around in muddy holes and underneath houses where spiders, rats, and snakes thrive. I worked after school, during spring break, and through the summers, and of course there were probably some times when I preferred to go off and play ball or get into some minor trouble with my friends, but for the most part, I was always fascinated by the idea of lifting up something as big as a house, putting it on a truck, and moving it on down the road where we set it up on a new foundation good as new.

I spent a lot of my time doing masonry in the early years, which is always required after moving a house or building, and after repairing a foundation too. That was about the time I developed a natural sense about a house or a building structure. Several years ago, I acquired the nickname as the House Whisperer while talking about it to a news reporter. I have an inherent ability — I call it a gift — that from the time I pull up in front of a structure and look at from a distance, I know instinctively where I will find weak links. Before I go into a house, I already know with accuracy, where I am going to find floating floors, sagging windows and doors, and cracks in the interior and exterior.

That is in regards to a foundation repair job. If I am to move a structure, I can walk through the house from room to room and the house will tell me how to move it. I know that sounds weird, but I have been doing it since I was 12 years old and it has become part of who I am.

Now that I am getting older, I sometimes feel like Kesuke Miyagi in the Karate Kid, training my team and sharing how to develop that natural instinct about a structure so that a house will speak to them too. Our foreman, who is my cousin, Phillip, has been with me for many years and he knows how passionate I am about getting every structure sitting firmly on its foundations. I have little tolerance for shoddy workmanship and short cuts when I see them.

There are a lot of companies out there who enjoy talking up the latest and greatest one-size-fits-all widget or the newest concept in foundation and basement repair. Some of them have merit but since I know there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution because every house has its own history, its own personality, its own livability factors — I try to be careful about selling my customers the next new shiny object or overwhelm them with buzzwords. The only words that buzz around my brain are FIX THE PROBLEM and sometimes that requires some customization and well, a little creativity too.

At Kennedy and Sons Structural Solutions, we get to the root cause of the problem and fix it permanently! No band-aids, no patches, no widgets and buzzwords. Just customized solutions that work so we can guarantee our work over a lifetime.

Give us a call before you try anyone else. Let my family go to work for your family!

Jeff Kennedy
President & CEO