Everything a North Texas homeowner should know before anyone talks piers at their kitchen table. Plain English. No sales pitch. Free, like it's always been.
Some ~25–30 years ago, Metro published The Foundation Repair Report as a free booklet for homeowners. No strings attached — just the straight story on foundation trouble, written by people who spent their days under houses.
This is that report, brought back for a new generation of North Texas homeowners as part of the Metro brand's revival. (Straight talk: the brand went quiet for a stretch — this is a revival, not an unbroken run. The knowledge never left, and neither did the standards.)
Here's our deal with you: read this before you call anybody — us included. When you understand what's happening under your house, no salesman can rush you, scare you, or snow you. An informed homeowner is the hardest person in Texas to take advantage of. That's exactly who we want to work for.
Almost every foundation problem in North Texas comes down to three things: soil, water, and time. Understand those three and you'll understand 90% of what any contractor tells you.
Most of North Texas sits on expansive clay. That word — expansive — is the whole story. This soil swells up when it gets wet and shrinks down when it dries out. It doesn't do it a little. It does it a lot.
Think of it like a sponge under your house, except the sponge is ten feet deep and your house weighs more than a freight train. When the soil swells, it pushes up. When it shrinks, the ground pulls away and your foundation loses its support. Up, down, up, down — year after year, wet season to drought.
No foundation loves that ride. Slab foundations can crack and tilt. Pier-and-beam homes can settle unevenly as the ground moves beneath different parts of the house at different rates.
Water is what makes the clay move, so where the water goes, the trouble follows. A few classics:
Here's what most homeowners miss: foundation trouble is almost never sudden. It's the accumulation of tiny seasonal moves over years. A sixteenth of an inch here, an eighth there. The soil swells in spring, shrinks in August, and doesn't come all the way back. Repeat for a decade.
That's why a crack "just showed up" even though the real story started ten years ago. The house was keeping score the whole time — you just couldn't see the tally until something finally gave.
Most North Texas homes sit on one of two foundation types, and the clay treats them differently. A slab foundation is a thick concrete pad your house sits directly on. When the soil under one part of a slab shrinks, that part of the slab loses support and can crack or tilt — and because your flooring sits right on the slab, you feel it fast in sloping floors and cracked tile.
A pier-and-beam home sits on piers with a crawl space underneath. These handle soil movement a little more gracefully, but they're not immune — wooden beams and shims shift over time, and uneven settlement shows up as bouncy floors, doors that won't latch, and that unmistakable downhill roll of a marble. The fix is usually re-shimming and adjusting rather than deep piers, which is one reason an honest diagnosis matters: the right fix depends on what your house is actually sitting on.
The bottom line: your foundation doesn't fail because it was built wrong (usually). It struggles because Texas soil moves, water moves it unevenly, and time multiplies every small shift. Everything else in this report — the signs, the piers, the questions — flows from that one idea.
Every house settles a little in its first couple of years. That's normal — the ground compacting under new weight, materials finding their rest. Normal settling is small, even, and it stops.
Foundation trouble is different. It's uneven, it's ongoing, and it leaves a trail. Here's how to read the trail.
Ask yourself four questions:
1. Is it getting worse? Put a pencil mark at each end of a crack and date it. Check back in a month or two. A crack that isn't growing is usually an old story. A crack that's growing is a current event.
2. Is it a pattern or a loner? One hairline sheetrock crack in a ten-year-old house is life. The same crack plus a sticking door plus a sloping floor on the same side of the house is a diagnosis forming.
3. Is it uneven? Even settling is boring and harmless. Trouble is always lopsided — one corner, one side, one room. If everything dropped together a quarter inch, you'd never know. It's the difference between one side and the other that breaks things.
4. Is there water involved? Walk your foundation line after a hard rain. Standing water, soggy soil on one side, downspouts dumping at the corners — water plus symptoms is the combination that moves a house from "watch it" to "get it looked at."
You don't need tools for this — just your eyes and a marble. Twice a year (spring and fall are good), walk the outside of your house slowly and look at the brick, the trim, and the caulk lines. Then walk inside: open and close every door, look above every door frame, and roll that marble across the floors in a few rooms.
Write down what you see with dates. "Hairline crack above the guest room door — March." "Marble rolls toward the west wall in the living room — March." That little log is worth its weight in gold later, because it turns "I think it's getting worse" into "it grew half an inch since March" — and that's the difference between guessing and knowing. Bring the log when a contractor comes out. The good ones will read it like a chart.
The bottom line: a single small crack is a note to self. A growing pattern of cracks, sticking doors, and slopes — especially on one side of the house — is a reason to get a free evaluation. Mark your cracks, watch them for a few weeks, and call if they're moving.
When a foundation needs real help, the fix is almost always piers: supports driven or placed deep under the foundation to reach stable ground, so the house rests on something that doesn't move with the seasons. Contractors will throw around names and opinions. Here's what the names actually mean, in homeowner terms.
The workhorse of Texas foundation repair. Short concrete cylinders — about the size of a coffee can, only heavier — are stacked and pressed straight down into the ground, one on top of another, using the weight of your house as the pushing force. They keep going until the ground pushes back harder than the house pushes down. Then the foundation is lifted and secured to the top of the stack.
Concrete piers have been used in Texas for decades. They go as deep as the soil requires to find firm resistance, they're straightforward to install, and there's a long track record of how they perform in our clay. When a contractor recommends them, they're reaching for the method with the most history behind it in this part of the country.
Steel piers work on the same idea — drive a support deep until it reaches ground that won't move — but they're made of steel pipe sections joined together as they're driven down. Steel can be driven deeper than concrete in many soils, which matters when the stable layer sits a long way down.
The trade-off is the one you'd expect: steel generally costs more than concrete, and whether the extra depth is worth it depends on your soil, your house, and how deep stable ground actually is under your lot. A straight-shooting contractor will tell you why they're recommending one over the other for your specific house — not just which one they prefer to sell.
Mudjacking (pumping material under a slab to lift it), foam injection, and various proprietary systems all have their place — mostly for specific situations like sunken concrete flatwork or void-filling. For a house foundation that's settling unevenly, piers are the standard answer across the industry, and any contractor who tells you otherwise should be able to explain exactly why your house is the exception.
One more thing worth knowing: the number and placement of piers matters more than the brand name on them. A well-planned set of piers in the right spots, installed by an experienced crew, beats a premium product installed in the wrong places every time. That's why Chapter 4 exists — the plan matters more than the product.
You'll sometimes hear a contractor talk about interior piers. Most piers go around the outside perimeter of the foundation, where the crew can dig from the yard. But when the middle of a slab is dropping — the center of the house, far from any outside wall — the crew has to work from inside: cutting through the flooring and slab to install piers beneath the interior.
Interior work is messier, louder, and more disruptive — there's no way around that, and an honest contractor says so upfront. It also tends to cost more because of the extra labor and the flooring repair afterward. If your bid includes interior piers, ask the contractor to show you exactly why the interior needs support and not just the perimeter. Sometimes it's genuinely needed. Sometimes it's padding. The written plan from Chapter 4 is how you tell the difference.
The bottom line: concrete piers are the proven Texas standard; steel piers go deeper when the soil demands it. Either can be the right call. The right question isn't "which pier is best?" — it's "which pier is right for my house, and why?" If a contractor can't answer that second question clearly, keep shopping.
Including us. Especially us. A contractor who welcomes these questions is a contractor worth talking to. One who dodges them has told you everything you need to know.
1. Will you walk the whole property with me — inside and out — before you give me a number?
A real evaluation means the attic-to-foundation walk: inside rooms, outside walls, the roofline, the drainage. If someone prices your foundation from the curb or over the phone, they haven't evaluated anything.
2. What's causing my problem — and how do you know?
You're not buying piers; you're buying a diagnosis. The contractor should be able to point at the cause — the drainage, the dry side, the leak — and connect it to your symptoms in words you understand.
3. How many piers, exactly where, and why each one?
Vague pier counts are a red flag. Every pier should have a reason tied to a symptom or a measurement. "Twelve piers along the west wall because the elevation drops an inch and a half from the northwest corner" is an answer. "Twelve piers" is a guess.
4. What kind of pier are you proposing, and why that kind for my soil?
See Chapter 3. The answer should reference your house and your soil — not just what the company happens to sell.
5. Will I get the plan in writing before any work starts?
Pier locations, the method, the timeline, the total — in writing, before a shovel hits the ground. A contractor who won't write it down is a contractor planning to change it later.
6. Who's actually doing the work — your crew or somebody else's?
There's nothing wrong with subcontractors as a rule, but you deserve to know who's digging around your foundation and how long they've been doing it. Experience under houses is the whole ballgame.
7. What does your workmanship guarantee cover, and is it in writing?
Ask what it covers, what it doesn't, and what happens if a pier settles after the job. Get it in writing. (Ask us about ours when you call — we'll lay it out plainly before anything starts.)
8. What happens to my yard, landscaping, and plumbing during the work?
Pier work means digging — any honest contractor says so upfront. Ask how they protect landscaping, where the equipment goes, and what the yard looks like when they leave.
9. Can I talk to homeowners in my area you've worked for?
Local references from real jobs beat any brochure. A company with a real track record in your town is happy to connect you.
10. What happens if you find something different once you start?
Soil surprises happen. The question is whether the contractor has a plan for them — stop, show you, explain the options — or just keeps digging and adds to the bill.
Foundation bids are notoriously hard to compare, because no two contractors count piers the same way. Here's how to level the field: line up the written plans side by side and check four things. Pier count and locations — is one company proposing eight piers where another proposes fourteen for the same wall? Somebody's plan doesn't match the symptoms. Pier type — are you comparing concrete to concrete, or is one bid steel? What's included — cleanup, landscaping restoration, interior flooring repair, plumbing tests after the lift. A cheaper bid that excludes the messy parts isn't cheaper. The guarantee in writing — not the brochure version, the actual paperwork.
And here's the rule of thumb from decades of watching homeowners decide: throw out the highest bid if it can't explain why it's highest, and be deeply suspicious of the lowest bid if it can't explain why it's lowest. The honest bid is usually the one in the middle with the clearest paperwork.
The bottom line: you don't need to know foundations to hire a foundation contractor. You need to know how to interview one. Ask all ten, take notes, and compare answers between companies. The straight shooters will sound like each other. The salesmen will sound like nobody but themselves.
Most foundation contractors are honest people doing hard work. But the industry has its share of salesmen who get paid to close, not to diagnose. Here's how to spot them before they spot you.
The bottom line: trust the contractor who slows you down, not the one who speeds you up. The honest ones want you to get a second opinion — because they know what the second opinion will say.
This is the chapter most foundation companies hope you skip. Plenty of foundation symptoms are water problems wearing a foundation costume — and water problems get fixed with a shovel and a gutter, not a pier rig.
If a contractor tells you your house doesn't need piers, believe them — especially if they could have sold you piers instead. Here's what often solves it cheaper:
The single most common fix in North Texas. If your downspouts end at the foundation corners, extend them — with solid pipe or simple extensions — so roof water lands several feet from the house. One weekend, basic materials, and you've removed thousands of gallons a year from the soil that was swelling against your foundation.
Walk your foundation line. The soil should slope away from the house all the way around — no dips, no flower beds acting as swimming pools against the slab. Low spots get filled and re-sloped. This is unglamorous work that prevents an enormous share of foundation trouble.
Texas summers bake the soil, and the sunny sides of your house shrink first. A soaker hose laid in a loop around the foundation — run on a timer during drought — keeps soil moisture even so the ground doesn't pull away from one side. You're not watering a lawn; you're keeping the sponge under your house from drying out unevenly. Twelve to eighteen inches out from the foundation is the usual placement, and consistency matters more than volume.
A slow leak under a slab keeps one patch of soil permanently swollen. If your water bill creeps up for no reason, or one area near the house stays damp when everything else is dry, get the plumbing checked before anyone talks piers. Fix the leak, let the soil normalize, and re-evaluate.
A big tree within twenty feet of the house is drinking from your foundation's soil every day. You don't have to cut down every oak — but root barriers, selective trimming, and extra soaker attention on the tree side can balance what the tree takes.
Here's the part that matters: water management prevents new movement, but it can't undo movement that's already happened. If your slab has dropped an inch on the west side and the doors haven't latched in two years, gutters and soaker hoses will keep it from getting worse — they won't lift it back.
That's the honest handoff point, and it's exactly what a straight-shooting contractor tells you: "Let's fix your drainage first and watch it for a season. If the movement stops and the symptoms are livable, you just saved yourself a pier job. If the structure has settled past the point of coming back, then we talk piers — and your new drainage keeps the repair working for the long haul." Either way, the water work is never wasted. It just determines whether it's the whole fix or the first step.
The bottom line: a contractor who starts with your gutters and grading before mentioning piers is a contractor you can trust with piers later. Roughly speaking, if water caused it, water management can often fix it. Piers are for when the structure itself has moved and won't come back on its own. Knowing the difference is worth more than any sales pitch.
If you've never watched foundation work, the unknown is the scary part. Here's the plain-English version of what actually happens, so nothing surprises you.
You've already had the evaluation, asked your ten questions, and received the written plan — pier locations, method, timeline. The crew chief walks the plan with you before anything starts, marks the dig points, and confirms where equipment goes and what gets protected. If anything in the plan changed since the evaluation, this is when you hear about it, not mid-job.
The crew arrives, lays out the work area, and starts digging at each marked pier location — small, targeted holes tight to the foundation, not a trench around your house. Underground utilities get located and marked first; nobody digs blind. Expect noise, dirt, and a crew that knows exactly where it's going. By end of day, the holes are open and the first piers start going in.
This is the main event. Piers are driven at each location until they reach firm resistance, then the foundation is lifted — slowly, evenly, and in small increments, with measurements taken constantly. This is the part that separates experienced crews from everyone else: lifting a house is easy, lifting it evenly is the craft. Interior cracks may close up as the house comes back; that's normal and a good sign.
Be honest with yourself here: a house that's settled for years won't always come back to perfectly level, and a straight-shooting contractor tells you that upfront. The goal is stable, even support — getting the structure back where it belongs without creating new stress. "Maximum practical lift" is the honest phrase. Anyone promising factory-perfect level on a thirty-year-old house is selling, not explaining.
Fair warning: lift days are loud. You'll hear thumping, feel vibration through the floors, and see dust shake loose from places you forgot existed. Pictures should come off the walls, anything fragile on shelves should come down, and if you work from home, plan to be elsewhere on lift days.
The good news: as the house comes back up, you'll often watch old symptoms reverse in real time — a door that hasn't latched in years suddenly clicks shut, a diagonal sheetrock crack visibly narrows. Some cracks won't fully close, and that's normal; cosmetic patching and paint come after the structure is stable, not before. Don't let anyone talk you into repainting before the lift — that's putting makeup on before the surgery.
Holes get backfilled and compacted, the site gets cleaned, and landscaping that was moved gets put back. Then the important part: the final walkthrough with you. The crew chief walks every pier location, shows you the finished work, re-checks the elevations, and makes sure you're satisfied before anyone calls it done. Ask every question you have — this is what the walkthrough is for.
Keep up the water management from Chapter 6 — gutters, grading, soaker hoses in drought. Piers fix the structure; consistent moisture keeps the soil from starting the whole cycle over again. And keep your written plan and guarantee paperwork somewhere you'll find them. If anything ever looks off, you call the same number and a familiar crew comes back out.
The bottom line: most residential jobs take a few days, not a few weeks. The pattern is always the same — plan, dig, drive, lift, clean, walk through. If a contractor's process doesn't include a written plan up front and a walkthrough at the end, that's not a process. It's just digging.
You've just read what took us over a decade under North Texas houses to learn. Here's what we want you to do with it:
Go look at your house. Walk the foundation line. Check the doors. Mark the cracks with a pencil and a date. Look at where your downspouts dump. You now know more about foundations than most homeowners will ever learn — and you'll know it the next time anyone talks piers at your kitchen table.
Fix the cheap stuff first. Gutters, grading, soaker hoses — Chapter 6 is the highest-value section of this whole report. A weekend of water management prevents more foundation trouble than anything else you can do.
And when you want a professional set of eyes — whether something's worrying you or you just want to know where you stand — call us. Our evaluation is free, it's the full inside-and-out walk from Chapter 4, and if your house doesn't need piers, we'll tell you that straight and show you what to watch instead.
That's the Metro way. It was the Metro way ~25–30 years ago when this report was first published, and it's the Metro way now that the brand is back. Same straight talk. Same standard. Ask us about our workmanship guarantee when you call — we'll lay it out in writing before anything starts.
Free evaluation. Straight answers. No pressure, ever.
You've got the knowledge. Now get the free evaluation — and ask us the 10 questions from Chapter 4. We welcome them.
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