Buying a home is always an experience; sometimes fun, sometimes stressful, sometimes disappointing. But at the end, there’s a new home for you to start filling with family, laughter, and your future. Unfortunately, when not building the house yourself, you don’t know if the builders took any shortcuts. This family had lived in their home for only a few years when they found out what shortcuts the builders had taken twenty years ago.
The builders of this particular house decided that, instead of paying to haul off all the trees they cleared for the house, they would use the trees as back-fill. And while this did save the builders a few bucks back then, these new home owners are paying for it now.
As the trees began to decompose, they took up less and less room creating a sink hole. And as you can see above, these trees were buried right next to the foundation of the house. As the dirt sunk, the foundation’s base began to pull away from the house. Can you see the gap between the house and the block?
We ended up having to dig a massive hole to remove all of the dead trees. Only then did we refill the hole with dirt to prevent the foundation from sinking any further. But the amount of trees we ended up removing was astonishing.
Always inspect the foundation of the house before you buy, and check up on it every year. Houses do settle and shift on their foundations, but they should not separate from them. Luckily these homeowners were very committed to their house’s up keep and called us to diagnose and correct the problem.
