Pier and Beam Foundation Repair in Tulsa, OK

For the bungalows and brick cottages built before 1960. We crawl under, find what dropped, and fix that.

If your house was built in Tulsa before about 1960, it almost certainly sits on pier and beam. The house rests on a grid of brick or concrete piers, with wood girders across the piers and floor joists across the girders. Under all that is a crawl space, somewhere between 18 and 36 inches of dirt and air. That's the whole system. When one pier drops or one girder rots, the floor above it follows.

The good news about pier and beam is you can get to everything. The bad news is the wood has to stay dry in a town where the clay never makes up its mind.

What it looks like in Tulsa's older neighborhoods

We see the same house over and over. A 1920s craftsman in Maple Ridge. A 1930s Tudor cottage in Florence Park. A 1940s brick bungalow in Brookside or Kendall Whittier. Same bones, same failures.

A soft spot in the floor. Usually in the kitchen or bathroom, where a plumbing leak or a bad vent kept the dirt wet for years.
A slope toward one end of the house. Set a marble down in the hallway. If it rolls toward the back bedroom, a pier back there has dropped.
Bounce. Walk across the living room and the china cabinet rattles. A girder has pulled off its pier, or the joists have sagged between supports.
Plaster cracks at the door frames. Diagonal, starting at the top corner of the opening. The wall above a dropped section is racking.
Doors that stopped latching. Especially interior doors on the low side of the house.

Under the house, what we actually find is one of four things. Brick piers that cracked or tilted when the clay swelled and shrank around them. Sill plates and girder ends rotted from decades of crawl space moisture. Joists that pulled away from girders after 80 years of settling. Or termite damage at the bandboard, which is common on houses that had dirt piled against the siding at some point.

Brookside has one more wrinkle. A lot of pier and beam houses there got a slab addition in the 60s or 70s, a den or a master suite poured on grade off the back. The slab and the crawl space move at different speeds. The seam between them is the first place to look.

Piers and floor beams under an older Tulsa pier and beam house before releveling

How we fix it, step by step

Measure the floor. We run a zip level across every room and write down the elevations. This tells us which piers dropped and by how much.
Crawl the whole space. Every pier, every girder, every joist end. We map what's cracked, what's rotted, what's just dirty, and where the water gets in.
Set up jacks on the low sections. Hydraulic bottle jacks under the girders, on steel plates so they don't sink into the dirt.
Lift slow. A quarter inch at a time across the whole section, checking the floor above as we go. Rushing this is how plaster cracks and windows bind.
Fix the supports. Failed brick piers get replaced with poured concrete piers on proper pads. Where the soil is too soft to trust a pad, we screw in a helical pier by hand in the crawl space and set the beam on that. Good piers that just lost contact get steel shims.
Replace the rotted wood. Rotted girder ends get cut out and spliced. Sagging joists get a sister joist bolted alongside. Rotted sill plates come out in sections.
Deal with the water. Vapor barrier on the dirt, downspouts extended away from the house, grading fixed if it slopes toward the foundation. Skip this and you'll call us again in five years.
Final level and cleanup. We run the zip level again, hand you the before and after numbers, and haul out the old brick.

What it costs in Tulsa

Pier and beam work is priced by what's broken, not by the square foot. Here's what jobs actually run on the older Tulsa housing stock.

Shim and support a single dropped section: $3,500 to $9,000. One room, a few piers, no major wood replacement.
Full releveling of a 1,200 to 1,800 square foot bungalow: $5,000 to $18,000. New piers, sister joists, shims, and a vapor barrier. This is the typical Maple Ridge or Brookside job.
Helical piers under a beam: $1,800 to $2,800 per pier when the dirt won't hold a concrete pad. Most pier and beam jobs need zero to six of these.
Crawl space drainage, sump, or encapsulation: adds $1,200 to $5,000 depending on how wet it is under there. See our crawl space repair page for the breakdown.

Access moves the number. A Maple Ridge lot with a 3 foot side yard and a 20 inch crawl means everything gets hand carried. We'll tell you where your house lands after we've been under it. Not over the phone.

How long it takes

Most pier and beam jobs run three to five working days. A single room shim job can finish in one. You live in the house the whole time. The water stays on, the kitchen works, and the loudest part is the jacks and some thumping under the floor during the lift.

What can go wrong

Honest list, because you'll find out anyway.

Plaster cracks during the lift. A wall that's been racked for 30 years doesn't like being pushed back. Hairline cracks at door corners are common and are a drywall patch, not a structural problem. We lift slow to keep them small.
Old cast iron drain lines. Houses from the 1920s and 30s often have cast iron under the floor that's held together by rust. Lifting a section can open a joint. We check the plumbing before and after and tell you if something needs a plumber.
Surprise rot. We can't see inside a girder until we're under it with a screwdriver. Sometimes a job quoted as shims becomes a job with a spliced beam. We stop and call you before that changes the price.

When pier and beam repair is the wrong call

Sometimes the crawl space isn't the problem, or isn't the whole problem.

The perimeter beam dropped, not the interior piers. On houses with a brick or concrete stem wall around the outside, a dropped corner shows up as stair step cracks in the brick. Shims won't fix that. That corner needs helical piers at the perimeter, which is a different job with a different price.
The slab addition is what's moving. If the cracks are all at the seam with a 1970s den, the den needs piers around its edge. See slab foundation repair.
The floor bounces but nothing dropped. Undersized joists spanning too far. That's a framing fix, add a girder and a row of piers mid span, not a leveling job.
The crawl space is a swamp. Standing water, no vents, no barrier. Fix the water first or every dollar of pier work is temporary.

Warranty. Pier work carries a lifetime transferable warranty, set in writing by the contractor before the first jack goes under the house. If you sell, it goes with the house.

FAQs

How do I know if my Tulsa house is pier and beam?

Look for a crawl space vent or access door in the foundation wall, and a floor that gives a little when you walk on it. Almost every house built in Maple Ridge, Brookside, Florence Park, and Kendall Whittier before 1960 is pier and beam. Slab houses have no crawl space and the floor is concrete under the finish.

Can I stay in the house during pier and beam repair?

Yes. Nearly all the work happens in the crawl space. You'll hear jacks and some thumping under the floor for a few days, but the kitchen and bathrooms keep working and nobody has to move out.

Will the floor be perfectly level when you're done?

Closer, not perfect. A 1925 bungalow was never dead level to begin with, and forcing it there cracks plaster and binds doors. We lift to where the floor feels right and the doors swing, then stop. We'll tell you the target before we start.

Why does my crawl space need drainage work if the piers are the problem?

Because water is what moved the piers. Wet clay under the house swells, dry clay shrinks, and the piers ride that. If the crawl space stays wet, new piers and shims drift the same way the old ones did. Drainage and a vapor barrier are what make the repair last.

Does pier and beam repair come with a warranty?

Pier work carries a lifetime transferable warranty, set in writing by the contractor before the job starts. Shimming, wood replacement, and drainage are covered separately, and the terms for those go in the same written quote.

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