Foundation repair Selma, TX.

If a door in your Selma house sticks tight through August and then swings clean after the first real rain, your foundation is telling you something the soil already knows. The ground across this stretch of North Bexar is Cibolo Creek clay, Blackland-family soil that swells when it drinks and shrinks when it dries, and a slab poured on top of it has no choice but to ride that movement.

GroundLock repairs those foundations the way the geology demands: galvanized steel piers driven hydraulically past the seasonal clay and into strata that hold still. Before any of that, we measure. A free elevation survey, accurate to a hundredth of an inch, maps which corners dropped and which interior zones lifted, so the fix is built to your slab's actual movement instead of a guess.

The clay under Selma isn't just sticky, it moves feet

Selma's lots sit in the Cibolo Creek corridor, where fluvial deposition has stacked up thick profiles of expansive clay. These soils routinely test with plasticity indices above 40, the engineer's shorthand for a material that absorbs and gives up huge volumes of water relative to its dry state. Every inch of rain and every dry spell becomes real volumetric change in the upper soil, and your foundation is caught in the middle of that cycle season after season.

The layer where that movement happens is the active zone, the depth at which seasonal moisture swings finally settle to zero. Around Selma, regional data and field studies place it roughly 8 to 15 feet below grade, and lot drainage, tree roots, and paved-over cover can push it deeper. Anything that stops short of that depth simply floats along with the clay.

That one fact decides which repairs actually work here. A pier that ends inside the active zone moves with the soil and gives you nothing. GroundLock's galvanized steel piers are driven through it and seated in competent bearing strata below, tying your home to ground that doesn't answer to the weather.

Signs your Selma foundation is on the move

The active zone sends early messages long before cracks turn structural. Watch for these around your home:

• Doors and windows that bind in the dry months but ease up after a good rain
• Stair-step cracking in exterior brick or block, usually starting at a corner
• Diagonal cracks running from the top corners of interior door frames
• Gaps opening between interior trim and the ceiling, or between the wall and cabinets
• Hairline cracks at window corners that visibly widen from summer to winter
• A yard that sits flat or slopes back toward the slab instead of draining away

Why we measure the slab before we quote the repair

Not all settlement is the same problem, and treating it as if it were can make things worse. Perimeter edge settlement, the slab dropping where the beam has dried and pulled down, calls for a different pier layout than interior dome heave, where moisture trapped under a covered slab pushes the center up. Read the pattern wrong and the correction fights the foundation instead of fixing it.

The elevation survey settles that with numbers. It produces a contour map of your slab's real differential movement, and that map drives the written, engineer-backed repair plan on every GroundLock estimate. Most Selma projects land between $4,500 and $14,000 depending on pier count, access, and whether drainage work is in scope, but you see a measured number, not a range, before anyone commits.

Drainage and trees are the quiet culprits. Finished grade should fall at least six inches over the first ten feet away from the beam on every side, and flat or reverse-sloped yards are among the biggest contributors to clay saturation here. Large live oaks and cedar elms within 15 to 20 feet of the slab dry the clay unevenly, so correcting the erosion and grading around the home often protects the repair as much as the piers do.

Selma foundation questions, answered