Foundation work for Carrollton homes
Five distinct jobs, not one job with five names. Which applies depends mostly on how your house was built and whether water is the cause or the symptom.
First, what do you have?
Start by working out what you have
Carrollton's housing stock splits fairly cleanly. The area around the Historic Square and the older streets near the original townsite include homes old enough to be pier and beam, built over a crawl space on wooden joists. The large expansion north and west of there, from the 1960s onward, is overwhelmingly slab-on-grade: a single concrete pour sitting directly on the clay.
The distinction matters because the repairs share almost nothing. A pier and beam house is adjusted from underneath and is comparatively forgiving. A slab has to be lifted from the outside in, is far less forgiving of a mistake, and is the reason Carrollton insists on an engineered design.
Which one your symptom points at
- Doors binding in late summer, diagonal cracks from door and window corners. Slab movement. Start with an inspection; the survey decides whether piers are warranted.
- Floors that slope or bounce, a musty smell from under the house. Pier and beam. Often a crawl-space moisture problem before it is a structural one.
- Water standing against the perimeter, downspouts discharging at the slab. Drainage, and doing it before piering is what stops you paying twice.
- Stair-step brick cracks with nothing moving inside. Usually masonry repair, but read the pattern before filling anything.
- Not sure, or selling. An elevation survey and an engineer's report answers both, and Carrollton requires them before a repair permit anyway.
The five jobs
What we arrange
Slab foundation repair
Interior and perimeter piering for post-1960 slab-on-grade homes, the dominant build type across Carrollton north of Belt Line.
Pier and beam repair and leveling
Shimming, joist and girder replacement, and crawl-space work for the older housing stock around Downtown Carrollton and the Historic Square.
Foundation inspection and engineer reports
Elevation survey and a Professional Engineer’s report—which Carrollton requires before it will issue a foundation repair permit.
Drainage and moisture control
French drains, grading and root barriers aimed at the shrink-swell cycle underneath the movement, which is where the durable fix usually is.
Concrete and masonry crack repair
Brick and mortar cracks, separated lintels, and driveway or walkway sections that moved with the foundation.
Order of operations
The sequence that saves money
In roughly this order: get an elevation survey, get a Professional Engineer's assessment, fix drainage, then (if it is still warranted) lift the foundation. Reversing those last two is the most common expensive mistake in North Texas. Piers installed while water is still pooling against the slab address the consequence and leave the cause running.
It is also worth knowing that piering is not risk-free. Incorrectly installed piers can worsen a foundation, and lifting one pier out of step with its neighbors can crack a slab that was previously intact. This is precisely why Carrollton requires the work to be designed by an engineer rather than sold by an estimator.
Send us what you're seeing and we will arrange the survey first.
Not sure which of the five applies?
Describe the symptom, not the diagnosis
Most people are not, and guessing wrong is expensive in one direction specifically: paying for piers when the actual problem was drainage. Describe the symptom rather than the diagnosis and the survey will settle it.