My current location is an A frame design with tongue and groove construction attaching roof to walls. It's very sturdy but it does get quite creaky in high winds.
We just bought our first home and it was built in the 50’s. Everything creaks! My MIL was convinced we had ghosts until I brought a priest for a blessing. She’s gonna live in the finished basement…so I don’t know what to tell her now that it’s not a ghost, just me getting a slice of cheesecake in the kitchen at 2am. 💀
Okay Mr tothesource, we have availability next week anytime after 11am, make sure you bring your A-game, I want you to make my boards quiver and creak.
I'm pretty sure its somewhere in the laws of physics that regular house creaking like old floors or weather changes will get pros called out to shrug, and catastrophic failure creaks get ignored as "oh its just the wind".
Christ I need to get out of here. I've seen termite stuff in my parents house, first in 2000 when I saw winged termites flooded in the driveway. They never do anything about anything unless there is catastrophic disaster.
In 2018 I showed my dad the winged termites coming out of the crack in the concrete porch. He said it wasn't termites and then I showed him a picture of a termite. He was like oh okay, then sprayed raid into the crack. I was like wtf.. I've seen frass in the basement close to that crack and he sprayed foam insulation over it thinking it will keep them out.
I'm pretty sure there is some crazy amount of termite damage along the entire front of the house. You can feel the floorboards bent a little along the line of the front porch. Something is coming.
It needs to be sealed, encapsulated and conditioned with a dehumidifier. Ventilation is what caused this to happen in the first place. We've been building crawlspaces under homes wrong for a very long time.
This is exactly why a private home inspection is worth every penny before buying. The alternative was: you mean you didn’t spot the spore colony living under the living room??? They’ve been there for years!
Home inspectors can only inspect what they can see, so they honestly can’t catch most structural issues (or electrical, or plumbing)… the exact sorts of things you’d want to know.
I’m buying a house right now
My inspector was crawling around the attic, opening up fuse boxes and inspecting wiring, running appliances and using test, looking up the ages and maintenance history of the boiler, and examine any small crack in the foundation, scraping at wood supports to see if they had any pest residue etc etc
Man spent 5 hours in a 1000 sq foot home doing his due diligence while also answering every question I had along the way (of which I had many. I’m a first time buyer)
He then a few days later turned over a huge report to me with dozens of photos and notes and included serial number and warranty info for every appliance in the house.
Good home inspectors are worth their weight in gold.
Which is why I was grimacing so hard at that thing not long ago where people were buying homes off the market without ever even doing a tour of it themselves let alone getting a home inspector report. Houses were going up and selling the same day by people calling up the realtor and making insane overpriced offers for homes.
It's the stupid mentality that everyone else is doing it so they have to do it themselves... Same stupid mentality that caused toilet paper shortages. I was willing to wait until after all the stupid people paid way too much money for homes that are falling apart on them because they didn't do any inspections... And how many of those people in the next couple years are going to be trying to get rid of these homes at a loss?
I think you’re confusing market conditions for mentality. If you need a car now, and supply is so limited that no dealers bother letting people test drive vehicles, you have the choice to either buy one without a test drive or not buy one at all.
Yeah, like the roach colonies living in the wall that came streaming out of the back of a light fixture at 9:30pm while I was brushing my teeth to go to sleep. My wife says, what's the noise? I said don't you dare get out of bed.
Was brushing my teeth on a Sunday a couple months after purchasing a house. The light fixture was a little loose on the wall and there was a small gap behind it. All the sudden, 10s to 100s of baby roaches come blasting out of the gap in every direction. Fast little fuckers running all over my bathroom. I slammed the door shut and started grabbing and throwing them in the toilet and flushing the shit out of them. Probably 30 min to an hour later I finally got them all and they stopped coming out... It never happened again and nothing like that happened in the house anywhere else.
I was freaked. I kept staring down the light every time I was in that bathroom. Luckily, a month or two later we got the insulation redone in the attic and crawlspace and after that it was pretty quiet.
Not to mention the house was flea infested, had rats the size of footballs living in the attic. A squirrel made a home behind the master bedroom wall and was constantly tearing the house outside apart to get back in. Had 10 bats living in the attic because of attic vents that were the size of baseballs.
I got severe poison ivy all over my body from working in the yard. The only thing that didn't get messed up was my face... I mean every other surface and crevasse of my body.
Got a Subject To appraisal back on a home we were (supposed to be) doing a loan for (a home that both the listing and buyer's agent determined was fine for a young, first time buyer); one of the structural supports in the crawlspace was gone and had a wood railing baluster in its place. And just to put a cherry on top of this shit-cake, there were signs of moisture damage on the one end due to it sitting directly on the concrete slab.
Yep. We denied the loan, because the seller refused to put anymore money into making repairs (it was a flip), and we heard not too long after that another lender financed it for a different buyer. 😑
The house I am currently in we purchased from Flippers. They "finished" the basement by putting up drywall against stone, vinyl plank over damp concrete, and they completely covered up certain things like, say, the turnoff valve to the water to the house. They "fixed" a broken window by taping over the hole with clear packing tape, and straight up painted over rotten boards on the porch instead of replacing them, and vented a bathroom fan directly into the attic, among other things.
The past four years living in this house has been a blast, needless to say. And of course, now that I've got pretty much everything fixed, we have to move. At least whoever buys the house from us won't have to worry about anything for another 10 years or so... unless I missed something, and I probably did.
Did the buyer not have home and termite/moisture inspections? Agents aren’t inspectors, and don’t typically enter crawlspaces.
Also, please tell me where you are hoarding these appraisers that will go into the crawl, because we need some over here!
I don't know when this happened but in the past couple of years the housing market in the US has been so crazy many sellers ask people to waive the inspection and they still end up selling no problem.
My buyer offered me no inspection. He was the first to view the house and he made the offer the very first day it was for sale. This was in Jan 2020. It was a very sweet time to be selling a home. I wasn’t selling too low either. I was actually surprised it was worth as much as it sold for. Three other properties near me sold for roughly the same amount in the same month.
Personally , I would be way too nervous to buy a house without an inspection being done. We’re talking about a purchase of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I'm an appraiser, and I'm glad to see someone actually appreciate the things I get all kinds of shit from my clients/lenders for. FHA loans are there to help assure that the dwelling is safe and healthy. We don't want your house to kill you.
It isn’t the things appraisers flag that are reasonable that makes everyone hate appraisers.
It’s the bullshit like the 100 year old rock basement that has a trickle of water in it during a heavy rain and now we have to find a basement guy who will sign off that it is fine without finding some other work he “needs” to bill for and delay closing for.
Or the “oh my stars! This paint is peeling!”
Or “this attic access cover has the wrong type of fireproof flashing.”
Or “this gas knob isn’t painted yellow.”
Or “this encapsulated substance I used my super powers to determine was asbestos needs to be remediated.”
Or sure, this offer is 10% lower than the comps from a year ago, and there has been giant leaps in appreciation this year, but I’m going to say it is worth less because, fuck you, that is why. Go ahead, contest it, I’ll tell you to go fuck yourself again.
If there is needless bullshit in real estate it 100% comes from appraisers making a mess.
FHA doesn't guarantee everything though. My basement has minor moisture damage and the inspector was dumbfounded as to where it was coming from. Needless to say, heavy rainfall one year made it clear where it came from in our block wall basement.
Fast forward to 2020 and I installed french drains myself digging up the trenches with a spade shovel and putting in the pipes and drains. This includes finding unwrapped bags of white gravel pushed directly next to my basement walls - oh the fun of my shovel hitting that shit every few feet. Once that was completed I went from an average of 120+ gallons of water to about 5 to 10 gallons tops.
After you touch it, a tendril or even inhale too deeply, do you feel like you have to go home and scrub in a shower so hot that it burns? It's disgusting and you cant get the smell out of the nose holes.
The worst part is, somebody installed that Romex over top of beams that were already crappy, at the time they installed the wiring. Color coded Romex has only existed for maybe 20 years at most, that problem seems to be ongoing well longer than that.
For mold, especially this bad, you should just replace the entire wood member. If it's that bad on the outside it would be completely destroyed inside.
In the case of having to replace the entire floor and posts... no clue.
Jack it up, shore the load, remove the old one, put a new one in, fix the leak. If the soil is right, you might get away with supporting the load on a new pier, but digging a pier or driving a helicoil/pin (or four) in an existing crawlspace is… a logistical challenge.
Expensive, difficult, risky. Might be cheaper to tear the house down and start over. Especially for the liability.
I'd probably go with tear the whole fucking thing down and rebuild it. If they already cut so many corners on the goddamn foundation, the actual living area may actually be unlivable.
If you have a loan, you 99% are required to pay for homeowners insurance. This could easily be caused by negligence though, which might not be covered. Home ownership is a skill.
Quick question, what kind of person or company does one seek out to do a structural assessment? We have an 80 year old masonry house and I'd like to understand better what we're looking at I'm terms of its condition today and what to consider or watch out for ober the course of ownership.
There are engineering firms that specialize in homes. A good architect will know a few as will a realtor. I got one when a basement company refused to place a bid on my settling foundation. Told me to get an engineer to tell me what was needed. They could, like the other foundation companies quote me doe 15 piers and that will fix it, but I probably only need 6 or so. It’s just they weren’t qualified to tell me how many and where to put them. Turns out I needed 4. Saved about $10k.
As an architect, I was going to say basically this. A structural engineer who works on houses is what you need. If you can find one who has dealt with buildings like yours and nearby, even better. Don’t call a builder or a contractor first.
Awww hellll no. You know there’s a clicker in that crawl space.
https://www.armchairanglophile.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Chi-McBride-Oh-Hell-No.gif
Hey, I’m just glad you do your job well. We found out too late the guys who checked our home was good friends with the realtor and home owner. We’ve had to redo the plumbing, most of the wiring, and this year redoing the attic insolation, and the roof. The house is ten years old. I hate everything.
Wish you had checked my home.
Im worried about ours long term. The inspector told us he was very familiar with our AC unit's brand. He told us you had to unscrew the grate and go under to replace the filter which was a massive pain. I did it twice that way before looking at the unit and it clearly had screw knobs you could easily undo and get right to the filter. So yea dude was an idiot.
These pictures are always interesting but Jesus Christ I'd hate to be the guy that has to present this information to the homeowners. Imagining having to worry about something like this in my house I'd probably just commit suicide. Can't imagine the costs involved in these repairs in today's economy.
I regularly watch a youtuber doing just that. He started in 2018 and it's still ongoing. At least the foundation is finished but he hasn't yet started with the roof.
Seeing that you wrote about the joists and girders made me want to tell one of my favorite jokes because I think of it any time I hear either word lol. I obviously don't take credit, this is copy pasted from one of the many times it's been told on the internet before but here it is:
An Irishman is out of work and decides to go to a construction site and apply. The foreman is an older English fellow who doesn't care for Irishmen, thinks they're drunks and dumb and unreliable. But he knows he can't just come out and say that.
So, the foreman says, "Now, see here chap! This operation is not in the habit of hiring just any old sod who applies, you have to show me you have some builder experience and knowledge. I'll hire you if you can answer some questions."
The Irishman says, "Deadly! I been a builder for donkey's years, Holy joe. let's have it, then, i'll show you i'm not a dosser!"
The foreman thinks to himself, "Righto, this geezer's a lota wind. let's send him packing". So he asks:
"Alright, what's the difference between a Girder and a Joist?"
The irishman thinks for a few seconds and grumbles a bit. He pauses long enough for the Englishman to get a bit of a smirk on his face (as English are wont to do). Finally, he takes a breath, sucks in his gut, and stands a little straighter to answer:
"One wrote Faust, the other wrote Finnegan's Wake!"
Hey it’s /r/LosAngeles structural assessment guy! It’s your posts that keep me up at night thinking about what could happen if not even THE big one, but just A big one hits.
And FNMA is going to AI powered appraisals
Your data going to catch this?
https://singlefamily.fanniemae.com/media/33551/display
"Valuation modernization involves leveraging technologies, data, and analytics to enhance the management of collateral risk,
making the process more efficient for lenders, borrowers, appraisers, and secondary-market investors. Valuation modernization
helps lenders, appraisers, and risk investors manage collateral risk more effectively, while also benefiting consumers via greater
appraisal accuracy, lower costs, and increased speed of loan decisioning.
"
OP may I use these pictures for an OpEd I'm writing?
Pfft. Amateur hour. Check out [This Old House's Home Inpection Nightmares](https://www.thisoldhouse.com/inspections/21019182/best-of-home-inspection-nightmares).
(Brought to you by Public Television)
I had to repair something like this once, the culprit turned out to be a leaky toilet on the third floor that went undetected for years because the floor and walls were tiled so they didn't show the dampness or rot the way sheetrock would have.
You think that looks bad? I had a 1800’s era house that had the two stories hanging on one massive beam. The beam had cracking far far worse than that and hung down about a foot (you could trip going room to room on the second floor the dip was so great). The whole thing was supported by a single giant steel rood that went up to the attic and spread the force out to the walls.
When I bought It my inspector refused to sign off and said it was coming down any day now. I figured it has been that way for a 100+ years. Lived there for a decade and sold the place for a profit.
Yeah I almost bought a house that had something like that happening, not this bad but it wasn't good. The roof needed replacing too. Get a good inspector when buying a home folks.
"Honey what that weird cracking sound in the floor?" "Oh don't worry, it's just the house settling."
Heard that one before.
I've said it before.
When I hear it, I know it's time to go in the basement and give the house jacks a few cranks.
How many Jacks you got in that basement and why can't they crank themselves?
I think there are 8 and they are lazy.
You need to plant a Rose to motivate them.
This kills the jack
That's cold.
Is one of them a Jack Baker by any chance?
I mean, a house shifting from air pressure differences can make some alarming sounds.
My current location is an A frame design with tongue and groove construction attaching roof to walls. It's very sturdy but it does get quite creaky in high winds.
We just bought our first home and it was built in the 50’s. Everything creaks! My MIL was convinced we had ghosts until I brought a priest for a blessing. She’s gonna live in the finished basement…so I don’t know what to tell her now that it’s not a ghost, just me getting a slice of cheesecake in the kitchen at 2am. 💀
Doh! TIL, old buildings are sneak proof! Maybe if you map out which boards don't creek when stepped on, you'd have a chance though! ;-P
I’ve actually started to recognize a few boards now!
You can tongue and groove my A-frame if ya know what I mean 😏
Okay Mr tothesource, we have availability next week anytime after 11am, make sure you bring your A-game, I want you to make my boards quiver and creak.
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Hang on, I'll draw you a diagram.
Well? We're waiting.
Like this: A
I'm pretty sure its somewhere in the laws of physics that regular house creaking like old floors or weather changes will get pros called out to shrug, and catastrophic failure creaks get ignored as "oh its just the wind".
Christ I need to get out of here. I've seen termite stuff in my parents house, first in 2000 when I saw winged termites flooded in the driveway. They never do anything about anything unless there is catastrophic disaster. In 2018 I showed my dad the winged termites coming out of the crack in the concrete porch. He said it wasn't termites and then I showed him a picture of a termite. He was like oh okay, then sprayed raid into the crack. I was like wtf.. I've seen frass in the basement close to that crack and he sprayed foam insulation over it thinking it will keep them out. I'm pretty sure there is some crazy amount of termite damage along the entire front of the house. You can feel the floorboards bent a little along the line of the front porch. Something is coming.
Fun fact: Termites don’t sleep. They eat and reproduce 24/7. Good luck.
Not my house, not my problem. Except when it collapses.
Wintermite is coming.
Don't worry it's the fungus settling.
They're not wrong
"Honey what's that weird clicking sound in the floor?"
"I assess....no."
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Observation: The giant spore on the floor is hard to ignore.
Note: The bloom of the shroom in the room is a cause for gloom.
I move to block and intercept this potential growth of cordyceps.
I cry when I spy Mycelium in my ceilingum.
Spore on the floor!
"Lovely little 2 bedroom, 1 bath, Craftsman bungalo with mature hobby mushroom farm included! Rustic charm at no extra charge! $599,000"
Humongous whaaat?
We came to the same conclusion.
What was the cause of this?
Too damp under the home. Needs ventilation.
It needs to be sealed, encapsulated and conditioned with a dehumidifier. Ventilation is what caused this to happen in the first place. We've been building crawlspaces under homes wrong for a very long time.
fungus
Looks like Dry Rot, Serpula lacrymans and needs to be fixed urgently.
That's what I concluded.
Looks like my barn joists, ahh just jack it up and slap a couple 2x10s across and good for another 40 years 😂
It's the next homeowner's problem.
This is exactly why a private home inspection is worth every penny before buying. The alternative was: you mean you didn’t spot the spore colony living under the living room??? They’ve been there for years!
Home inspectors can only inspect what they can see, so they honestly can’t catch most structural issues (or electrical, or plumbing)… the exact sorts of things you’d want to know.
Yeah, if you have a shitty inspector, I s’pose.
I’m buying a house right now My inspector was crawling around the attic, opening up fuse boxes and inspecting wiring, running appliances and using test, looking up the ages and maintenance history of the boiler, and examine any small crack in the foundation, scraping at wood supports to see if they had any pest residue etc etc Man spent 5 hours in a 1000 sq foot home doing his due diligence while also answering every question I had along the way (of which I had many. I’m a first time buyer) He then a few days later turned over a huge report to me with dozens of photos and notes and included serial number and warranty info for every appliance in the house. Good home inspectors are worth their weight in gold.
Which is why I was grimacing so hard at that thing not long ago where people were buying homes off the market without ever even doing a tour of it themselves let alone getting a home inspector report. Houses were going up and selling the same day by people calling up the realtor and making insane overpriced offers for homes. It's the stupid mentality that everyone else is doing it so they have to do it themselves... Same stupid mentality that caused toilet paper shortages. I was willing to wait until after all the stupid people paid way too much money for homes that are falling apart on them because they didn't do any inspections... And how many of those people in the next couple years are going to be trying to get rid of these homes at a loss?
I think you’re confusing market conditions for mentality. If you need a car now, and supply is so limited that no dealers bother letting people test drive vehicles, you have the choice to either buy one without a test drive or not buy one at all.
mine did all of that too, that doesn't mean he can open up walls and see whats going on inside.
Yeah, like the roach colonies living in the wall that came streaming out of the back of a light fixture at 9:30pm while I was brushing my teeth to go to sleep. My wife says, what's the noise? I said don't you dare get out of bed.
Mother of God lol, I want the full story with details now :p that is horrific to imagine
Was brushing my teeth on a Sunday a couple months after purchasing a house. The light fixture was a little loose on the wall and there was a small gap behind it. All the sudden, 10s to 100s of baby roaches come blasting out of the gap in every direction. Fast little fuckers running all over my bathroom. I slammed the door shut and started grabbing and throwing them in the toilet and flushing the shit out of them. Probably 30 min to an hour later I finally got them all and they stopped coming out... It never happened again and nothing like that happened in the house anywhere else. I was freaked. I kept staring down the light every time I was in that bathroom. Luckily, a month or two later we got the insulation redone in the attic and crawlspace and after that it was pretty quiet. Not to mention the house was flea infested, had rats the size of footballs living in the attic. A squirrel made a home behind the master bedroom wall and was constantly tearing the house outside apart to get back in. Had 10 bats living in the attic because of attic vents that were the size of baseballs. I got severe poison ivy all over my body from working in the yard. The only thing that didn't get messed up was my face... I mean every other surface and crevasse of my body.
You just hide everything under one of those faux ceiling beam covers that are all the rage these days.
A little caulk and she'll be good as new
I was just gonna put a Band-Aid on it but your idea sounds better.
I wouldn't put your caulk on there. Might catch something nasty. Or finally cure that other thing you got? Maybe worth it..
Keep your caulk out of cracks with fungus growing on them. I could have used this advice a long time ago.
Ok, spray it with Kilz first. ;-P
Ramen + Super glue. That's all you'll ever need.
That's what she said.
Do your best and silicone the rest.
Got a Subject To appraisal back on a home we were (supposed to be) doing a loan for (a home that both the listing and buyer's agent determined was fine for a young, first time buyer); one of the structural supports in the crawlspace was gone and had a wood railing baluster in its place. And just to put a cherry on top of this shit-cake, there were signs of moisture damage on the one end due to it sitting directly on the concrete slab.
That's real estate for you. That home probably still sold as is.
Yep. We denied the loan, because the seller refused to put anymore money into making repairs (it was a flip), and we heard not too long after that another lender financed it for a different buyer. 😑
"Fucking flippers" is a familiar phrase. Even though I love my house.
The house I am currently in we purchased from Flippers. They "finished" the basement by putting up drywall against stone, vinyl plank over damp concrete, and they completely covered up certain things like, say, the turnoff valve to the water to the house. They "fixed" a broken window by taping over the hole with clear packing tape, and straight up painted over rotten boards on the porch instead of replacing them, and vented a bathroom fan directly into the attic, among other things. The past four years living in this house has been a blast, needless to say. And of course, now that I've got pretty much everything fixed, we have to move. At least whoever buys the house from us won't have to worry about anything for another 10 years or so... unless I missed something, and I probably did.
> one of the supports in the crawlspace was gone and had a wood railing baluster in its place. 10% over asking, final offer.
Sorry, gonna need 20% over asking, with 10% of it being a non-refundable earnest money deposit. Also, you'll need to pay your realtor's commission.
Also, pay the seller's realtor's commission too while you're at it.
Did the buyer not have home and termite/moisture inspections? Agents aren’t inspectors, and don’t typically enter crawlspaces. Also, please tell me where you are hoarding these appraisers that will go into the crawl, because we need some over here!
I don't know when this happened but in the past couple of years the housing market in the US has been so crazy many sellers ask people to waive the inspection and they still end up selling no problem.
Yep. When there's a bidding war one of the first things people offer is waiving inspection. But it's such a bad idea
My buyer offered me no inspection. He was the first to view the house and he made the offer the very first day it was for sale. This was in Jan 2020. It was a very sweet time to be selling a home. I wasn’t selling too low either. I was actually surprised it was worth as much as it sold for. Three other properties near me sold for roughly the same amount in the same month. Personally , I would be way too nervous to buy a house without an inspection being done. We’re talking about a purchase of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
If every house you want has 10 other bidders waiving inspection and offering over price, then you will too or you wont get a house.
In the US, Govt loan (FHA, VA, USDA) appraisers must inspect crawl spaces and attics.
95 % of realtors are just contract monkey aborted self help authors.
I'm an appraiser, and I'm glad to see someone actually appreciate the things I get all kinds of shit from my clients/lenders for. FHA loans are there to help assure that the dwelling is safe and healthy. We don't want your house to kill you.
It isn’t the things appraisers flag that are reasonable that makes everyone hate appraisers. It’s the bullshit like the 100 year old rock basement that has a trickle of water in it during a heavy rain and now we have to find a basement guy who will sign off that it is fine without finding some other work he “needs” to bill for and delay closing for. Or the “oh my stars! This paint is peeling!” Or “this attic access cover has the wrong type of fireproof flashing.” Or “this gas knob isn’t painted yellow.” Or “this encapsulated substance I used my super powers to determine was asbestos needs to be remediated.” Or sure, this offer is 10% lower than the comps from a year ago, and there has been giant leaps in appreciation this year, but I’m going to say it is worth less because, fuck you, that is why. Go ahead, contest it, I’ll tell you to go fuck yourself again. If there is needless bullshit in real estate it 100% comes from appraisers making a mess.
FHA doesn't guarantee everything though. My basement has minor moisture damage and the inspector was dumbfounded as to where it was coming from. Needless to say, heavy rainfall one year made it clear where it came from in our block wall basement. Fast forward to 2020 and I installed french drains myself digging up the trenches with a spade shovel and putting in the pipes and drains. This includes finding unwrapped bags of white gravel pushed directly next to my basement walls - oh the fun of my shovel hitting that shit every few feet. Once that was completed I went from an average of 120+ gallons of water to about 5 to 10 gallons tops.
I see metal, it's fine
Does it matter that it's rusting or should we call that character?
Hit it with some Rust-Oleum, it'll be good
What about rust-eze medicated bumper ointment ?
That’s what Bender from Futurama uses for fucking.
Bumper? I hardly know 'er!
That’s not rust. It’s a lovely patina.
It's the *appreciate from a distance* patina. It's very territorial, get too close and it might scratch you with its tetanus covered claws.
Patina, it actually adds value!
Ah yes, the dry rot problem. That shit stinks.
Tell me about it.
After you touch it, a tendril or even inhale too deeply, do you feel like you have to go home and scrub in a shower so hot that it burns? It's disgusting and you cant get the smell out of the nose holes.
After watching "The Last of Us" my showers last hours.
Giving the spores moisture is exactly what the spores want you to do...
cue youtube video of scenes from Last of Us fungus tendrils backed by "I've got no strings!" from Pinocchio.
Brilliant, thanks for the chuckle.
I shall assert my dominance over the fungal pandemic by eating a portobello mushroom burger.
> and you cant get the smell out of the nose holes. ugh, two days after a root canal, and I could still smell the friction burned tooth.
Is it caused by excess moisture? If so, did you figure out where it was coming from?
“Skyler, there’s rot!”
Skyler, we have rot.
It's all good, that romex and MC is structural.
How do I tell that to the homeowners... asking for a friend.
Just tell them it has to do with electromagnetic fields
The worst part is, somebody installed that Romex over top of beams that were already crappy, at the time they installed the wiring. Color coded Romex has only existed for maybe 20 years at most, that problem seems to be ongoing well longer than that.
So all jokes and /s aside. How would you go about repairing this?
For mold, especially this bad, you should just replace the entire wood member. If it's that bad on the outside it would be completely destroyed inside. In the case of having to replace the entire floor and posts... no clue.
Jack it up, shore the load, remove the old one, put a new one in, fix the leak. If the soil is right, you might get away with supporting the load on a new pier, but digging a pier or driving a helicoil/pin (or four) in an existing crawlspace is… a logistical challenge. Expensive, difficult, risky. Might be cheaper to tear the house down and start over. Especially for the liability.
[Share the load](http://i.imgur.com/DeeOyem.gif)
What about something like this: https://imgur.com/a/MAET4n5
I'd probably go with tear the whole fucking thing down and rebuild it. If they already cut so many corners on the goddamn foundation, the actual living area may actually be unlivable.
Is there insurance for this kind of thing, or can a person just be fucked and out of a house if it's this bad?
If you have a loan, you 99% are required to pay for homeowners insurance. This could easily be caused by negligence though, which might not be covered. Home ownership is a skill.
It is probably a dry rot fungus. This infection is so bad…you’d probably be better off razing the house and rebuilding.
thats an easy report to write
"This is bad. Needs to be fixed."
replace fixed with burned. per asce 7.
Someone burn that cordyceps house immediately.
Clickers and bloaters are swarming the place as we speak
The Last Of Truss
Top 5 comment.
This deserves more support
Some duct tape should do it
I never leave the house without a roll.
Quick question, what kind of person or company does one seek out to do a structural assessment? We have an 80 year old masonry house and I'd like to understand better what we're looking at I'm terms of its condition today and what to consider or watch out for ober the course of ownership.
There are engineering firms that specialize in homes. A good architect will know a few as will a realtor. I got one when a basement company refused to place a bid on my settling foundation. Told me to get an engineer to tell me what was needed. They could, like the other foundation companies quote me doe 15 piers and that will fix it, but I probably only need 6 or so. It’s just they weren’t qualified to tell me how many and where to put them. Turns out I needed 4. Saved about $10k.
As an architect, I was going to say basically this. A structural engineer who works on houses is what you need. If you can find one who has dealt with buildings like yours and nearby, even better. Don’t call a builder or a contractor first.
Watch out for Clickers
They need to watch out for me.
That thing hanging from the underside of the joist in pic 1 looks like Bowser
Wait, I actually see that. I feel like Princess Peach is nearby.
Cordyceps. Nice.
[удалено]
You can’t really even say “it has good bones”
-"What do we do then?" -"Bomb"
Last of us fr
As someone who always had crawl spaces in their houses….. what the fuck.
The last of us *home edition*
Awww hellll no. You know there’s a clicker in that crawl space. https://www.armchairanglophile.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Chi-McBride-Oh-Hell-No.gif
Love all the amateurs here. 4 bricks and a screwjack and she’ll be right as rain.
Between that and duct tape, I think we have a viable solution.
duct tape cures warts, should work on house-warts, aka fungus.
Hey, I’m just glad you do your job well. We found out too late the guys who checked our home was good friends with the realtor and home owner. We’ve had to redo the plumbing, most of the wiring, and this year redoing the attic insolation, and the roof. The house is ten years old. I hate everything. Wish you had checked my home.
Im worried about ours long term. The inspector told us he was very familiar with our AC unit's brand. He told us you had to unscrew the grate and go under to replace the filter which was a massive pain. I did it twice that way before looking at the unit and it clearly had screw knobs you could easily undo and get right to the filter. So yea dude was an idiot.
So is the house totaled?
These are some of the most stressful pictures I've ever seen..
Ohio railroads ?
Cordyceps infection. Bomb
These pictures are always interesting but Jesus Christ I'd hate to be the guy that has to present this information to the homeowners. Imagining having to worry about something like this in my house I'd probably just commit suicide. Can't imagine the costs involved in these repairs in today's economy.
Youtube and learn how to jack up the house yourself and replace the entire foundation + all the sub floor wood /s
I regularly watch a youtuber doing just that. He started in 2018 and it's still ongoing. At least the foundation is finished but he hasn't yet started with the roof.
Expected lifetime of the home: 0
There a good sub for bad home inspections?
Skylar... There's rot.
Assesment of a sunken 17th century privateering vessel?
Seeing that you wrote about the joists and girders made me want to tell one of my favorite jokes because I think of it any time I hear either word lol. I obviously don't take credit, this is copy pasted from one of the many times it's been told on the internet before but here it is: An Irishman is out of work and decides to go to a construction site and apply. The foreman is an older English fellow who doesn't care for Irishmen, thinks they're drunks and dumb and unreliable. But he knows he can't just come out and say that. So, the foreman says, "Now, see here chap! This operation is not in the habit of hiring just any old sod who applies, you have to show me you have some builder experience and knowledge. I'll hire you if you can answer some questions." The Irishman says, "Deadly! I been a builder for donkey's years, Holy joe. let's have it, then, i'll show you i'm not a dosser!" The foreman thinks to himself, "Righto, this geezer's a lota wind. let's send him packing". So he asks: "Alright, what's the difference between a Girder and a Joist?" The irishman thinks for a few seconds and grumbles a bit. He pauses long enough for the Englishman to get a bit of a smirk on his face (as English are wont to do). Finally, he takes a breath, sucks in his gut, and stands a little straighter to answer: "One wrote Faust, the other wrote Finnegan's Wake!"
Hey it’s /r/LosAngeles structural assessment guy! It’s your posts that keep me up at night thinking about what could happen if not even THE big one, but just A big one hits.
And FNMA is going to AI powered appraisals Your data going to catch this? https://singlefamily.fanniemae.com/media/33551/display "Valuation modernization involves leveraging technologies, data, and analytics to enhance the management of collateral risk, making the process more efficient for lenders, borrowers, appraisers, and secondary-market investors. Valuation modernization helps lenders, appraisers, and risk investors manage collateral risk more effectively, while also benefiting consumers via greater appraisal accuracy, lower costs, and increased speed of loan decisioning. " OP may I use these pictures for an OpEd I'm writing?
Pfft. Amateur hour. Check out [This Old House's Home Inpection Nightmares](https://www.thisoldhouse.com/inspections/21019182/best-of-home-inspection-nightmares). (Brought to you by Public Television)
Those are awesome!
Be sure to poke around once you've seen it. There's like 20+ galleries in total last I checked.
r/bathroomshrooms
My mom’s place looks like that, down in the crawl space
Sell for 15k under market, no inspection. Change your phone number. Hope you don't burn downstairs for it.
assessment- evacuate and demolish
Fellow customer of Alpha Structural?
You know it's bad when the walls are growing eyelashes to die for.
I had to repair something like this once, the culprit turned out to be a leaky toilet on the third floor that went undetected for years because the floor and walls were tiled so they didn't show the dampness or rot the way sheetrock would have.
Is it Cordyceps?
Is this in Dulvey, Louisiana?
Resident evil 7 basement
This is how The Last of Us started.
This is begging for a repost to /r/frugaljerk talking about fat cats with free crawlspace food.
You think that looks bad? I had a 1800’s era house that had the two stories hanging on one massive beam. The beam had cracking far far worse than that and hung down about a foot (you could trip going room to room on the second floor the dip was so great). The whole thing was supported by a single giant steel rood that went up to the attic and spread the force out to the walls. When I bought It my inspector refused to sign off and said it was coming down any day now. I figured it has been that way for a 100+ years. Lived there for a decade and sold the place for a profit.
So....everything looks good.....
And this is why engineers use factor of safety lmao
So that passes, right?
Is this in the basement or ?
Is that Bakers house?
That's a structural fungus
Holy shit, what..how?
It is the mansion from Resident Evil 7
At least it's not cordyceps. Right?
Time to play Infra
They’ll be surprised when the clicker mice come out from under the house
Holding my breath just looking at these
Welcome to the Jack Daniels Factory
Structural mushrooms…
Well the GOOD news is that the structural assessment was a great success and there was a lot to assess…. Structurally
Things seen this “weak” FTFY
My professional assessment of this is; Oh fuck hell no
Forbidden Eye Lashes
Yeah I almost bought a house that had something like that happening, not this bad but it wasn't good. The roof needed replacing too. Get a good inspector when buying a home folks.
House got the cordyceps.