Foundation repair Westover Hills.

Why slabs shift out here on the far west side

Westover Hills was built on the graded fill and native soils west of Loop 1604, close enough to Culebra Creek that drainage and moisture never quite hold steady from one season to the next. A lot of the ground here is clay mixed with caliche, and the clay fraction is what moves, it swells after a wet spell and shrinks tight in a long San Antonio dry stretch, and the slab above it rides that motion.

Across the wider metro, the expansive clays run high on the plasticity scale, commonly a plasticity index in the 40 to 60 range, and the active zone, the depth where seasonal moisture actually changes soil volume, reaches roughly 8 to 12 feet below grade. That's the layer doing the damage. Each shrink-swell cycle nudges the foundation a little further, and the movement doesn't reverse on its own.

So the cracks you're seeing in Westover Hills are usually differential, not uniform: a door corner that splits diagonally, brick mortar stepping apart at one end of the house, a door that sticks every August and frees up by spring. Those are shape changes in the slab, and they trace back to which parts of the clay dried out fastest.

How galvanized steel piers actually stop it

The fix is mechanical, not cosmetic. GroundLock drives galvanized steel piers hydraulically straight through the active-zone clay and caliche until the equipment registers consistent refusal on competent load-bearing strata, the layer deep enough that seasonal moisture no longer reaches it. Around Westover Hills that can mean anywhere from roughly 10 to 25-plus feet, depending on how deep the shifting soil runs before the pier stops advancing.

That depth is the whole point. Concrete pressed piers are limited in how far they go and often stay inside the same zone that's causing the trouble. Steel keeps advancing to refusal, then the system transfers your home's weight off the unstable clay and onto that stable substrate, settlement stops at its source instead of getting patched over.

Most Westover Hills homes stay occupied the whole time, and typical projects run $4,500 to $14,000 with financing available and a lifetime transferable warranty that carries to the next owner. If you want to keep the ground from re-wetting unevenly after a lift, our drainage and erosion-control work handles the runoff that Culebra Creek's low ground tends to send back toward the slab.

Signs a Westover Hills home is due for a survey

Any one of these is worth a free elevation reading before it gets worse:

• Diagonal cracks running out from the top corners of interior door and window frames
• Stair-step separation in brick or stone mortar, usually heaviest at one end of the house
• Interior doors that bind or stick in late summer and loosen after the rains return
• A gap opening between the slab edge and the soil, or grade that slopes toward the foundation instead of away
• Hairline-to-wider cracks in the slab or in tile and grout lines across a room
• Windows that no longer latch square, or a visible dip or high spot in the floor

Westover Hills foundation questions