This is real deal stuff with these drought conditions. We moved to Texas from Mississippi in ‘92. We moved into our new house in September. I didn’t understand anything about the soil or the climate but I learned a lot about it before the end of that first year. I met a bunch of guys in those first few months and we all met in the mornings at this little place where we drank coffee and talked about just about everything. One guy was a Captain on the Waco Fire Department, one was a Texas Ranger, one of them owned a gun shop, a couple were pretty well-known building contractors in town and a couple others owned construction companies. All of them grew up and lived in central Texas and had lived most of their lives in the area. One morning in late May that first year, my wife brings to the fact that several doors in our house were not opening/closing like they had been moving in. Our garage we detached from the main house and connected to the house via a covered sidewalk. I noticed that the door from the garage to the sidewalk was getting very hard to open/close. I had built houses back in Mississippi and knew that issues like these are an indicator of foundation problems. I was devastated thinking that I had purchased a home with foundation problems. The house was 4 years old when we bought it. Well, I walked into the coffee shop one morning and told my buddies what was going on at my house. These guys all knew the neighborhood where I lived and most of them knew the guys who built my house. They all started laughing at my story-I couldn’t believe they found humor in hearing my problem. One of them said, say, ya’ll don’t have clay soils in Mississippi? Yeah, we certainly have plenty of clay soils but where I had lived it was more of a sandy loam. I jumped into the truck with one of the contractors and we got out and walked around the house. He told me to look at how far away from my foundation the soil was-there was about a 4” gap between the soil and the edge of my slab. He told me to go buy enough soaker hoses to lay all the way around my house and to turn them on at dark and let them run all night-turn them off during the day and back on the next evening and let them run until the soil was back against the foundation all the way around the house. Took 3 nights to close the gap all the way around, but after the first 2 nights my doors were all working like new again. We lived there for 12 years and I never had another problem-if I saw the soil retreating away from the slab an inch or so I just ran the soakers for a night. I had a friend who was a rancher who sent a Mexican who worked for him to the store to buy a 125’ of heavy chain with hooks on each end. They opened the tailgate on his truck and pulled the chain out onto the tailgate. Somehow one end of that chain started sliding over the edge of the tailgate and just happened to find one of those cracks in his field-by the time they realized what had happened the entire chain had completely disappeared down that crack and was never seen again.
