Our Crumbling Problem

A couple of months ago I was going through our Netflix queue and was surprised to see the movie The Money Pit on it. I've seen that movie a long long time ago and it's one of my favorite Tom Hanks films. Sean had put it on the queue as he's never seen it. So we sat down one night and watched it and laughed our hineys off. We laughed not only because the movie is hilarious but also because we are living that movie. We bought our house almost seven years ago. It was a foreclosure and marked below it's market value. We fell in love with the property and knew even before looking at the house that we'd be putting an offer in on it. Were we ignorant kids at the time? You betcha! This house could have been completely gutted and falling into the ground and we probably still would have bought it. Ends up it was falling into the ground. Not even six months after closing on the house we started seeing the first of many cracks develop in the tile flooring in the dining room. Our house is "special" in that it has a partial basement and the rest is a slab. The basement takes up about 2/3rds of the house while the dining room and our bedroom sits on the slab. The basement has no problems, there is no shifting or leaking happening down there. The slab is another matter. The clay soil under the slab is contracting causing the slab to crack and shift. And boy is it cracking.....big honking cracks you can stick your finger in.

So four years ago we had several companies come out and give us quotes on jacking up the corner of the house. The first quote made my eyes almost pop out of their sockets. I remember calling Sean at work and laughing because the quote was astronomical. Turns out that first quote was the lowest of all of them. *groan* So with our options being what they were, we refinanced our money pit and had the foundation jacked up. They put four jacks around the outside of the foundation and then came inside and jack hammered three holes in the middle of my dining room. They then placed three more jacks under the interior of the slab. That was four years ago. Then yesterday they came out and did it all again. Turns out the ground can shift some more and the jacks shift with them.

So I guess it's a blessing we never got around to putting down new flooring. It's also a blessing we picked the company that gave us a warranty, seeing as this probably is going to happen every four years. If I can offer any advice to prospective home buyers: get a home inspection done by a competent inspector that knows foundations. I would like to have thought we wouldn't have bought this house if we knew all the issues we were going to have with it. But, like I mentioned, we were ignorant and young and probably would have bought it anyways.

My beautiful dining room.