Foundation repair in Westover Hills, where limestone sits close under the slab.

That difference decides how we work out here. The soil barely swells, so when a Westover Hills slab moves, the cause is usually water going somewhere it should not, a trench or service line under the pad, or a thin spot where the rock pitches away under one corner. We measure the floor and name the mechanism before anyone talks about piers.

FAR WEST SIDE AREAS WE SERVE, FROM WESTOVER HILLS AND THE HIGHWAY 151 MEDICAL DISTRICT TO THE GREAT NORTHWEST, SILVER OAKS, HUNTERS RANCH AND HERITAGE NORTHWEST, ABOUT TWENTY MINUTES WEST OF OUR VANCE JACKSON SHOP.

The ground under the far west side

Westover Hills sits on shallow Eckrant clay over fractured limestone.

Westover Hills is a district of San Antonio built around the Highway 151 and Loop 1604 interchange, and the ground under it is not the deep expansive clay that drives most foundation work in this metro. The soil survey maps the dominant unit as Eckrant cobbly clay on 1 to 8 percent slopes, roughly 85 percent Eckrant with about 7 percent Brackett and 5 percent Bexar in the mix. Eckrant is a shallow soil full of rock fragments sitting on fractured limestone, and its linear extensibility is 5.7 percent. Linear extensibility is simply how far the clay swells when it takes on water and shrinks when it dries, so a low number means the ground moves very little by itself. The Branyon and Houston Black clays under much of the rest of Bexar County run about twice that figure.

What replaces shrink and swell here is bearing and water. The soil layer over rock is thin, so the slab leans on ground that can wash out, consolidate, or wedge where the limestone pitches. Fractured rock also drains fast and unevenly, which means roof water concentrating at one corner travels through seams rather than spreading out across the lot. That is why a Westover Hills floor elevation survey usually reads as a narrow local dip instead of a long settled edge, and why drainage correction resolves a real share of what we are called out to look at. About a third of the inspections we run end with no repair needed, and the free survey is what tells a homeowner which group their house is in.

The building era

These 1990s and 2000s slabs are old enough for their drainage to have drifted.

Westover Hills filled in through the 1990s and 2000s, which puts most of its houses somewhere in their twenties and thirties. That is a useful age for diagnosis. These slabs were poured under modern engineered practice rather than the lighter standards of the 1960s and 1970s, so the concrete and steel are rarely the problem. What has changed in the years since is everything around the slab. Gutters were added or taken down, patios and pool decks were poured hard against the foundation, beds were raised above the brick ledge, and trees that were saplings at closing now pull moisture out of one side of the yard. On ground that barely swells on its own, those are the variables that decide whether a house cracks.

The side yards are the detail we check first out here. Subdivision lots from this era are narrow, and the strip between the house and the fence usually carries the downspouts, the condensate line, the gas and water service, and a bed of landscape rock laid over whatever backfill went into the trench. Water that collects there has nowhere to go but down into material that drains differently than the rock beside it. Downspouts that end at the slab and grading that fell back toward the house account for a large share of what we write up in Westover Hills, and the answer is often flatwork and drainage rather than support. When support is genuinely the answer, we install steel and hybrid piers only, they run $600 to $1,000 each, and every one carries a lifetime transferable warranty that follows the house to the next owner.

The commercial side

The office and hospital campuses off Highway 151 crack for different reasons than the houses do.

Westover Hills carries one of the larger medical and office concentrations on this side of the city, along with the retail that grew up around it. Commercial slabs here face a different set of forces than a single family house on the same soil. The floor plates are much wider, so a dip that would go unnoticed in a living room shows up as a door that will not latch and a tile joint opening across a corridor. There is far more plumbing running under the slab, and one failed joint beneath a wide floor can soften a bearing area for months before anyone upstairs notices. Parking is the other variable, because paved acres collect storm water and deliver it wherever the lot was graded to send it, which is not always away from the building.

We work that side of town as commercial foundation repair, including medical office buildings where the schedule matters as much as the scope. The order of operations does not change from a house. Measure the floor, find out whether a line under the slab is leaking, read where the water goes in a storm, and only then decide whether anything needs support. Inspections are free on commercial buildings the same as on homes, they are run by ICC-certified inspectors, and the elevation map goes in writing whether or not the answer turns out to be repair.

Costs, warranty and inspections

The straight numbers on foundation repair in Westover Hills.

Nearby

Also serving the communities around Westover Hills.