A marble that rolls on its own, or a dip you can feel near an exterior wall, usually means part of the foundation has settled more than the rest. What that means for repair depends on how much, and which kind of foundation you have.
Burleson's clay soil swells and shrinks with moisture through the year, and it rarely does so evenly across an entire foundation footprint. One section — often near a corner, a plumbing line, or wherever drainage is worst — settles faster than the rest. The floor above simply follows the foundation underneath it, so a slope or dip is usually a surface symptom of movement happening below.
On a slab, uneven floors usually trace back to localized soil consolidation under one section, or occasionally a plumbing leak that's over-saturated the soil beneath a specific area. The fix is typically piering for significant settlement, or slab leveling or mudjacking for smaller, isolated low spots.
On a pier-and-beam home, uneven floors more often come from sagging or rotted beams and joists, or piers that have shifted in the clay and lost full contact with the beams above them. That's a pier-and-beam repair — shimming, sistering, or beam replacement — rather than piering the slab itself.
As a general guide, differential settlement under about half an inch across a run can often be addressed with leveling or shimming alone. Past that, piering tends to be the more durable fix, since leveling a severely settled section without addressing the support underneath it usually means the same dip returns. The elevation survey gives you the actual number rather than a guess from how the floor feels.
Some unevenness is common in homes built before modern slab standards, and not every sloped floor needs structural repair. The elevation survey measures the actual differential across the floor, which is a more reliable signal than how the slope feels underfoot.
Often, yes. Isolated low spots on a slab can sometimes be corrected with slab leveling or mudjacking rather than full piering. Pier-and-beam homes can sometimes be releveled by shimming at the existing piers rather than replacing structural members.
Slab leveling raises an isolated low section back toward level without changing the support structure, and works best for minor, localized settlement. Piering drives new support down to load-bearing soil and is used when settlement is more significant or likely to continue. See the full cost breakdown for how the two compare on price.
Free elevation survey, same-day written quote if repair is needed.
(817) 602-9879