Texas Gulf Coast’s climate and soil conditions are difficult on pier and beam foundations. Moisture, shifting soil, and high humidity can all affect your home’s stability. In such conditions, you should keep an eye out for uneven floors, doors that don’t close properly, or cracks in walls and ceilings. These are often signs that your foundation needs attention.
Pier and Beam Foundation Repair in Houston: The Advantages
Pier and beam is a form of foundation that has a distinct advantage over the simpler concrete slab variety, and those advantages even extend to maintenance, because repairing a pier and beam foundation is easier by its very nature.
While those monolithic giants, the concrete slabs, are basically single units bearing all the weight of the house, pier and beam foundations distribute the weight differently. Just as in a car each wheel has its own suspension, so with pier and beam there are units in different areas.
The “piers” are substantial concrete posts embedded in the ground for stability. The beams are tough pieces of timber that sit on the piers, with the house resting on them. This creates a space below the house which enables tradespeople to put utility materials there, such as cabling and plumbing. That in turn makes it easier to maintain those items because maintenance workers have a crawl space in which to work. This also creates natural ventilation, which is good for a building, even underneath.
An added advantage which is particularly helpful on the Texas Gulf Coast is that flood waters can sail underneath the building, often quite harmlessly, whereas if there was no space the water would slop upwards and get into the house.
So, there are plenty of good points, but few things in life are perfect and from time to time, houses may need pier and beam leveling and pier and beam foundation repair. At Terrafirm Leveling, we offer these services because we are foundation specialists. This is a highly specialized area that regular builders are not usually equipped for. We have been working with concrete for more than 25 years and we have carried out remedial and maintenance work on foundations in all kinds of houses.
Our services range from house lifting and moving to foundation inspection and leveling or installing new pilings. It’s all about creating an infrastructure on which the stability of the building depends, and we have helped house owners across the area including Houston with structural issues they probably never imagined when they bought the house. Even getting a detailed survey done can miss foundation problems, because this is something most people take for granted. You’ll look at the roof and the walls, the windows and doors, and check for damp and decay, for the foundations? Not so much. They pretty much take care of themselves, that is the common belief.
In fact, foundations can have a limited life of less than 100 years, and someone has to keep an eye on them because if the foundations are weakened, the whole building is vulnerable.
Contact Us for Pier and Beam Foundation Repair in Houston
If you’ve got pier and beam foundations, that’s a good start. Let’s just make sure the set-up is as good as it should be, and if it needs repairing, we can do that, no problem. If you’re not sure what you need or even if you have an issue, we can come and check it out, and then deal with it in whatever way is necessary. Read Less
