Repair My Foundation-A Homeowner's Look at the Options

If you’ve been trying to get a grasp on foundation repair jargon and have been hearing the term “bell bottom piers”, the Du-West website has a pretty good explaination. It has nothing to do with pants. There is also a drawing on the site to give you a visual idea of the process.
Bell bottom piers [...]

Dudes, check your websites now and then.
If you are going to say you have a great reputation and include a link to your Better Business Bureau, you might want to make sure that when a potential customer clicks on that link it doesn’t take them to a page on the BBB site that says your [...]

It’s not very often that a word used on a foundation repair contractor’s website sends me running for the dictionary. It did today, but more on that in a moment. OK, if you just can’t wait, the word is “thixotropy.”
If you live in a part of the country where you are bombarded with commercials for [...]

I’ve been talking about using soaker hoses to keep the soil around my foundation from completely drying up during this blazing hot and dry summer. If you have shrink-swell clay soil it can shrink away from your concrete slab during dry periods and possibly cause damage.
This morning, I ran across the website of a [...]

The Branyon and Houston-Black clay soils that my neighborhood sits atop heaves and breaks up streets in addition to foundations. The street two blocks behind me is getting an extreme makeover.

This street feeds a nearby school and takes a fair amount of traffic. School buses, heavy city trucks and normal traffic takes it’s toll [...]

My concrete slab foundation sits on Branyon clay. A couple of blocks away there are areas of Houston-Black and Lewisville silty clay. None of this is happy news.
How did I aquire this fascinating knowledge? Why, from the Web Soil Survey tool on the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service website.
The survey says the “linear extensibility”, engineer [...]

I’ve noticed that the soaker hose that runs along the west side of my concrete slab foundation is out of pressure before it reaches the end. The trip from the faucet to the tip of the hose is about 70 feet. I’m turning the faucet on hard enough that the first 20 feet of soaker [...]

Business is good for area foundation repair contractors because the drought is so bad. The same expansive clay soils that are now shrinking from lack of water and moving home foundations are also causing water mains to shift and break at the city level.
For homeowners it’s even more important to keep those soaker hoses going [...]