Reply to Potential foundation issue but not actually an issue?

Forum Index » Home Improvement, Design, and Decorating

Reply to "Potential foundation issue but not actually an issue?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]We bought our 75 yr old house 6 years ago and the inspection came back fine. It was our first house and we had no clue what to look for, and used our realtor's inspector. A few months after moving in, we realized that the unfinished basement, which is concrete block with a parge coating, had a long skinny horizontal hairline crack in one of the walls (no way to know if the crack goes below the parge surface). The crack had probably always been there; we were not looking for anything like that closely.

When we discovered the crack, we hired a structural engineer to look at it. We were dumb and hired one who worked for a foundation company (licensed engineer, not just a salesperson). His professional opinion was that technically we should fix it with steel beams to the tune of $15k due to a 3/8" bow plus the crack, but he told us that it was so minor that if it were him he would monitor the crack and only address if it got bigger years down the road. This left us confused, so we hired another independent structural engineer who advised that the bowing was acceptable and the crack was not concerning.

The crack has not changed at all in the years since. We are thinking about selling and don't know what to do. We live in a buyer beware state so we don't have to disclose anything, and frankly I'm not sure what to disclose as both engineers made it sound like a nothing-burger (we only got a written report from the independent one who said there was no issue whatsoever). We could also shell out the $15k (probably more now), but that seems dumb as both engineers told us not to worry about it. On the other hand, I would hate to go to market, under contract, and then have a potential buyer hire the same engineer that quoted $15k and have that screw up the sale. Any thoughts would be appreciated.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics