Our Foundation

I’ve read DIY blogs for years. Long before I actually owned a home, I watched with fascination and awe as makeovers came together and the most incredible before and after photos were revealed.

This is not one of those. It figures that I finally start a blog and the first “before and after” I get to post is of a dank, dark basement and crawlspace. Sigh. I’ve talked a little about the problems with our foundation, but I thought today I would share all the details.

Just some of the materials needed to repair the foundation.

Once we decided that we were definitely going to sell our house, we knew that the first step was going to be talking to a structural engineer. He spent 3 hours crawling around under the house and came upstairs to tell us that we had major foundation and structural problems. A few weeks later he sent us a very long report that included pictures of all the problems. Basically (in terms that I understand so there are zero guarantees that it’s accurate), there were a lot of beams and girders (I learned a new word!) that were damaged and unsupported.

Additionally, there were problems with the pantry that was on the back of the house attached to the kitchen. He said that the foundation under the pantry was completely crumbling and that the whole room was, quite literally, falling off the back of the house.

View into the pantry from the kitchen.

Apologies for the terrible lighting (my sister will kill me when she sees this picture), but this is the ceiling of the doorway between the pantry and the kitchen and the incredibly large crack that runs along the entire doorway.

The exterior of the pantry. See that large crack around the window? Apparently that’s not good.

The exterior side of the pantry with more “not good” cracks.

Fast forward to getting the quote from the contractor we eventually went with, and he said we needed a bunch of new joists and girders, along with about a dozen CMU piers (no idea what those are) and several helical piers (ditto). Fantastic. They also needed to completely rebuild the foundation under the pantry.

The day before all the work started, April 27, 2020, I filmed a quick video of the basement just to show a little bit about what was going (the parts of it that I understand, anyway).

The first few years that we lived here we had a lot of problems with water getting into the basement. After a hard rain, we could open the door to the basement and there could be 1 - 2 feet of water just sitting there. Finally, we were told that our sump pump wasn’t strong enough and we needed a new one. So we did that. The new sump pump kept getting clogged so, again, we would have a swimming pool in our basement after a hard rain. Eventually, we were told they needed to dig down and install a sump pump under the floor level and put in special measures so it wouldn’t get clogged. So we did that 4 or 5 years ago and, for the most part, the basement hasn’t flooded since then.

As you can see in the video, all that water certainly contributed to the problems. It greatly damaged the walls so some of those have to be repaired. Additionally, we had several metal “supports” that were sitting on wood boards that rotted away because of all the flooding and were no longer supporting anything. There were many more supports that were sitting on concrete blocks on the ground of the crawl space, and, as the ground shifted, the concrete blocks shifted and, again, the supports were no longer supporting anything. So some of what the repairs will be is to dig down and pour permanent concrete piers for the supports to sit on.

One of the “supports” that can be moved by hand after the boards under it have rotted away. You can also see on the pole how high the water would get when it was flooding.

Again, all of this is my interpretation as a liberal arts major and law school graduate, so in no way should be taken as accurate.

The window that the workers are crawling in and out of. Also, the white on the brick walls? That’s a sign of water damage. Awesome.

So that’s where we are. The work continues and we feel awful because it’s dark, dirty, damp work and they are accessing the basement by crawling in and out of the basement window (which is very very small). They’ve cut out holes in the basement floors to pour footings for the piers and are working to replace one of the front girders right now (Chris told me all that, so it’s probably accurate).

This has been a huge, very expensive lesson for us. We bought a too-big house that stretched us financially so we didn’t have a whole lot of money to put into maintenance. We also were just really stupid first-time homeowners. I want to go back in time to us in 2010 or so when we first noticed the flooding and SLAP us. When we saw the water the first time, we laughed and were like, well what do we do with this? And left it for a couple days while we tried to figure it out. Dumb dumb dumb.

This is their 3rd week of work and we’re guessing we have another week or 2. After that, the REAL fun begins (replacing floors! painting! repairing base molding!). Never thought I would say this, but I can’t wait.