Ten things worth doing for your foundation

Foundations in this part of Texas live on soil that moves. It swells when it is wet and shrinks when it dries, and it does both on a seasonal cycle. A foundation is designed for that, which is why the design starts from real soil tests taken on your own lot rather than from an assumption.

What the design cannot account for is what happens around the house afterwards. Most of the foundation trouble people experience is not a structural failure. It is a moisture management problem that took a few years to show up.

The principle behind all of it

Keep the moisture level in the soil around your house as even as you can, all year. Not dry, not soaked. Even. Almost every item below is a version of that single idea.

Ten things worth doing

• Keep gutters clear and make sure downspouts discharge well away from the house rather than at the corner of the slab.
• Check that the ground slopes away from the foundation on every side. Soil settles over time and can quietly reverse a grade that was correct on handover.
• Water the soil around the house during long dry spells. It feels strange and it is the single most effective thing on this list, because it prevents the shrink half of the cycle.
• Water evenly on all sides. Watering one side and not the other is worse than watering neither, because it is differential movement rather than uniform movement that cracks things.
• Keep large trees at a sensible distance. Mature root systems draw a surprising amount of moisture out of the soil near a house.
• Watch for pooling after heavy rain. Anywhere water sits within a few feet of the slab is a place to fix the grade.
• Look for a plumbing leak if one area stays damp with no explanation. A slow under slab leak is a moisture problem that never takes a season off.
• Keep flower beds against the house from becoming reservoirs. Beds that are watered daily and edged to hold water put a wet band right where you want an even one.
• Walk the perimeter once or twice a year and look at the slab edge, and at doors and windows for sticking, which is often the first symptom anyone actually notices.
• Photograph any crack you find with something for scale and a date, then photograph it again in six months. What matters is whether it is moving, not that it exists.

Which cracks matter

Hairline cracks in a slab are extremely common and usually mean nothing at all. Concrete cures and shrinks and small cracks come with the territory.

What is worth attention is a crack that is widening over time, one where the two sides are no longer level with each other, or one that appears alongside other symptoms at once, like doors that have started to stick and gaps opening at the top of a door frame. That combination is a pattern rather than a coincidence.

When to call someone

If several symptoms appear together, or a crack is measurably moving between your photographs, get it looked at rather than watching it for another year. Foundation problems caught early are a drainage correction. Caught late they are a great deal more than that.

The routine version of this is about fifteen minutes twice a year with a phone camera, which is a modest amount of attention for the most expensive component of the building.