Foundations, slabs, footings, structural pours and room additions, built for ground that moves by inches across a single Houston season. This is the structural side of our business, where the soil work below the concrete decides everything that happens above it. Residential and commercial, across Houston and the surrounding communities.
Structural concrete carries building loads. This includes foundations, slabs, footings, structural pours, and room additions. Unlike decorative or flatwork concrete, these elements have a defined load path. Houston’s soil makes that work especially important. Beaumont Formation clay can swell when wet and shrink when dry, creating movement measured in inches rather than millimetres. Uneven soil support can cause slabs and foundations to bend and crack.
Cross Construction Services has more than 10 years of experience pouring structural concrete in Houston. We follow your structural engineer’s plans rather than guessing at foundation requirements. Our work includes excavation, moisture conditioning, compaction, select fill, vapor barriers, reinforcement, and concrete placement. Estimates break these items into separate costs, so you can clearly see how the foundation is being built and where your investment is going.
New installation, replacement, repair, resurfacing and widening, plus stamped and decorative finishes. Deliberately not covered on this page: a driveway is flatwork carrying wheel loads, not structure carrying a building, and it gets designed and jointed differently. Plenty of our foundation clients need both, and we will quote them together.
Commercial lots with load zoning for delivery and refuse traffic, accessible space layout, striping and full-surface drainage, phased to keep a property trading. The soil thinking carries straight across from structural work, since a large lot fails from uneven support in exactly the way a slab does.
Foundations, slab-on-grade, footings, structural pours, and the foundation and slab work behind room additions and extensions. Residential and light commercial. This page covers the whole of it, including sub-base preparation, moisture management and reinforcement, which on Houston clay are the substance of the job rather than preliminaries to it.
Solid-roof patio structures, attached or freestanding, tied into an existing roofline with gutters and water management built in. Where a cover is going onto a new slab, it is worth planning both at once so the footings and any posts are set before the concrete goes down rather than drilled in afterwards.
Open-frame structures giving partial shade rather than a solid roof, which is the distinction between a pergola and a covered patio. Cedar and other woods, attached or freestanding, anchored into footings sized for the ground they sit in, which on clay matters more than the timber above.
Sub-base built for stability. Excavation, moisture conditioning, compaction and select fill help create a stable foundation.
Reinforcement checked before pouring. Bar size, spacing, laps, cover, and placement are verified against the drawings.
Moisture is controlled around the slab. Vapor barriers, grading, and drainage help maintain more consistent ground conditions.
Hot-weather pours planned carefully. Early starts and proper curing help protect concrete during Houston’s extreme summer heat.
Engineered plans followed closely. Drawings are reviewed before work begins, with questions raised early when adjustments are needed.
We assess the site, drainage, access and drawings, then provide a detailed written scope.
Excavation, sub-base preparation, compaction, forming and reinforcement are completed to the project specifications.
Concrete is placed, finished and properly cured, with final inspection before the next trade begins.
Footings spread concentrated building loads across the soil. In Houston, that soil can change with seasonal moisture. As a result, footing depth and size depend on the site’s conditions and the engineer’s design. Some projects may require deeper or wider footings, while others may use drilled piers to reach more stable soil below the active clay zone.
We pour footings, grade beams, pier caps, column pads, and interior ribs, along with structural slabs and equipment bases. Three details matter during installation: reaching suitable bearing material, placing and lapping reinforcement correctly, and properly consolidating the concrete. These checks happen before backfilling because the finished footing will no longer be visible.
Home additions require careful foundation planning because the existing house has already settled through years of seasonal soil movement. A new slab can move differently from the original foundation. That can lead to cracked drywall, sticking doors, broken tile, or brick separation at the transition. The connection between old and new construction should be determined by a structural engineer. Depending on the home, the design may connect both structures or use a movement joint between them.
Our role is to execute the approved foundation design accurately. We handle new footings, slabs, thickened edges, and floor-level transitions around existing structures. Excavation can also reveal unexpected conditions, especially beside older foundations. We address those findings carefully and make sure the finished slab aligns with the existing floor before the next trades begin.
Houston’s clay expands when wet and shrinks when dry. The goal is to keep moisture levels as consistent as possible beneath the entire slab. That starts with proper excavation, moisture conditioning, and layered compaction. Where native clay is unsuitable, select fill may be needed. A vapor barrier can also help limit ground moisture from reaching the underside of the slab.
Drainage around the slab matters just as much. Grading should direct water away from the structure. Downspouts and drain lines should discharge far enough away to prevent water from returning to the foundation. Large trees can also create uneven soil moisture as their roots draw water from the ground. Depending on the site, root barriers or moisture barriers may help control these conditions.
Slab-on-grade is the dominant foundation type across Houston, partly because the high water table and clay-rich ground make basements impractical, and partly because a properly designed slab handles this soil well. Two reinforcement approaches are common, and the choice belongs to your structural engineer rather than to us or to you. It is still worth understanding the difference, because it affects how the foundation behaves and what you can do to it later.
For anything structural we would strongly encourage one, and your engineer will usually require it. A geotechnical study drills the lot and tells you how deep the active clay runs, what its moisture content is doing and where competent bearing material starts, which is what the foundation design depends on. Without it, a designer is working from assumptions about the most variable thing on your property. It is a small cost against the price of a foundation and by far the cheapest insurance available on the job.
You need a structural engineer, and we will tell you that before quoting rather than after. We are the concrete contractor: we build what the drawings specify, and we do that part carefully, including flagging anything on the drawing that will not build as shown. Keeping design and construction as separate responsibilities protects you, because the person checking the work is not the person who set the requirements. If you do not have an engineer yet, that is the first call to make.
That depends on how the tie-in is designed, which is exactly why it is an engineering decision rather than something to settle on site. Your existing foundation has already found its own pattern of seasonal movement, and the new slab has not, so the design has to either connect them so they move together or separate them deliberately with a movement joint. Both approaches are used successfully in Houston. What causes trouble is neither one being chosen on purpose.
We are a concrete construction contractor rather than a foundation repair company, and those are genuinely different trades. Underpinning, pier installation on a settled house and slab levelling belong to specialists with the right equipment and, usually, an engineer’s repair plan. What we do handle is new structural concrete: foundations, slabs, footings, structural pours and the work behind additions. If you call us about a moving house we will say so honestly rather than take the job.
Concrete shrinks slightly as it gains strength and gives up moisture, so some fine cracking is a property of the material and not a sign of failure, which is why control joints and reinforcement are there to manage where it happens and keep it tight. What matters is telling that apart from movement cracking, which tends to be wider, to run diagonally from door and window corners, and to be accompanied by sticking doors or stair-step cracks in exterior brick. If you are seeing the second pattern, that is worth an engineer looking at rather than a contractor guessing.
Send us the drawings if you have them, and tell us what you are building if you do not. We will walk the site, tell you what the ground is likely to demand, and put a written scope in front of you with the sub-base and steel priced as their own lines rather than buried in a single figure.
Cross Construction Services is a Houston concrete contractor of more than ten years, working out of 4530 Kingfisher Dr. Structural work is the part of the business where we are most conservative, because on clay soil the foundation is the one thing you cannot revisit later without real cost. Call (713) 854-5949 to talk through a slab, a foundation or an addition.
