House Leveling in New Braunfels

Leveling versus stabilizing

Two different goals get called house leveling. Stabilizing means installing supports so the house stops moving where it is. Leveling means also lifting the settled portion back toward where it started. Most jobs in Comal County do both, but the lift is the part with judgment calls in it.

A house that has settled two inches at one corner over twenty years has adjusted to that position. Drywall has been patched, doors have been planed, the brick has cracked and been tuck-pointed, the drain lines have taken on a new slope. Lifting it all the way back can open new cracks, bind doors that were fine, and stress plumbing. An experienced crew lifts to the point where the structure is sound and the floors are within normal tolerance, which is usually most but not all of the original drop.

The contractor should tell you the target before the lift starts, in inches at each pier, and the elevation survey afterward should show what was achieved.

Leveling a slab home

After piers are installed along the settled section, a bottle jack goes on top of each pier under the grade beam. The crew lifts in small increments, moving from jack to jack so the beam comes up evenly rather than bending at one point. Someone inside watches the cracks and the laser readings. When the target is reached, shims and caps are set, the jacks are released, and the house bears on the piers.

On the east side of New Braunfels, where the slabs are on deep clay, a lift of an inch and a half to two inches on a settled edge is routine. On the limestone side, lifts are usually smaller because the settlement was smaller; the problem there is more often a fill pocket under one part of the house.

Interior low spots that cannot be reached from the perimeter get interior piers through the slab, or in the case of a void without structural drop, polyurethane injection to raise the slab section a fraction of an inch. Mudjacking with a cement slurry is the older version of the same idea and is still used on driveways and patios.

Leveling a pier and beam home

Pier and beam leveling is more forgiving. The crew works from the crawlspace, jacking individual beams and setting shims on the posts or pads below. Because every support point can be adjusted independently, an old house on Academy Avenue or along Hunter Road in Gruene can be brought very close to level without the wholesale lift a slab needs.

The limiting factor is the wood. A beam that has sagged for fifty years has taken a permanent curve. Jacking it straight can crack it. In those cases the fix is a sister beam alongside it, and the floor above is leveled with shims on the subfloor rather than by forcing the old beam.

Expect plaster and drywall touch-ups after any meaningful pier and beam lift, and expect a few doors to need rehanging in the other direction.

Costs and what affects them

Leveling is priced through the supports that make it possible. For a slab, that is the pier count: pressed concrete piers at roughly $400 to $800 each and steel at $1,200 to $3,000 each, with most houses needing eight to fifteen. For a pier and beam home, a shim-and-level job runs $1,500 to $4,000 and climbs with new pads, posts and wood replacement.

Add-ons that show up on real estimates: a hydrostatic plumbing test before and after the lift, usually a few hundred dollars; interior slab breakouts; and drywall or brick repair after the lift, which the foundation contractor typically does not do.

A house that is level but still sitting on the same wet-dry clay cycle will drift again. Leveling without addressing the gutters, grading and watering is a temporary result.