Amarillo · Potter & Randall County

Your foundation is moving. Let's find out how much.

Tell us what the house is doing and we hand your details to one independent foundation repair contractor who works Amarillo, Canyon and the surrounding Panhandle. One call, one company, no charge to you.

Call (806) 758-7483 Send details instead

We are a matching service — we do not sell you repairs
Your details go to one contractor, not to a bidding pool
Slab, pier and beam, crawl space and basement foundations
Potter County, Randall County and the towns around them

Tell us what you are seeing

Read this first. Potter County Foundation Repair is a lead referral service. We are not a contractor, we do not carry out inspections or repairs, and we do not employ engineers. What we do is take your information and pass it to an independent foundation repair company that serves the Amarillo area. Your contract, your price and your warranty are all between you and that company.

Why Amarillo houses crack

The ground under Amarillo was laid down by wind and standing water

Most of Amarillo sits on soils that blew in and settled out during the Pleistocene, part of what soil scientists call the Blackwater Draw Formation. Two of the resulting soil series were first described right here and carry local names: the Amarillo series was established in Randall County in 1920, and the Randall series is named for the same county. A third, Potter, takes its name from the county the city's north half sits in.

That matters because those four soils behave in four different ways under a house. Pullman clay loam, the dominant soil across Randall County farmland, is slowly permeable and shrinks and swells with moisture. Randall clay, which fills the floors of playa basins, runs roughly 50 to 60 percent clay and is a true vertisol — it cracks open in dry spells and closes back up when water stands. Amarillo fine sandy loam is loamy and far more forgiving. Potter soils, on the broken ground toward the Canadian River, are shallow, gravelly and calcareous.

A house on Amarillo fine sandy loam in a west-side subdivision and a house on a playa rim off Soncy have almost nothing in common from the grade beam down, even though they may be four miles apart and built the same year. This is why a contractor who guesses at your soil before looking at the site is guessing at your repair.

How deep Amarillo requires a grade beam

The City of Amarillo publishes its own Panhandle Residential Foundation Manual, which sets minimum foundation geometry by the soil's effective plasticity index — a measure of how much the clay moves with moisture.

PI under 15

Standard code methods apply.

PI 15–20 → 24″ beam

Perimeter grade beam at least 24 inches deep.

PI 21–25 → 30–36″ beam

The manual tells builders that when the USDA Web Soil Survey gives no AASHTO classification for a Panhandle site, they should assume the higher band. In other words, Amarillo's own default assumption is that your dirt moves.

What we match you for

Foundation work homeowners here actually call about

Pick whichever is closest to what you are dealing with. Every one of these pages explains what the work involves in Amarillo conditions and what to ask the contractor before you sign.

Foundation Inspection

Elevation readings, a walk of the exterior grade and an honest answer about whether anything actually needs doing.

What this involves

Slab Foundation Repair

Underpinning and levelling for concrete slab-on-grade homes, the dominant foundation type across newer Amarillo neighbourhoods.

What this involves

Pier & Beam Repair

Levelling, shimming and pier work for the older raised-floor homes concentrated in Amarillo's pre-war neighbourhoods.

What this involves

Crawl Space Repair

Moisture control, vapour retarders, support work and access under raised-floor homes.

What this involves

Mudjacking & Slab Jacking

Lifting sunken driveways, walks, patios and garage slabs back to grade without tearing out concrete.

What this involves

Drainage & Grading

Getting surface water away from the house — usually the cheapest and most effective foundation work available.

What this involves

Foundation Crack Repair

Sealing cracks in slabs, stem walls, basement walls and brick mortar — after working out whether they matter.

What this involves

French Drains & Waterproofing

Subsurface drains, footing drains, dampproofing and sump systems where surface work is not enough.

What this involves

Early signs

What homeowners notice first

Foundation movement almost never announces itself with a dramatic crack. It shows up as a door that has started catching at the top corner, a window that suddenly takes two hands, or a hairline stair-step in the mortar that you are fairly sure was not there last summer.

Doors or windows binding on one side of the house only
Stair-step cracking through brick mortar joints, often near a corner
A gap opening between the brick ledge and the soil
Sheetrock cracks running diagonally from a door or window corner
Floors that feel out of level enough to notice when you walk barefoot

Around Amarillo, two seasonal patterns show up again and again. The first is late-summer shrinkage: August is the wettest month here, and a dry June and July followed by a soaking week can move a clay subgrade noticeably in both directions. The second is what happens after a hard freeze, because at roughly 3,600 feet Amarillo runs colder than most of Texas and gets a real winter.

Neither pattern means your house is failing. It means the soil is doing what this soil does. The useful question is whether the movement is seasonal and cyclical, or whether it has been trending one direction over several years. A contractor with an elevation survey can tell you which; a guess from a photograph cannot.

The four soils

Four named soils, four different houses

Amarillo is unusual in that the ground beneath it gave its name to the soil rather than the other way round. Three of the series mapped across this area carry local names, and knowing which one you are on tells you most of what you need to know about how your house will behave.

Soil series	Where it is	What it means under a house
Pullman clay loam	The dominant soil across Randall County farmland and much of the tableland.	Slowly permeable, shrinks and swells with moisture. The classic seasonal-movement soil of this region.
Randall clay	The floors of playa basins, sitting ten to fifty feet below the surrounding plain.	Roughly 50 to 60 percent clay. A true vertisol that cracks open when dry and swells shut when water stands. The most reactive ground in the area.
Amarillo fine sandy loam	Widespread on the plains, including west toward Bushland. Series established in Randall County in 1920.	Loamy, well drained, moderately permeable and far more forgiving. Its risk is erosion and washout rather than swelling.
Potter soils	The broken ground of northern Potter County, toward the Canadian River.	Shallow, gravelly and calcareous throughout. Barely reactive, but shallow to hard material, which complicates excavation and pier bearing.

Pullman, Randall and Amarillo soils all formed in wind-laid or standing-water deposits of the Blackwater Draw Formation, laid down during the Pleistocene.

This is why a contractor who arrives with a single standard approach is a contractor to be careful with. A house on Amarillo fine sandy loam west of the city and a house on a playa margin south of it need different diagnoses, different pier depths and, quite often, different answers about whether structural work is needed at all.

The process

What happens after you get in touch

1. You tell us what you see

Call, or send the form. You do not need to know what is wrong, what your foundation type is, or what anything is called. Describing the sticking door and roughly when it started is enough to begin.

2. One contractor gets it

Your details go to a single independent foundation repair company covering your part of the Amarillo area. Not a pool, not a bidding queue. They contact you directly to ask follow-up questions and arrange a time.

3. They measure the house

Elevation readings across the floor, a walk of the exterior grade, and a look at where your roof water and irrigation go. Everything after that follows from what those readings say.

Nothing in that sequence costs you anything, and none of it obligates you to hire anyone. If the finding is that your slab is fine and your gutter is not, that is a perfectly good outcome and one worth knowing.

Urgency

How worried should you actually be?

Most foundation symptoms are not emergencies, and a lot of unnecessary anxiety comes from not knowing which category you are in. It is worth being direct about where the line falls.

Things that can reasonably be watched over a season include hairline cracks in plaster or drywall, fine cracking in a slab surface, a door that has begun catching at one corner, and stair-step cracking in brick mortar that has not obviously widened. None of those is nothing, and all of them warrant measurement and monitoring. But they do not require a decision this week, and on the reactive soils around Amarillo a good proportion of them turn out to be the annual cycle rather than progressive movement.

Things that warrant a prompt call are different in kind. A horizontal crack in a wall retaining soil indicates lateral pressure and is the one pattern that should never be left to see what happens. A crack that has widened visibly over a matter of weeks is telling you the rate of change is high. Doors or windows that have gone from sticking to unusable within a single season indicate rapid movement. Water actively entering beneath the house, or a floor that has developed a noticeable slope you can feel walking across it, both belong in the same category.

There is a separate reason for urgency that has nothing to do with severity, and that is a deadline. If you are selling, refinancing, or working through a buyer's inspection report, the timescale is set by the transaction rather than by the house, and the useful thing to know is that a licensed engineer's assessment generally carries more weight with a lender than a contractor's quote does.

If you are unsure which group you are in, that uncertainty is itself a reasonable reason to have someone measure the house. An elevation survey is a modest undertaking and it converts a worry into a number, and a number can be compared against another one taken six months later. That is how these questions get settled — not by looking harder at the crack, but by measuring the floor.

The city on the soil

A city that covered its own soil map

There is a detail in the Potter County soil survey that captures Amarillo's situation neatly. Alongside the named soil series, the survey carries a map unit simply called urban land, and it describes it as downtown Amarillo, the large suburban shopping centres and parts of the airport — ground where between roughly 75 and 90 percent of the surface is covered by buildings, streets, parking, rail yards and runways.

The survey notes that construction has so altered and obscured the original soil features that they no longer resemble the described series at all, though small pockets of undisturbed Pullman soil survive within the downtown area.

That is worth pausing on, because it describes the actual condition beneath a great deal of the city. Under an established Amarillo neighbourhood the ground is rarely the pristine profile a soil map suggests. It is a century of cut, fill, utility trenching, demolition backfill, imported material and paving, laid over whatever was originally there, with the shallow zone — the zone that matters most to a foundation — the most heavily disturbed of all.

Which is the argument, in the end, for measuring a specific house rather than reasoning from a regional map. The regional picture tells you what the ground here tends to do. Only the elevation readings, the exterior grade and whatever can be established about what lies beneath tell you what your house is doing. Everything on this site is background; the survey is the answer.

Between Potter and Randall counties the population runs to well over a quarter of a million people, the great majority of them in and immediately around Amarillo. That is a very large number of houses sitting on ground the city's own building department instructs designers to treat as reactive unless proven otherwise.

Coverage

Towns we cover

Amarillo straddles the Potter–Randall county line, so a single city spans two counties, two appraisal roll offices and two very different soil pictures. We also cover the smaller communities around it.

Get a real number instead of a guess

Send your details or call and we will get one independent Amarillo-area foundation contractor in touch with you directly.

Call (806) 758-7483 Request a quote online