Foundation repair Kendall County.

Why the east side of Boerne moves more than the west

On the clay side of the escarpment, much of the IH-10 east corridor and the creek bottoms, the active zone runs roughly 6 to 10 feet below grade. That's the depth where seasonal wet-dry swings actually change the soil's volume. After a long drought the boundary can sink deeper. A slab sitting in that zone is essentially riding a material that swells in spring and shrinks in August, and the two halves rarely move in step.

The tell is center-lift distortion: interior soil stays damp while perimeter edges dry and drop, so doors near the middle of the house start sticking, floors feel slightly humped, and diagonal cracks climb from window corners toward the ceiling. People assume the slab is sinking. Usually it's the opposite, the edges fell and the center stayed put.

West of the line it's a different story. Homes near a limestone outcrop can show irregular, roughly parallel cracking that follows joints in the rock rather than the classic heave pattern, a sign of differential bedrock settlement or void development, not clay swell. Same county, completely different diagnosis.

What an honest evaluation here looks at

A Kendall County inspection that's worth your time covers more than the cracks you can already see:

• A full elevation map. We survey the whole footprint to ±0.01 in. (1/64 in.) so the plan targets the real low spots instead of the spots where cracks happen to surface.
• Drainage slope. Grade should fall at least 6 inches over the first 10 feet from the house. Flat or back-pitched yards in the clay zone keep re-wetting one side and can undo a repair in a single wet season, drainage work often belongs in the same scope.
• Trees against the slab. Live oaks, cedar elms, and Ashe juniper pull moisture hard in summer; roots under a slab create a dry pocket that drops one corner even when the rest of the yard looks green.
• Build age and pad quality. A lot of subdivision homes along IH-10 and US-87 were set on minimally engineered fill that assumed soil the Houston Black clay never agreed to be. They tend to show distress at 7 to 15 years old.
• Crack character, not just count. Stair-step brick cracks and openings racked out of square matter; a hairline in the drywall usually doesn't. We separate cosmetic settling from structural movement so you don't over- or under-repair.

How we stabilize on both sides of the escarpment

GroundLock drives galvanized steel piers hydraulically through the active soil and down to genuinely load-bearing strata, and where the geology allows, into or against the limestone beneath. A steel pier holds because of what it lands on, not the dirt wrapped around its shaft, so the terminal depth is whatever it takes to reach refusal.

That depth swings widely across Kendall County. Near a shallow Edwards outcrop we may hit competent rock at 12 to 18 feet; out in the deeper clay near Welfare or Comfort, stable material can sit 25 feet or more down. The elevation survey tells us which segments of the slab are actually moving, so we space piers to the problem instead of stamping a generic pattern around the perimeter.

Most Kendall County homes, and commercial buildings, stay occupied while we work, since crews operate from the exterior and access points. Typical projects land between $4,500 and $14,000, the work carries a lifetime transferable warranty, and financing is available so it doesn't have to be paid all at once.

Kendall County foundation questions