quote:
Originally posted by CBDFrontier06:
One of my neighbors has taken the water restrictions a bit too literally and has just stopped watering his lawn...completely.
He now has 3-4" wide, 6' long crevices in his yard....pretty soon he's going to have his very own Grand Canyon. I'd hate to have his foundation problems later in the year.
I was reminiscing with a neighbor yesterday about losing a wooden yardstick as a kid down a crack like those in our side yard. It was nothing but weeds every spring as a result of my old mans shortsightedness in those years. We learned that dormancy still meant watering, just not enough to keep the Bermuda green. It revived with the September rains, and judicious fertilizer use kept it pretty well weed-free once the Bermuda sorted itself out.
But before that happened, he almost asphalted over that side yard. I recall a house in the late sixties where AstroTurf was installed. In a few years it changed colors - randomly and differently -- weeds/trees came up in the seams, and dog faeces was first impaled, then mummified. It needed vacuuming every day or so to look pristine.
Foundation problems are a function of design/build quality. The only house I know of in Dallas that has not ever had foundation problems with soil shift (allegedly) was built in 1906 (along Turtle Creek) with structural iron and on top of a giant set of ball bearings that allow the house to move independently of the foundation/sub-foundation.
Watered or not watered, they all move sooner or later around here unless built directly on our limestone underbase.
And as long as cheap slabs and matchstick wooden construction is code, then all the houses on the Blackland Prairie are failure prone.
It's a failure of politics (lobbying weak, ineffective municipal codes), not of watering.
