Foundation repair Burnet, TX.

The ground under Burnet doesn't behave like the rest of Central Texas

Drive east past the Balcones Escarpment and foundations crack because of expansive Blackland clay swelling and shrinking with the seasons. Burnet is a different animal. Here you're sitting on the Llano Uplift, where ancient Precambrian granite pushes toward the surface alongside fractured Edwards and Ellenburger limestone. The plasticity index that dominates conversations in San Antonio matters far less than one stubborn fact: bearing capacity is wildly uneven from one corner of a lot to the next.

Bedrock can sit within inches of grade in one spot and drop ten feet or more a few steps away, separated by pockets of decomposed granite, residual silty clay, and colluvial fill that all compress at their own pace under load. A slab that looks like it's resting on solid rock may actually be bridging a shallow soil pocket, or spanning a void left where water dissolved a channel through the limestone over the centuries.

That's why the tell in Burnet is usually subtle and one-sided. A single door that suddenly binds, a lone racked corner, a hairline that fans from one window, these show up long before a house looks visibly off, because the support is failing in one place rather than everywhere at once.

Measuring the slab before anyone touches it

Every project in Burnet starts with a free elevation survey accurate to ±0.01 in. (1/64 in.), taken across a grid of interior and perimeter points. The output isn't a sales pitch, it's a differential settlement map showing exactly which corners have dropped, where the slab is doming, and by how much.

In country where bedrock relief can change sharply over a single span of a few feet, that map is the difference between placing piers where the load actually needs them and spacing them by rule of thumb. Because soft pockets can sit anywhere under the footprint, interior settlement, floors that slope toward the center of the house, is common here, and it calls for interior pier placement, not just perimeter work.

From the survey we build an engineer-backed plan: pier count, exact positions, and a lift sequence that brings the slab back toward level without forcing new stress across neighboring panels. Most projects land between $4,500 and $14,000, and the repair carries a lifetime transferable warranty, a genuine advantage on resale, where Burnet buyers and their inspectors tend to scrutinize foundation history closely.

What we look at before recommending anything

A few things we check on every Burnet home, and a few you can watch for yourself between rains:

• Diagonal cracks running from door and window corners, plus gaps that open at the roofline rather than evenly along the base, classic signs of uneven bearing, not uniform settlement.
• Doors that bind on one side of the house but swing fine on the other, which points to localized support loss over an irregular bedrock surface.
• Floors sloping toward the interior, a flag for a soft soil pocket under the middle of the slab.
• Roof runoff: downspouts discharging within two feet of the stem wall concentrate water that softens the silty fines between granite outcrops.
• Grade around the perimeter, we want roughly six inches of positive slope over the first ten feet so water moves away, and we'll flag where drainage work should follow the repair.
• Surface rock that can fool you: a granite outcrop in the yard tells you nothing reliable about what sits directly beneath your slab a few feet away.

Burnet foundation questions, answered