Cleveland Ohio's
Certified Home and Commercial
Property Inspectors
FOUNDATION INSPECTIONS
Total Care Property Inspection checks for foundation cracks in the slab and foundation walls. We can advise you of the potential problem and the solutation for the repair. If you have problems in the foundation the can cause damage all through the home. The word foundation is a timeless metaphor of strength and security, and people quite naturally have genuine concerns about the foundations on which their homes rest. For this reason, people need to be educated about foundations in general and specific types in particular, and I include such information in every report.
Some inspectors may be inclined to believe that small cracks, which are typically the result of shrinkage, are not worth noting. However, consider the following case involving a house with slab on-grade foundation in a neighborhood with no apparent geological issues, no cracks in the streets, no broken curbs, nothing. The house had been completely renovated, and appeared to be in perfect condition. It was tastefully furnished, and had a new roof, new windows, new doors, and new carpeted and tiled floors, to name the major improvements. The only visible blemishes were cracks in an old patio slab that could have resulted years earlier, due to the absence of expansion joints, the installation of which was not in common practice when the house was built.
Vertical cracks in foundation walls are relatively common, and typically result from shrinkage. However, those in the above pictures that were taken from inside a garage are probably seismically related, but not everyone agrees on the significance of such cracks. And when money is involved, opinions can range from rational to ridiculous. A veteran foundation contractor that I once knew paid little attention to such cracks unless there was a significant degree of rotation, but that was in a less litigious era. He would explain how they occur and sometimes pacify his nervous clients by explaining that he had to crawl through an eighteen inch crack in the stem wall, meaning the screened foundation access hatch, to enter the crawlspace. However, there are issues besides cracks that inspectors need to be concerned about. For instance, if the soils around a foundation extend above the footing and do not slope away for a distance of at least six feet, structural problems could result, as you can see from the picture of a foundation wall that was taken from inside a crawlspace. Soils were piled high on the outside of the stem wall that allowed moisture to pond, penetrate, and eventually deteriorate the concrete to a point that exposed the rebar, as you can see from the picture.
Shrinkage cracks are common in slab foundations, and are usually quite small. However, it is not unusual to find larger ones where the slab meets the footing. These are referred to as cold-joint separations, and are usually not discovered until carpeting and padding are being replaced. Because of their size, they can seem structurally alarming but they’re really not and are easily repaired with non-shrink grout. However, people have been reported to become hysterical, believing that their house is about to fall down, or that the seller had deliberately concealed defects that the inspector should have magically known existed. It’s a recurrent nightmare for those inspectors who have tried to convince a disgruntled client that such cracks have little significance. The truth is that all cracks are structural but not all of them are structurally alarming, and people really do need to be educated and cautioned about them, no matter how small, in which case their response is likely to be rational instead of hysterical.
We should not leave the subject of foundations without talking about sloping floors. Some floors are built out of level, and some are caused by differential settling, which is a result of weight bearing down on footings situated in soils that are either inherently unstable, inadequately compacted, or have become destabilized by moisture. Significantly, most builders pay little attention to weight, and could only guess at the weight of a house, whereas a shipwright could tell you down to the last pound what a ship weighs. Consequently, houses do have a tendency to settle, usually listing to one side, or settling more or less equally on opposing sides, which leaves floors crowned in the center. Similarly, many structural engineers agree that one inch of slope in twenty feet is tolerable, and report that differences in elevation are typically not noticed until it exceeds this.
TOTAL CARE PROPERTY INSPECTION
871 Richmond Road
Lyndhurst, OH 44124
(216) 544-9322
Cleveland, Ohio
Home, Commercial and Mold Inspections
