Pier-and-Beam Repair in Shreveport & Bossier City

Before the slab subdivisions, Shreveport built on piers. If your home sits on a crawl space — bouncy floors, a gentle sag toward the kitchen, doors out of plumb — you have a different foundation, different problems, and a different trade than the slab-raising companies push. This is ours.

Where the Pier-and-Beam Homes Are

Shreveport and Bossier City’s pier-and-beam stock is concentrated in the older neighborhoods built before the slab era took over: Highland and Stoner Hill with their early-20th-century cottages and craftsman bungalows, Cedar Grove’s mid-century homes, and the pre-war and immediate post-war streets of old Bossier City near Barksdale. Plenty of mid-century ranch homes on the edges of Broadmoor and Spring Lake are block-and-base too — block piers under a wood-framed floor that looks and feels like a slab from inside until things start moving.

These houses have real advantages — repairable plumbing, accessible structure, ventilation — but their foundations are a system of wood, concrete or cinder-block piers, and soil. When any part of that system fails, the floor above tells the story.

How Pier-and-Beam Foundations Fail Here

• Wood rot from crawl space moisture. Northwest Louisiana humidity is relentless, and decades of wet seasons leave sill plates (the beam that sits directly on the piers) soft and crumbly. Termites love the same conditions. Rot at the bearing point lets the beam drop an eighth of an inch at a time.
• Settled or tipped piers. Block piers resting on shallow footings tilt or sink as clay moves; older stone or brick piers in Highland-era homes can disintegrate entirely.
• Too-few, too-far-apart supports. Original construction often spaced piers at the edge of what the floor framing could handle. Seventy years of live loads later, the middle of long spans sags.
• Improper prior “repairs.” Stacks of shims, bricks, and leaning blocks are the calling card of handyman releveling. It works for a season, then the wood compresses and you’re back where you started.
• Water management. Red clay holds water against crawl space walls; poor exterior grading keeps it there. The February 2021 freeze burst lines across these neighborhoods, and saturated crawl spaces under old houses took months to dry — rot accelerated accordingly.

What Releveling and Repair Involve

A proper pier-and-beam job is methodical, not dramatic:

1. Crawl space assessment. We go under with lights and a probe: pier-by-pier condition, wood moisture readings, beam sizing, and a floor-elevation survey from inside.
2. Jacking and leveling. The house is lifted a fraction of an inch at a time with bottle or screw jacks — enough to bring floors back within tolerance without cracking plaster, tile, or brick veneer above.
3. Component replacement. Rotted sill plates come out and are replaced with pressure-treated lumber; failed piers are rebuilt with new concrete block or precast piers on proper footings.
4. Support correction. Where spans are oversize, we add piers and beams so the fix outlasts the next wet-dry cycle.
5. Moisture control. Vapor barriers, ventilation fixes, or encapsulation so the new wood stays new.

Signs of Pier-and-Beam Trouble

• Floors that bounce, sag, or roll — a marble won’t sit still on the dining room floor
• Doors that swing open or closed on their own, or have big uneven reveals
• Gaps between baseboards and flooring, or cracked tile lines running across rooms
• Musty smell from the crawl space; visible standing water after rain
• Interior cracks that follow the same line room after room (beam settlement, not random drywall)

What Pier-and-Beam Work Costs