Pre-1960s homes · Crawlspace craft · Honest scopes
Pier & beam foundation repair, by people who actually crawl under the house.
Monte Vista bungalows, Hyde Park craftsmans, courthouse-square Victorians — Central Texas keeps its oldest homes on wood beams over a crawlspace. Repairing them is a different craft from slab work: beams, sills, blocks, and moisture, measured like everything else we do.
The system, and how it ages
Four parts, four ways to sag.
A pier-and-beam house is a wood floor on joists, the joists on beams, the beams on piers or blocks, all over an open crawlspace. Every layer can move: piers settle or tilt in the clay, blocks crush or walk out of plumb, beams sag or rot where moisture finds them, and sills decay where the house meets the perimeter. Each failure has its own fix and its own price — which is why an honest pier-and-beam quote names the layer, not just a number. The full symptom checklist lives in our guide to the signs a pier & beam foundation needs repair.
Moisture is the quiet villain in most of it. A crawlspace that holds water — bad drainage outside, a plumbing leak underneath, blocked vents — rots beams from below while the clay heaves the piers around them. Half of pier-and-beam repair is carpentry; the other half is making the crawlspace boring again.
What the work actually is
The four scopes, from cheapest to biggest.
Shim & block adjustment
Re-leveling the floor by adjusting what the beams sit on — steel shims, new blocks, plumbed piers. The most common scope, often done in a day against a floor elevation map.
Beam & sill repair
Sistering, reinforcing, or replacing beams and sill plates that sagged or rotted. Real carpentry, in tight quarters — the craft half of this trade.
Crawlspace moisture control
Grading, drainage, and ventilation corrections so the new wood stays dry and the clay under the piers stops cycling. Skipping this is how the same repair gets sold twice.
Perimeter & interior piers
When the concrete grade beam or interior pier footings themselves have settled, pier support goes in beneath them — the same driven-to-proof methods as our slab work, with the same lifetime warranty.
Most houses need one or two of these, not all four. The inspection — including the crawl — sorts which, before anyone talks money.
The honest price difference
Don't accept a slab quote for a crawlspace problem.
It's the most expensive mix-up in this trade, and we see it monthly: a pier-and-beam home with a sagging beam gets quoted perimeter piers like a slab — a five-figure answer to a four-figure question. Crawlspace scopes routinely cost a fraction of slab piering because nothing gets excavated; the fix happens at the layer that failed. If a bid for your 1940s house never mentions the crawlspace, that's your cue to ask the ten questions — or get a second opinion that includes a crawl. Ours is free.
Where we do this work most: the pre-war streets of San Antonio (Monte Vista, Beacon Hill, Jefferson), central Austin (Hyde Park, Crestview, Travis Heights), old-town San Marcos, and the courthouse squares of Seguin, Lockhart, and Georgetown.
Money, plainly
What pier & beam repair costs.
Shim-and-block re-levels and modest beam repairs commonly land in the low-to-mid four figures; bigger beam replacement and combined scopes climb from there; and full perimeter piering — only when the grade beam itself settled — prices like our slab work, by the pier. Moisture corrections are usually hundreds, not thousands, and they're what make the rest last. As with everything we do, the inspection produces a firm scoped number, and “your slope is character, not structure” is a real possible outcome — we deliver it regularly.
Straight answers
Pier & beam questions, answered straight.
From real jobs and inspections
Under-the-house work, documented like all our work.
Got an old house doing old-house things?
Free inspection — including the crawl — with a written answer: repair, monitor, or relax. We love these houses; we won't scare you about yours.