Preparing Your Home for Foundation Repair Work

Foundation repair sounds like the kind of project that demands a week of preparation — rooms emptied, landscaping sacrificed, the family shipped off to a relative's house. For a typical perimeter pier job, that picture is wrong on every count. Most homeowners finish their entire prep in under an hour, usually the evening before the crew arrives, and the crew handles everything else — including putting the yard back when the work is done.

What follows is the actual checklist, drawn from what we ask of homeowners on real jobs across the San Antonio–Austin corridor: what to move, what the crew needs to reach, what happens to your sprinklers and shrubs, and what to expect when the last pit is filled.

Start with where the work actually happens

Standard pier work happens outside the house, at the edge of the slab. The crew digs pits — roughly two feet square, the size of a doghouse — at each pier location along the walls being stabilized, installs the piers, lifts the structure back toward level, and backfills. Nobody is working in your living room. Water, power, gas, and air conditioning stay on the whole time.

That one fact dissolves most of the prep list people imagine. You don't empty rooms, you don't rent a storage unit, and you don't book a hotel — almost everyone lives at home through the repair. The preparation that actually matters is a narrow band of outdoor housekeeping.

Your pier map tells you exactly which walls are involved. Every Motmot job starts with a free elevation survey, and the repair plan it produces marks every pier location. If the piers run along the back wall and one side, the front yard needs nothing from you at all.

The work line: three feet along the repair walls

The crew needs about three feet of clear ground along every wall that's getting piers — room to dig, stage soil on tarps, and run hydraulic lines. The evening before, walk that band and move:

• Pots, planters, and garden ornaments
• Hoses, hose reels, and splitters on the affected spigots
• Patio furniture, grills, and smokers sitting inside the band
• Firewood stacks, stepping stones, and kids' outdoor toys
• Anything leaning on the house — ladders, lumber, bikes, trash and recycling bins

For most houses that's the whole list, and it's genuinely a twenty-minute job. If something is too heavy for one person — a three-hundred-pound glazed planter, a built-in bench — leave it and tell us. The crew moves heavy objects for a living; we would much rather shift it ourselves than have you hurt your back saving us four minutes.

Decks, A/C condensers, and porch slabs that sit over a pier location are our problem, not yours. The estimator flags those at the proposal stage, prices the access into the plan, and the crew arrives knowing what's there. Nothing about your patio should be a surprise on repair morning.

Driveway, parking, and the street

The crew shows up with a work trailer, hydraulic equipment, and — on concrete and hybrid pier jobs — pallets of pier sections that need to stage somewhere close to the work. That somewhere is usually your driveway.

So the second chore: get your cars out before the crew arrives on day one. Park on the street, or if you'll need a car during the day, make sure it's not the one trapped behind a pallet of concrete cylinders. If your garage is your only parking and the driveway will be blocked, just plan around it for the duration — most jobs run one to three days.

On narrow streets — common in older neighborhoods from Alamo Heights to Hyde Park — a quick heads-up to the neighbors about a trailer parking out front goes further than you'd think. It's not required. It's just good fences.

Gates, locks, and access

If any pier locations are in the backyard, unlock the gate the night before — or tell us the combination. Standard equipment fits through a standard gate; if your side-yard access is unusually tight, the estimator already noticed and planned for it.

You don't need to be home, and the crew doesn't need to be inside the house except for brief interior elevation checks, which we schedule with you. Many homeowners work their normal day and come home to a yard full of progress. One small courtesy in the other direction: if you have motion-alert yard cameras, expect a lively phone for a couple of days — or mute the backyard zone until the sod goes back down.

Inside the house: ten minutes, not a weekend

The lift moves the house — that's the point — and even a slow, monitored lift is felt along the walls being raised. So take ten minutes on the rooms that border the repair walls:

• Take down mirrors and heavy framed pictures on the walls being lifted, or at least check that the hangers are solid.
• Nest the rattly stuff in china cabinets and on floating shelves near those walls.
• Lay down anything tall and tippy — a vase on a plant stand, a top-heavy lamp.

In practice the lift comes up an eighth of an inch at a time with gauge readings between every move, and wall damage from lifting is rare. But a twelve-dollar picture hook failing under a three-hundred-dollar mirror is a bad trade, so we say it every time. If your plan includes interior piers — uncommon, and you'd already know — that's a different prep conversation, and we have it with you well before repair day.

Landscaping and sprinklers: what survives, and what to flag

This is the section people worry about most, so here's the honest version.

Sod and plants

Sod in the work line gets cut and set aside in slabs, then relaid after backfill. Shrubs and perennials in the band are dug, balled, and replanted when the pit closes. Established plants mostly shrug this off. If something is irreplaceable — the rosebush that came from your grandmother's yard — say so before the dig, and where the pier map allows, we route around it.

Sprinkler systems

Irrigation lines love to run exactly where pier pits go. Lines we expose or cut get capped during the work and repaired before we leave — that's part of the job, not a change order. Your part: flag the heads within a few feet of the foundation so the shovels know where they are, and run each zone once after completion. If a head sprays sideways or a zone loses pressure, tell us and we make it right.

Flag what we can't see

Public utility lines get located and marked before any digging — that's standard and automatic. What the locator service won't find is your stuff: shallow drip lines, low-voltage landscape lighting wire, the buried hose feeding a fountain, an unmarked French drain. A handful of hardware-store landscape flags the evening before saves a splice the next afternoon.

Trees

Pits near significant trees are dug carefully, and roots are cut only where the pier truly has to go. If you have a large oak within a few feet of the foundation, the relationship between that tree and your slab is its own conversation — one we cover in tree roots and foundation movement — and it usually matters more to the diagnosis than to the repair-day logistics.

Pets and kids: one rule

The work zone gets flagged and coned, and the rule is simple: the pits and the equipment line are off-limits. That's it.

For dogs, day one is the consideration. Excavation morning is the loud chapter, and gates will be opening and closing all day — if your dog is a door-darter, that's a good daycare day. Most dogs object to the first hour of pier driving, then nap through the rest. Cats decline to acknowledge the event entirely. For kids, the cones plus one parental briefing has a perfect track record; pits aren't left open and unmarked overnight.

What you don't need to do

Half of good preparation is knowing what to skip. Don't:

• Move out. The work is outside, the utilities stay live, and a home office survives everything except excavation morning's worst hour.
• Patch your cracks beforehand. This one surprises people. The existing cracks are our reference points — we photograph and measure them at the walkthrough, and watching them close during the lift is the proof the plan worked. Cosmetic repairs come after, once the house has had a few weeks to relax into its new position.
• Pre-dig, trim, or demo anything yourself. Homeowners have removed bushes the plan was routing around. Leave the yard alone; bring us the worries instead.
• Rent storage or wrap furniture. Nothing inside needs to leave the house for perimeter work.
• Take the week off. Be there for the first-morning walkthrough and, if you can, the lift — the rest runs fine without an audience. The full process page walks through the days hour by hour.

What gets put back — and what the yard looks like after

Completion day reverses the first morning: pits are backfilled with the original soil and tamped in lifts, sod goes back down, balled plants go back in, and the crew runs a magnet sweep for nails and wire. Then comes the final elevation survey, a walkthrough against the before photos, and your documentation packet with the warranty.

Two honest expectations, because Central Texas clay doesn't read brochures. First, backfilled clay never goes back at its original density — the trench lines may sit slightly proud for a season, then settle flush as rain and watering work the soil down. Water those lines along with the rest of your foundation through the first dry summer; if you're not sure why a foundation gets watered at all, the clay page explains it. Second, sod relaid in an August drought looks shocked for a few weeks. Treat it like new sod and it recovers. If a low spot forms over a pit or anything else looks off after we've gone, call (210) 816-0034 — putting it right is part of the job, not a favor.

The shape of the days

Day one starts with the walkthrough and the noisy chapter — digging — which usually ends by early afternoon. The middle is the rhythmic part: piers advancing, gauges read, pressure logged. The lift is the payoff, and the last afternoon is shovels, sod, and the walkthrough. Most jobs: one to three days, start to restored.

One scheduling honesty: weather. A soaking storm can pause a dig day, because wet Central Texas clay turns to gumbo and open pits hold water. If the forecast forces a shift, we call you the evening before — your prep doesn't expire, and nothing you moved needs moving twice.