Crawlspace repair in Schertz, read from under the house

What a crawlspace inspection in Schertz looks at

Two passes, and they have to agree. From above, the elevation survey reads floor heights across the house to a tenth of an inch. A slope you can feel underfoot usually means an inch or more of difference, and feel on its own misleads often enough that nothing gets concluded before the readings exist. From below, an inspector crawls the space and reads what the survey can only infer: beam sag, sill condition where wood sits closest to damp soil, support blocks settled into the dirt, shim stacks that have walked, and the moisture picture around all of it. A floor that reads low over a sagging beam is a different job from a floor that reads low over sound framing, which points instead at the supports or the soil holding them. You get the result in writing either way, including no repair needed. The free inspection covers both passes, and the crawl is part of it.

The repair scope at beams, sills, blocks and shims

Most of the work happens at crawl space level with no excavation. Re-shimming and setting new support blocks brings a settled run of floor back toward plane, and that is where the majority of Schertz crawl calls end. Where a shim stack has crushed or a block has sunk into softened soil, the support gets replaced and whatever let it sink gets corrected at the same time, because replacing the block alone buys a few seasons. Beams get sistered or replaced where sag has set in, sills get replaced where moisture has taken the wood, and added support points go in where a span carries more than it was framed to carry. Our pier and beam repair page walks the whole scope.

Piers are the exception, not the rule. Where a perimeter beam has genuinely settled and the ground under it will not hold, steel and hybrid piers carry the load down to bearing at $600 to $1,000 each, with a lifetime transferable warranty on the piers. Steel and hybrid are the two pier types we install. The wood scope gets documented in writing with the rest of the estimate, and the cost guide breaks the ranges down by scope.

What restoration means next to repair

Repair is the structural half. Supports reset, beams and sills made sound, level restored where the readings say it moved. Restoration is the wider word, and most companies use it for repair plus putting back what time and water took out: decayed subfloor sections, joist ends gone soft, insulation that fell into the dirt, debris cleared so the space can dry. The two overlap, and a quote that uses one word for both is where homeowners lose track of what they are buying.

Ask for the line items separated into three groups. Which lines change the elevation readings, which lines replace wood that has lost strength, and which lines are cleanup. All three can be worth doing. Only the first two decide whether the floor stops moving. A yearly performance follow-up inspection is standing practice after any repair we do, which is how that gets proven instead of assumed.

Moisture under a Schertz crawl space

A crawl space sits on open dirt, so the ground is the moisture source, not the air. Wood loses strength well before it looks rotten, and a sill that reads fine to the eye can give under a thumb. The fixes that earn their keep are the ordinary ones: grading that falls away from the skirting, downspouts discharging past the drip line, vents that are actually open, and ground cover where bare soil stays damp. Cibolo Creek threads through town and pulls the low-lying older sections through the widest moisture swings, which is part of why two houses on the same Schertz street can read very differently under the floor. Our crawl space moisture control page has the sequence we work through. Full encapsulation, sealing the space in plastic, is a humid-Southeast system and we do not sell it here.

Why Barbarosa clay moves a crawl space differently than a slab

The soil series on record for Schertz is Barbarosa, with a linear extensibility of 7.5 percent, which this site reads as high shrink-swell. Barbarosa is clay over an old gravel terrace. The clay works with the wet-dry cycle while the gravel below it drains, so the top few feet carry nearly all the movement. Sunev, Houston Black and Lewisville soils are also present around Schertz, and which of them sits under any given lot is a question for the readings, not for a map.

Here is the part that belongs to crawl spaces. A slab spreads the weight of the house across a whole footprint and moves as one stiff plate, so clay movement reads as a tilt. A crawl space concentrates that same weight onto a grid of small bearing points, most of them shallow, sitting in exactly the few feet of soil doing all the breathing, and each one is free to move on its own schedule. That is why a crawl space reports seasonal clay sooner than a slab does, and reports it as bounce and local dips rather than one long slope. How the same clay behaves under the town’s slab stock is on the Schertz foundation repair page.

What the free inspection settles

The inspection is free, and it stays free whether the answer is a scope or nothing. About a third of ours end with no repair needed, and a crawl space is a common place for that verdict, because a bouncy floor over a walked shim stack reads alarming and fixes cheaply. ICC-certified inspectors run both the crawl and the survey, so the person under your house is the one reading the numbers. If work does follow, you get a dated elevation map to measure the next one against.