Foundation Inspection in New Braunfels, TX
We measure your floor elevation with a manometer and hand you a written report on the cause, severity, and fix, built for New Braunfels' shifting clay.
New Braunfels Foundation Repair HQ has inspected foundations across New Braunfels, Texas for over 18 years. A foundation inspection is not a quick look at a crack. It is a measured elevation survey of your whole floor, a documented record of the cracks and movement inside and outside the home, and a written report that tells you the cause, how serious it is, and what the fix should be. On the expansive clay and Balcones Fault soils around New Braunfels, that report is the difference between guessing at a problem and knowing exactly what the ground under your house is doing.
Signs you need this repair
When to Get a Foundation Inspection
Most homeowners call for an inspection because something has changed in the house. Any one of these is a reason to have the foundation measured before the next wet-dry season pushes the movement further:
- Stair-step cracks appearing in exterior brick or interior drywall, especially above doors and windows.
- Doors and windows that have started to stick, drag, or no longer latch.
- Floors that feel uneven underfoot, or a spot where a dropped ball rolls to one wall.
- Gaps opening between the walls and the ceiling, or between the cabinets and the wall.
- A chimney or a room addition pulling away from the main structure.
- A slab or garage-floor crack that keeps widening.
There are two other times an inspection matters even when nothing looks wrong. The first is a real-estate transaction: if you are buying a New Braunfels home, a foundation inspection tells you what you are taking on before you close, and if you are selling, a clean report or a documented repair removes the question that scares off buyers. The second is after a long drought or a heavy storm season, when the clay has swung hard in one direction and small movement can start. Catching it early usually means fewer piers and a smaller repair. See the signs a crack is structural rather than cosmetic if you are trying to judge how urgent a crack is.
What a Foundation Inspection Includes
The core of the inspection is an elevation survey. A specialist runs a manometer, a water-level instrument, or a laser level across the floor of the home and records the height of the slab at points throughout every room. Those readings map how far the foundation has dropped or heaved from one corner to another, measured in inches. A house can look level to the eye and still show two or three inches of fall across a room once it is on paper.
Around the survey, the inspection documents the evidence. The specialist records the location, width, and direction of cracks in the slab, brick, drywall, and stone, notes which doors and windows have racked out of square, checks the grade and drainage around the foundation, and looks for signs of a plumbing leak feeding water to the clay in one spot. On a pier-and-beam home, that includes going under the house to check the piers, beams, and joists.
All of it ends in a written report: what the elevations show, the most likely cause of the movement, how severe it is, and the repair we would recommend, whether that is pressed piers under a settling slab, drainage correction, or in many cases monitoring rather than immediate work. This is where a foundation inspection differs from the general home inspection done during a sale. A home inspector looks at the whole house and will flag a foundation concern, but does not run an elevation survey or diagnose the soil behavior behind it. A foundation inspection goes deep on that one system and gives you the measured basis for a repair decision.
Our Foundation Inspection Process
Foundation Inspection Cost in New Braunfels
Recent Foundation Assessments
The assessments we run around New Braunfels tend to fall into a few patterns: a corner dropping on a cut-and-fill lot in a newer subdivision, a slow slab leak swelling the clay under one room, and older pier-and-beam homes near the river settling unevenly over decades. The image below shows what an assessment documents, the settled side of a foundation mapped against the elevation it should sit at, as an illustration of the before-and-after an inspection captures.
In a good number of these assessments the report does not call for major work. When the movement is small and stable, the honest recommendation is drainage correction and monitoring, and we say so in writing.
Call (325) 880-1512Why Choose New Braunfels Foundation Repair HQ
We focus only on foundations, which is why the specialist who measures your home can tell you what the numbers mean and where you sit relative to a repair. If you want to understand the whole picture first, start with our overview of foundation repair in New Braunfels.