There is a funny story (or not funny if you were me) that goes with this inspection. The soil was extremely muddy and the clearance was such you had to crawl using only your elbows and tips of your toes to inch forward. I squeezed under that beam in the picture and inched my way through the the mud to the far corner. As you can imagine there was plenty of things to take pictures of, so when I got done I change my muddy boots and coveralls and threw them in the back of my truck and headed back. About 2 miles down the road I realized I had lost my cell phone. I lost it in that muddy crawlspace! I put on all my muddy clothes and crawled back in and found the phone in the very back. From that point on I ALWAYS leave my cell phone in the truck. The cell phone was in my shirt pocket under my coveralls. Some how it fell out and worked its way out.
That is why I wear my full Tyvec suit for those things, anything comes out of the pockets, stays in the suit. Took me forever to find my tape measure once, it was at my feet. :)
When I went to step on the hall floor, I noticed the seam through several floor boards,so I gingerly tested it. The floor had a lot of movement, so I went to the basement and found where somebody had cut a stringer off to make headroom for the basement stairs. The floor boards were moving for a good reason; they were being held up by air!!!
It was a foreclosure and this was one of the minor problems. The entire back wall of the house leaned out 5" from plumb! I was trying to figure out how to ethically tell my out of state customer to run like hell, when the same realtor that my customer was working with sold the house to another client. I told my client that even though they spent money on an inspection that were very lucky not to get this house.
What if an emergency happened while being down there…you would have no one to call for help…
As we know, there is all kind of hazards in crawls (e.g. snake, spiders, raccoons, broken glass, nails, earthquakes, heart attacks to name a few)…and you would have no one to call for help.
OK this house was a flip and like many only cosmetic crap was nice. This column has 4 bolt holes, in the picture you see2 BUT you need to know those 2 are only finger tight as I found them on the floor and put them there, thus there really is NO connection between the col um and the beam.:shock:
These are some great pics! Let me add a couple more. I was at this 2 1/2 storey home this last Monday. The main beam is undersized and compressed and the supporting columns are rotted.
I think there are already 15 pictures in the running but I had to post this one. If you can’t see it clearly, a wine barrel is holding up the main beam in the home. The only way I can imagine them doing this is by first drinking all the wine and then trying to figure out a way to support the home. :mrgreen: And, yes, I did list this as a defect in my Report.
:mrgreen: 