Sticking doors and windows in Cibolo

Why Cibolo ground racks a door frame

The soil series on record for Cibolo is Tinn, rated very high shrink-swell, with a linear extensibility of 9.8 percent, the measure of how much a soil changes length between wet and dry. Houston Black, the classic expansive clay of this area, is present here too. Tinn is creek bottom clay, low ground that fills with water quickly and drains slowly, so it holds its swell late and then lets go of it in a hurry. A slab edge sitting on that does not move straight down. It tips, and a tipped slab carries the stud wall with it, so the rectangle a door was hung into stops being a rectangle. Here is what that expansive clay does at your door.

A door works because two rectangles agree with each other. Move one corner of the slab a quarter inch and the wall above leans with it, the opening turns into a slight parallelogram, and one top corner closes on the door. The door is unchanged. Its hole is not. That is why clay sticking binds at a corner while humidity sticking rubs along a whole edge, and why the doors arrive as a group. The national guide to sticking doors runs the full pattern test. This page is what that test looks like on Cibolo ground.

The August stick that frees up, and the one that does not

Three versions show up here, and they are not worth the same money.

The first binds through the dry end of summer and works again after a wet winter. Bottomland clay holds its water late and gives it up hard, so the swing here runs wide and runs late. A slab edge riding it racks the frames above one way, then back. Steady perimeter moisture through drought narrows that swing, and nothing else is needed.

The second binds in August and is still binding in March, after the winter rain has had every chance to put the clay back. The ground returned and the slab did not. That is settlement, and it is worth measuring.

The third is the slow one. The door binds a little earlier each year and a little harder, and the gap over the latch keeps widening. Progressive movement never announces itself in one season. You only see it across several.

Which elevation it concentrates on

Sticking doors in Cibolo almost never spread evenly around a house. They gather, and where they gather is the map. South and west walls take the most sun, dry first and drop first, so their doors usually go first. On lots falling toward the low, creek-side edge, bottomland clay holds water there after the rest has let go, leaving the far edge to drop away from a corner that is still up.

Windows set one trap. Aluminum frames expand in direct sun, so a window that binds on an August afternoon and slides the next morning is heat, not the slab. The ones that matter bind at the same corner in any weather, in the same wall as your sticking doors. In Cibolo's older Old Town stock, the wall around the frame usually cracks before the sash ever jams.

Mark every sticking door and window on a rough floor plan with the month it started. Gathered on one wall or one corner, that is a floor worth measuring. Scattered, humidity is the better bet. Our Cibolo service area page covers the construction side, the lot-edge fill seams and the year three to seven timing.

When to measure

Measure at the extremes, not in between. The most informative reading comes at the dry end of summer, while the clay has given up the most water and the slab sits at its lowest. The second comes after a wet winter has put it back. Two dated readings across that swing separate a slab that moves and returns from one that moves and stays.

If you are only doing it once, do it while the doors are actually sticking. Planing the door first erases the evidence and does not stop the frame racking. An ICC-certified inspector reads the floor across the whole house, so the elevation map either lines up with your marked doors or it does not. The free inspection costs nothing whichever way it comes out.

What happens if the floor confirms it

On ground like this a seasonal sticker is ordinary, which is part of why about a third of our inspections end with nothing to repair. When the readings do confirm settlement under the cluster, the work is piers under the low sections. We set steel piers and hybrid piers, nothing else, at $600 to $1,000 per pier, and the price follows the count, which is why a settled corner and a full elevation are different numbers. Concrete piers we do not offer and never have. The cost guide walks through how a count gets built, and slab foundation repair covers the work itself.

The piers come with a lifetime transferable warranty, and the elevations get re-read at a performance follow-up inspection every year. In Cibolo the reading worth waiting for is the one taken at the dry end of the next summer, because that is the season that produced the first one.