Foundation Repair in New Braunfels, Texas

Why New Braunfels is hard on foundations

New Braunfels sits on the Balcones Fault zone, and Interstate 35 roughly traces the line. East of the highway the ground is Blackland Prairie: deep, dark Houston Black and Heiden clays that swell when they take on water and shrink hard when they dry out. West of the highway the Edwards Plateau takes over, with Glen Rose and Edwards limestone a few feet down, caliche, and thin cherty soils. A house in Westpointe and a house in Vintage Oaks can be eight miles apart and sit on completely different ground.

The clay side moves the most. A slab poured on Houston Black clay can see the soil under the edges shrink several inches during a summer like 2022 or 2023, when the city sat in Stage 3 drought for most of a year. The perimeter drops, the center stays put, and the brick veneer cracks in a stair-step pattern along the mortar joints. When the fall rains come the clay swells back, but rarely to exactly where it started. Repeat that for fifteen years and you have a slab that is out of level by two inches at the garage corner.

The rock side has its own problems. Homes in Oak Run, Rockwall Ranch and out toward Canyon Lake are often built on cut-and-fill lots where part of the slab bears on limestone and part on compacted fill. Fill settles; rock does not. The result is differential movement at the line where one meets the other, and that shows up as a long diagonal crack through the garage or a hump in the tile.

The City of New Braunfels saw foundation repair permits more than double between 2018 and mid-2023. Most of that work was on the east side of town.

Foundation repair services

The contractor we route your call to handles the full range of residential foundation work common to Central Texas. Each service below has its own page with method details and realistic price ranges.

• Foundation repair: the overview of how a slab or pier and beam home gets evaluated and fixed. See /foundation-repair.
• Slab foundation repair: pressed concrete piers, steel piers and drilled bell-bottom piers for post-tension and conventional slabs. See /slab-foundation-repair.
• Pier and beam repair: shimming, sister beams, joist and sill replacement for the older homes downtown, in Gruene and in Seguin. See /pier-and-beam-repair.
• House leveling: bringing a settled home back toward its original elevation, with a frank discussion of what can and cannot be recovered. See /house-leveling.
• Drainage correction: French drains, surface grading, gutter and downspout work, and root barriers that stop the wet-dry cycle at the source. See /drainage-correction.
• Foundation inspection: a measured elevation survey, a written summary, and a referral to a licensed professional engineer when a transaction or a lender needs one. See /foundation-inspection.
• Foundation crack repair: sorting cosmetic cracks from structural ones in brick, drywall and the slab itself. See /foundation-crack-repair.

What happens when you call

You call (830) 626-9042 or send the short form on this site. We answer, take down the address and what you are seeing, and route it to the foundation contractor who covers your area. They call you back, usually the same business day, to set an inspection time.

At the inspection, a technician walks the exterior, checks the brick and the slab edge, and takes floor elevations inside with a laser or a water level, typically on a grid every eight to ten feet. That produces an elevation map showing where the house is high and where it has dropped. They look at drainage, downspouts, trees within fifteen feet of the slab, and any plumbing signs like a damp spot in the yard.

You get a written estimate from the contractor with a pier plan, a count, a per-pier price and a total. If the house does not need piers, they will tell you that. A lot of calls in this area end with a recommendation to fix drainage and watch it for a season, and that is a legitimate outcome.

New Braunfels Foundation Pros does not perform the work, does not mark up the estimate and does not take a cut of your repair. We are a referral service, and we say so on every page. The contractor you meet is independent, licensed where licensing applies, and carries general liability insurance.

Signs your foundation is moving

Most homeowners in Comal County notice the small stuff first. Doors to the back bedrooms start sticking in late summer. A hairline crack over the front door grows from four inches to a foot. The caulk line between the brick and the window frame opens up on one side of the house and not the other.

The signs worth a call: stair-step cracks in brick wider than a quarter inch, cracks in drywall that run diagonally from a door or window corner, a separation between the brick frieze board and the soffit, floors that visibly slope or feel hollow under tile, a garage slab that has dropped away from the house slab, and a gap between the soil and the slab edge you can fit your fingers in during August.

Signs that usually are not structural: a single vertical hairline crack in the slab in the garage, cracks in the mortar that stay the same width year after year, and shrinkage cracks in a new home during its first two summers.

Service area

We take calls from across Comal County and the neighboring parts of Guadalupe and Hays Counties. In New Braunfels that means the historic districts downtown and on Sophienburg Hill, Gruene, Westpointe, Mission Hills, Oak Run, Rockwall Ranch, Vintage Oaks, River Chase, Creekside, Veramendi, Meyer Ranch and the FM 1101 and FM 725 corridors.

Outside the city we cover San Marcos and the Hays County line, Seguin and McQueeney, Schertz, Cibolo, Marion and Garden Ridge, and the Canyon Lake communities of Startzville, Sattler, Canyon Lake Hills and Mystic Shores, plus Spring Branch and Bulverde along Highway 46 and US 281.