LESLIE: Jim in Missouri is up next and he’s got an issue with foundation structure. In fact, perhaps a room’s even broken off. What is going on over there?
JIM: Well, I’m falling apart.
TOM: OK.
LESLIE: Holy moly.
JIM: I have a front bedroom that goes up to the hall and a bathroom. And it seems to want to leave the rest of the house. It’s a slab, 1,300-square-feet house. It’s pulling away from the rest of the house.
TOM: And where is the split itself?
JIM: It would be between the bedroom and bathroom and probably – I don’t know for sure but it probably goes underneath the hallway.
TOM: And do you sense that this is an active problem, that the cracks have gotten wider?
JIM: Yeah. Eventually – I mean originally – some split on the other side of the wall from the bedroom.
TOM: OK.
JIM: And it cracked along from the outside, across – under the tub, into the bathroom. And I don’t know if it went any further than the vanity or not.
TOM: Alright. So, listen, I think that this is a …
JIM: And they repaired that.
TOM: Well, how did they repair it? Did they just seal it or did they do some sort of structural repair?
JIM: Really just put it in the – they sealed it and then put mortar out to cover up …
TOM: Yeah, that’s not a structural repair; that’s a cosmetic repair.
Jim, I hate to tell you this but you really need to talk to a structural engineer, because this sounds like it’s potentially serious. It’s ongoing now and you’re seeing old repairs basically break apart, which means it’s moving. So you need to have an engineer look at this and figure out what’s moving, how quickly it’s moving and what we need to do to stop it from moving and design a repair to do just that.
And then once you have the design, you can have it fixed. But the contractor now is going to follow the engineer’s design, not their own sort of speculative way to fix this. And then once the contractor completes the repair, you can have the engineer reinspect it and kind of give you a letter that says it was done correctly. And that’s the best way to not only get it fixed but make sure you’re protecting the house for a future sale, so it doesn’t become an issue at that point.
JIM: Well, that’s what I’m going to do is sell the house. And I know – I heard your program, oh, a few weeks back on this. But I was in the car and I couldn’t do anything about it.
TOM: I do think that a lot of times we see cracks in these slabs but what you’re describing is potentially serious. I definitely would recommend that you have a structural engineer take a look at it first and then take it from there.
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