Pre-1960s homes · Crawlspace craft · Honest scopes
Pier and beam foundation repair, by people who actually crawl under the house.
Pier and beam foundation repair is a different craft from slab work — Monte Vista bungalows, Hyde Park craftsmans, courthouse-square Victorians: Central Texas keeps its oldest homes on wood beams over a crawlspace, and fixing them means beams, sills, blocks, and moisture, measured like everything else we do.
Financing available through Acorn Finance — check your rate in minutes, no credit-score impact →
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 — crawl space moisture control walks exactly how that’s done here: grading, drainage, downspout routing, and repairing what the damp already chewed. If it’s the crawl space itself you’re worried about — moisture, sagging floors, whether you need “encapsulation” — our crawl space foundation repair page answers those honestly for Central Texas.
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. Not sure which foundation you even have? Pier and beam vs slab shows how to tell in five minutes.
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. The 2026 pier & beam cost breakdown walks every scope and range. 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.
Financing through Acorn Finance, an independent third party. Checking your rate won’t affect your credit score.
Go deeper
Everything else we've written about pier and beam.
From a Google review
“These guys are awesome. They built a new Pier and Beam Foundation from scratch. Best Foundation Repair Company in San Antonio.”
Straight answers
Pier & beam questions, answered straight.
Old houses, real numbers
Crockett soil and the crawlspace problem.
Many older pier-and-beam homes sit on Crockett — a “claypan” soil the USDA rates with a coefficient of linear extensibility (COLE 0.07–0.10) and “very slow” permeability.
In plain English: a COLE that high means the clay really does change volume as it wets and dries, and very slow drainage means water lingers under the house. Together that’s seasonal heave plus a damp crawlspace — the two things a pier-and-beam inspection is really there to check.
See the Crockett series (COLE & drainage) at USDA →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.
Now booking free inspections in Central Texas.