I wish you would have called me earlier ...

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Now that you have an engineer on record saying that the house is "economically uncorrectable", and, "extremely non-uniform and below industry standard", you are basically screwed. That document, written by the engineer, MUST be included every time the house is sold. To conceal a document of that nature could land you in jail in a heartbeat. I don't know why people let that happen to something so valuable, but I know why engineers write those kind of letters ... YOU PAID THEM TO.

It is a sad thing to see, but perhaps this will be a warning to others in that predicament ... BE VERY CAREFUL of what is written about your house and by whom it is written. Your problems may have been superficial, but now they are monumental in the perceptions of future homebuyers.

Your only angle of attack right now, might be reason, but it is a slim chance. If I were in your shoes, I would quit thinking that your house is not going to keep moving. It will. Equilibrium of ground moisture may take 10 years to establish under your house if it is relatively free of organic material and properly maintained. Your house will move, and your slab will flex. It is inevitable unless it was built to launch the space-shuttle. But, with a little help from you to establish consistent moisture around the house given the seasonal rainfall consideration ... your house will begin to slow down how much it moves on the Houston "gumbo."

You can detect how much it moves by taking readings of the elevation of the house to establish a benchmark of flatness, from which to compare later. If you properly maintain moisture, then the movement will be undetectable, even if half of the cables are missing. (I bet the engineer did not tell you that when he wrote that letter that will result in about a 20%-50% reduction in property value.)

There are proactive things that can be done. For instance, repair the tendon. All cables in post-tensioned slabs can be removed, and replaced, or repaired. It isn't that hard to do, and it does not cost much either. My firm does that kind of stuff all the time, for less then a couple of hundred dollars per cable. You can also install a moisture-proof barrier apron around your house. This attaches to the outside edge of the slab, just below the ground surface, and extends a couple of feet toward the yard in every direction. By installing this apron around the house, you have just moved the effective edge-moisture variation distance by the width of the barrier. This can greatly decrease the activity of soil underneath ground-supported slabs, and the resultant fluctuation from wet season to dry season around the edge of the slab. Those are the obvious improvements that can be made among a host of other improvements that I have seen done.

Feel free to write me if you have any questions. The link to my address can be found at: www.prospectionsinc.com