I'm interested in buying this house and in the foundation I found this big crack. Is this kind of stuff fixable or should I give up on this house?
We talking $10k? $20k? $100k?
I'm interested in buying this house and in the foundation I found this big crack.
Vertical crack ok, house settle. Horizontal crac bad. Ground pushing into house bulges. Stair step crak very bad. Foundation failing
Here you can see the corner of the house is sort of floating above the foundation. Cracks observed around doors in this part of the house.
Hmm, so would you say this is a stair step crack? It is sorta diagonal.
This house is 1700sqft and this crack is the only obvious one I could find. Thanks for sharing your experience. I'd love to just get an inspection, but I doubt that's possible before actually buying it.
Where do you live? If you’re in US and you really, truly want that house, you can absolutely hire a structural engineer once the house is under contract. Be prepared to shell out $3000 at least, but peace of mind is priceless and it’s better than $70000…
I'm in California. I'm pretty sure that a crack this large will need to be fixed or I'm never going to be able to sell the home 5 years down the line (plus, if not fixed it will just get worse and worse).
It's really just a question of how much it's gonna cost
It may not, like this anon said:
that letter from the structural engineer will be priceless for reselling, or will save your ass if it turns out the foundation is fricked
The house market is such that this house is likely to receive one if not multiple no contigency offers. So anyone who ultimately buys this house is going to be taking a gamble (whether they know it or not). This house is priced quite a bit below houses in this area, possibly because of these structural issues. There is a potential that this issue only costs $30k to fix and then the value of the house goes up $200k alongside this. I'm just throwing out numbers here, but it's possible.
This pretty much answers your comment about being stuck with it down the road if you don't fix it. It's smart to be wary and there's a chance that something worse may happen, but ultimately this won't turn your house into an unreliable zombie in any reasonably active CA real estate market.
We had a place like that on SoCal, a tract house built in 1949 on an 8"x12" unreinforced stem wall poured on grade (over highly expansive clay soil) with no footings whatsoever.
We did some work ourselves to just stop some ongoing damage near a crawlspace opening (essentially retrofitting footings) but that place had cracks like that every ten feet or so and 20 years ago the cheapest quote we got was just under $10K to stabilize the 8' section where the crawlspace opening weak spot was.
Long story short, when itcwent on the market it was an old house, it was still standing, it wasn't condemned, and nobody gave a shit. Three years after we sold it someone came in and redid windows and doors and made it pretty and sold it for almost double...they did nothing to the foundation either.
Without regular torrential seasonal rains and freeze/thaw cycling it's not a huge concern; the fact that that's all that's obvious after 80 years is a good sign.
If you get it, like another anon said make sure to prep for getting water away and out from under it when you *do* get torrential rains that could undermine things quickly if they saturate the ground and runoff starts moving horizontally.
Knowing what I do now I'd recommend spending money on good gutters and drainage for this house over foundation repair, even though it won't be doing anything 99.999% of the time.
Wut?
I paid a structural engineering $200 for an hour consult. He offered a signed letter for another $200 but I told him to frick off.
Buy house, put a crack guage on it, come back in a few years. Maybe shim the opening if you're really worried.
That guy is cheap I don’t leave my house for less than $600
OP that crack has been there a long time as evidenced by everything else not moved or damaged
Could just been shotty construction of the sub grade and it settled
i assume thats a crawl space and shows a cracked footing. The fix requires some job specific equipment. I have a similar issue with my house but its a full basement. we got a $70,000 quote to fix the entire settling permanently. They push a steel pipe down to bedrock and lift the house. It's about 2000-3000$ per pile for a full basement.
Here’s my advice, frick basements and frick crawl spaces. Find a house with a slab foundation
>$70k foundation repair
Burn it down and move on
>and frick crawl spaces.
Isn't this kind of the best situation though? The foundation isn't doing anything other than just holding up the house, the rest of it is dirt. You can shove whatever under there to prop up the floor and it doesn't matter if the foundation cracks or not.
Right, because slabs never crack, and when the plumbing goes to shit you don't have to jackhammer a shit ton of it just to get to where your THINK the problem is, then fix it, then do more concrete work...
In the distance I can see what looks like a horizontal crack, but it's hard to tell and I can't really access that area too easily
If you found a crack like this in your foundation you could potentially just ignore it, right? These cracks aren't the end of the world
How old is the structure? Do the doors and windows in the vicinity of the crack open smoothly? A 45 degree crack is a shear crack, typically associated with settlement. The question is if it is old or still active. Hiring an engineer may not be that helpful since they will need to do a soil sample to actually understand what the composition is under the footing, something the homeowner may not allow. Without that, you are paying for an educated guess. How is the grade outside? I.e is there water running under the footing? If the house is old, and the grading looks good outside, chances are it settled and is fine. You can pack the area under the sil plate with structural grout. If the mentioned dry wall cracks look like they have been repaired and then reappeared that may indicate continued movement, which is cause for concern.
If any of this is concerning to you, let this one pass. Foundations that require structural repair can get expensive quickly.
Home is 80+ years old and in a seismically active area (California). There were some cracks noted in the exterior stucco in the area above the "floating" section. There definitely has been water in the crawl space or at least, you can see lots of efflorescence on the foundation and there was a damaged sump pump down there, too.
Hmm, at 80 years it very well may be old. Efflorescence is fairly common and not a real cause for concern. The sump pump may indicate that the water table get high at points in the season. The sump pump would be something you would want to maintain. You may want to inquire about the stucco cracks to see if you can glean any information on if they are new or old, not that the seller is going to be forthcoming with that information necessarily. Maybe try looking at the adjacent homes, if they are of the same age they may show similar characteristics. I’m no foundation engineer but I would trust your gut annon, if it looks questionable, it probably is. Good luck.
Buy it, finish the basement for less than it costs to fix the foundation, then flip it as upgraded
>buying this house
You are buying a used house.
Here's an important thing to remember:
A house is a consumable.
The land is an investment.
>a used house
Do colonials really?
Yeah, but I prefer the term second-hand house.
I had a similar crack fixed at my house and it was about 7k but I live in Michigan. They just need to lift the house onto helical piers. That being said, if this has been "fixed" in the past, it might be not fixable anymore.
shim & seal
this is a shear crack. cut a few wide shims and insert under sill plate and call it a day.
other option is using poly foam to lift it back up.
probably a 3-4k repair, just needs underpinning.
get insurance and burn it down by accident, rebuild, profit