Is your house sitting on the lowest elevation in the development? One house in Omaha I recently inspected was. The home was built in 2005 by a tract builder. During the home inspection, I noticed 2 vertical cracks in the basement exterior wall. These cracks weren’t typical. Most vertical cracks that form are wider at the top and gradually become smaller as you go down the wall. These are indications that one portion of the foundation has settled causing the wall to separate. Instead, these 2 cracks were wider at the bottom and narrowed as you went up. The only educated guess I could make was the center of the foundation wall was sinking.
With any house that is situated at the lowest elevation in the neighborhood, the #1 concern is how much water is being funneled to this area from the neighboring homes and lots. On this home, the sump pump had a discharge pipe that improperly ran from the side of the home all the way to the front corner of the garage and discharged onto the driveway. The pipe had been cut and now the pump was discharging directly at the foundation. With all of the snow and ice from the recent blizzard covering everything, you could see mud & grass where the pump had been discharging indicating there was a fair amount of water discharging here, but from the inspection, I couldn’t tell how much volume.
As the clients were with me, I asked them to go speak to some neighbors to see if they could provide any answers. The home had been foreclosed on, so I knew the bank wouldn’t provide any history. They ended up speaking to the neighbor in the house next door who was a wealth of information to say the least! The house I was inspecting and the houses on both sides of it were receiving A LOT OF WATER. The neighbor stated the sump pumps run almost non-stop. They were so concerned that they had MUD come out to investigate. The employee from MUD (Omaha’s water & gas company) concluded that there had to be a live spring under one of these houses and joked saying they’d be wise to install a well and sell the water!
With this added useful information, I recommended a Soils Engineer to review the matter. Not knowing how much of a problem and costly solution was involved, I reached out to a Structural Engineer to see if he’d ran across these problems before. He had. Unfortunately when he gets called out to these situations, the Buyers have already closed on the home and lived there 3-5 years before they realize something is wrong. The Buyer can lose any equity they have or become upside down on the mortgage because the cost to repair it is so astronomical. He then went on to state that when the soil under the home becomes so saturated, it loses its structural stability. The home can be fixed, but at a major expense. The foundation needs to be supported on piers that run all the way down to bedrock. This will run at least $10,000 for a small-sized home. The exact cost will depend on the overall footprint of the foundation. The other larger portion of the problem is trying to control and divert the water. He stated he’s seen repairs run upwards of $40,000-$60,000!!!
Luckily for my clients, they didn't own the home yet so they weren't stuck with this huge potential expense or headache. They had no reason to waste money hiring a Soils Engineer at this point. They wisely walked away and are looking for another house.
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