Start with conditions, not a product
Cracks and sticking doors are clues, not diagnoses — around Gastonia, Piedmont clay on rolling former textile-mill terrain makes grading, drainage, framing, and foundation type all part of the same question before any repair plan is proposed.
Build a complete scope
- What was measured, and whether the pattern repeats with the seasons
- Whether the original footings are shallower than later practice allows
- How runoff arriving from uphill against the wall is being handled
- The repair specified and the alternatives considered and dropped
- Working room in a shallow crawl space, restoration, and warranty scope
Gastonia context
Three housing eras sit inside one small city and they fail in three different ways. The textile-mill housing and compact early neighborhoods generally rest on brick piers with unreinforced perimeter walls, where movement announces itself as sloping floors and separated piers rather than a single clean crack -- and because those houses were built economically, the original footings are often shallower than later practice would allow. Postwar expansion brought block crawl-space walls that take lateral pressure poorly once intense rain loads the soil against them on a rolling lot. The newer Charlotte-region subdivisions sit on engineered fill, raising questions about compaction and its age instead. Under all three, Piedmont clay swells when wet and shrinks when dry, which makes much of the movement here seasonal rather than progressive -- and worth measuring across a full cycle before piers are committed to.