Slab foundation repair
Piers driven under a settling slab until it carries the house again
Tom Green County, TX
Foundation repair in Paulann
Paulann sits at the northeast tip of San Angelo, where US-67 branches off toward Dallas. It is partly industrial and partly residential.
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Paulann in one paragraph
Paulann is at the northeast edge of San Angelo, at the point where US-67 branches away toward Dallas, and it is a mix of industry and housing. The northeast side has a distinction worth knowing about, and it is not a marketing line — it is in the federal soil record.
What that means for a foundation here
When the USDA needed a reference example of the Tobosa clay series, the profile it used was taken in Tom Green County about ten miles northeast of San Angelo. That is what a soil series type location is: not a soil that resembles the description, but the actual ground the national description was written from. And the description is blunt. Tobosa is a Vertisol — a soil classified by the fact that it shrinks and swells — and its official record notes cracks 0.3 to 1 inch wide extending 20 to 60 inches down, staying open 210 or more cumulative days a year. Ground that is split open an inch wide and five feet deep for more than half of every year is not a stable thing to build on, and nothing sitting on it gets a pass.
What is worth watching in Paulann
The depth figure is the part with practical consequences. If the soil is moving down to 60 inches, then a pier that stops short of that is founded on ground that is still moving — which produces a repair that looks finished, costs full price, and fails again.
- Cracking that reappears in the same place after being patched, which usually means the movement never stopped.
- Visible gaps opening between the soil and the edge of the slab in late summer, when the clay has shrunk away.
- A repair done previously that did not hold. Worth asking how deep those piers went.
Getting a straight answer
The way to settle any of this is measurement rather than opinion. A free evaluation takes relative floor elevations across the house, records where and how the cracking runs, and looks at what the drainage and any nearby trees are doing to the soil — and you get that in writing. Quite often the answer is that the movement is old, stable and needs nothing, which is a perfectly good outcome and costs you nothing to establish.
Where work is needed, the plan should name every pier and its location before anything begins. Texas issues no foundation repair license, so a written scope, insurance confirmed with the insurer, an engineer's involvement, and a warranty in writing are the four things worth asking of anyone. How to judge a foundation contractor in Texas →
Ground and climate facts on this page come from the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service Official Soil Series Descriptions for the Tobosa, Lipan and Angelo series (all three mapped in Tom Green County) and from NOAA climate normals for San Angelo.
Most relevant here
The work that comes up most in Paulann
House leveling
The whole structure brought back within tolerance, measured not eyeballed
Foundation watering systems
Soaker lines that hold soil moisture steady through a Concho Valley summer
Questions people actually ask
Paulann — questions
How deep do piers need to go on this side of town?
Deep enough to pass through the layer that responds to the weather and reach soil that carries load without moving seasonally. The local reference point is that the USDA records cracking in the Tobosa clay here reaching 20 to 60 inches down, so a pier terminating inside that zone is sitting on ground that still moves. Exact depth is determined at the house, but that is the floor beneath the question.
What is a "type location" and why does it matter to me?
It is the specific site a soil series description was written from — the reference example for the whole classification. It matters here only because it removes the argument: this is not a claim that San Angelo soil is similar to a problematic clay, it is the ground the national description of that clay was taken from.
My previous foundation repair did not hold. What went wrong?
The most common reason is depth — piers that stopped inside the active soil layer, so they move along with the ground they were meant to escape. The second most common is that nothing was done about the water, so the same cycle that caused the original movement carried on. A measured evaluation of what is there now will usually make clear which happened.
Nearby
Other areas around San Angelo
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