Keep roof water and yard runoff away from your slab or pier-and-beam and hold soil moisture even.
Tell us what’s going on and we’ll come take a look — no charge, no pressure.
The most valuable thing on your property isn’t the lawn — it’s the foundation the house sits on. Foundation drainage is about keeping water and moisture swings away from your slab or pier-and-beam so the ground underneath stays as stable as possible.
In expansive-soil regions, foundations move when the moisture in the surrounding soil cycles between very wet and very dry. National building-science references describe the mechanism plainly: soils swell when they take on water and shrink when they dry, and those cycles crack foundations and walls; the damage is driven by differential moisture — one side of the house wet, another dry — not by water alone. The estimated national cost of expansive-soil damage runs on the order of $15 billion a year. East Texas soils are more moderate than the Blackland clays farther west, but the principle is the same: even, controlled moisture is what you want, and ponding water is what you don’t.
We install drainage that helps prevent moisture-driven movement. We are not a foundation repair company, and we won’t tell you a drain fixes cracks, sticking doors, or a slab that’s already moved — that’s a structural engineer’s and foundation contractor’s call. What good drainage does is remove one of the biggest controllable causes of the problem. If we think you need a foundation professional, we’ll say so.
The two common foundation types here want slightly different things from your drainage. A slab-on-grade home rides directly on the soil, so the enemy is uneven moisture around the perimeter — one side staying wet while another dries out, which tilts the slab. For slabs, the priorities are grading that sheds water evenly away on all sides, downspouts carried well clear of the edge, and a perimeter drain wherever groundwater collects against the beam. A pier-and-beam home sits on piers over a crawl space, so the added enemy is water pooling under the house: a wet crawl space breeds moisture problems and keeps the piers’ soil unstable. There we focus on keeping water out of the crawl space entirely — grading, downspout routing, and drains that intercept water before it runs beneath the structure, sometimes with a low-point collection and pump if the crawl space can’t drain on its own. Tell us which kind of foundation you have and we’ll tailor the approach; if you’re not sure, we can usually tell at a glance on site.
Free on-site drainage assessments across Tyler and Smith County. We’ll tell you what’s actually causing the water and what it takes to fix it.