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

I’ve been doing quite a bit of cosmetic fix-up inside the house over the last 10 months or so since I had root barriers installed. At the same time I had large shrubs removed from the west side of the slab foundation.
In the meantime I’ve been fixing drywall and painting. There were some small wall [...]

This little blog is written from the Dallas, Texas part of the globe which happens to be in one of the busiest areas for foundation repair companies. Why?
Most of the residential neighborhoods are built on what used to be black prairie farmland.  Where once they grew cotton they now grow housing developments planted in the [...]

Another thing Tom the Contractor suggested for reversing the loss of moisture under my slab foundation after the root barriers were installed was to rehydrate the soil. That’s a fancy word for squirting water into the dirt under the house.

One of his crew went all around the foundation with machine similar to a power washer [...]

The structural engineer who inspected my concrete slab foundation recommended tree root barriers be installed to stop foundation settlement due to loss of moisture in the clay soil that my home sits on. The thinking is that trees can suck a lot of water from under a foundation and contribute to the shrinking of clay [...]

We just got back home from a short vacation to Ruidoso, NM. It rained some four inches while we were away, a very good thing in view of the ongoing drought in our part of the world. Pulling into the driveway we noticed little wire and plastic flags in a line from the street to [...]

We had a bid from Tom the Contractor to install four root barriers to stop the underground tentacles of nearby trees from sucking moisture out from under our concrete slab foundation. We accepted his proposal and are tentatively scheduled to have the work done next week. His crew will also dig out a row of [...]

The inspection I had done on my concrete foundation calls for one root barrier to go between the slab and one live oak tree that is 12 feet from a corner of the home. One of the contractors I called for bids thinks I should have four of them. Two of them for other trees [...]

The structural engineer who inspected my foundation Monday is recommending a root barrier be installed in a back corner of the yard to keep roots from a nearby live oak tree away from my concrete slab foundation. They are also called root walls and root caps. The idea is to cut any roots that are [...]

You hear a lot about tree roots causing concrete foundation problems for houses that sit on expansive clay soils and may be wondering how that can be. In my travels around the Internet I’ve learned the trouble is two-fold. Large trees can suck huge amounts of water from the soil. If thirsty roots get under [...]

Given the amount of concrete foundation repair that happens in the Lone Star State, the Texas Section of the American Society of Civil Engineers has published a set of guidelines for the evaluation and repair of residential foundations. The document includes a couple of paragraphs regarding the effects of trees and shrubs near the foundation:
7.3.2 [...]