Inspection Day

Now I know why thorough inspections are required when buying a house. One of the first things I found looking around the yard were three of these black and yellow Argiope spiders (an orb web spider). They were huge but didn’t even scare my niece’s, Hannah and Skylar, because they looked so peaceful hanging out in their cool webs. They may have been the best thing I saw yesterday. From there it kinda went down hill and got discouraging.

We found several little things like this broken toilet tank, excessively hot water (140 degrees) and leaky outside water spickets. None of these things are really big or expensive problems for the seller to take care of. In fact, under the terms of the purchase contract they don’t have to repair such small things unless all repairs exceed $1500. But unfortunately not everything was a small problem.

They also had a few mid-range, somewhat expensive problems to address with the air conditioners. The downstairs air condenser had a rusted drip pan – no biggie. But the upstairs condenser had a broken PVC drain pipe thanks to someone throwing luggage on it when they used the condenser access area as storage. Yikes. The big problem is the water leaking from the broken pipe overflowed the drip pan which saturated the sub-flooring. Luckily it hadn’t soaked through to the ceiling below. We brought this to seller’s attention immediately so he could get it fixed quick.

But the real problem, and possible show-stopper, is the foundation. The first time we looked at the house my dad noticed the floor seemed to sink towards the center of the house. I couldn’t tell very much but did notice it felt like I was waking down hill in the entrance foyer. But according to Don, my inspector, this was just “the tip of the iceburg.” As he was describing the problem I quickly recalled from my experience framing houses during college that a floor girder must be located in the center 1/3 of a foundation support column.

As you can tell by this photo one girder of this house is clearly located on the right 1/3 of the support column and is even hanging off a little bit. Why is this a big issue? Because as the house settles the support column will settle to one side creating dips in the floor system as the floor joists bow. And it’s already starting.

So now we have to get a structural engineer to look at it. If he recommends fixing it then the seller will need to hire Ram Jack or some other foundation specialists to make the repair by setting another column. That won’t be cheap and it will be interesting to see if they’ll actually pay for it or back out of the sale. They might as well fix it because any future inspector is going to find the same problem.