You can tell when a guy sells the house, packs up and moves away. You can also tell when a guy just leaves. Bobby, the guy who lived behind me, has up and disappeared.
Bobby was having no luck selling his house because it needed foundation repair. He deducted the cost of fixing the slab from his asking price but didn’t realize the financing problems a new buyer would encounter. Mortgage companies are not real anxious to lend money for a house with known unresolved foundation problems.
Apparently Bobby had neither the cash, credit or will to get the foundation repaired so he could sell the house. Instead he seems to have just walked away. The heap of belongings behind the house testify to that. I haven’t seen him in weeks. The small in-ground swimming pool in the back yard has turned into a lagoon.
Then two weeks ago a crew showed up and dug the holes for drilled piers all around slab including a couple of holes through the driveway. The holes looked to be about 2 feet by 2 feet and I don’t know how deep. They were filled with concrete to within a foot and a half or so of the foundation. Then the crew left.
I doubt that this job was done by a main stream foundation repair contractor. The vehicles were crappy looking and had no company names. They worked on the July 4th holiday. I saw no reinforcing steel being used in the pier holes. They then left all the holes uncovered to collect rain water during the curing process. And it rained a lot. Somehow I don’t think an experienced engineer would approve of their work.
The crew returned a week or so later with jacks and concrete cylinders. They spent a day pumping water out of the holes, mating the cylinders to the piers, cutting the cylinders to fit, using the jacks to lift the slab. They backfilled the holes with the soil they had dug out and called it a day.
So somewhere there is a piece of paper that says Bobby’s foundation has been “repaired.” As they say, “buyer beware.”