This happened to me a while back but I thought it would be good to share to possibly save someone 10s of thousands of dollars.
I had some foundation cracks and a few small cracks in the drywall of my house. I got worried and called out a foundation company that offered a “free” inspection. The inspector proceeded to tell me that my house was “sinking and breaking in half like the titanic” and I needed $25k in repairs. I became very stressed. With a repair that large, I wanted a second opinion.
I hired a proper structural engineer. It wasn’t cheap, he charged me $450 to look around for about 15 minutes. I had told him what the foundation company had told me and he laughed. I ended up needing no repairs besides a point and retuck. The cracks in the brick? He said those were cracks from thermal expansion. He saved me about $24.5k.
I later read that a lot of the “free” foundation inspectors operate on a commission basis. They will always tell you that you will need foundation work, otherwise they would be going out of business. Beware of free inspections.
The only reason a for-profit business does anything for free is because it’s somehow tied to a payday somewhere else.
A free initial contact is really just an unpaid sales pitch.
This is a great tip!
I’ve never dealt with it on my own home, fortunately, but I used to work in real estate purchase/sale/title litigation and the amount of fly-by-night “inspectors” that would plague my clients with this garbage is truly shocking. I always recommend that home buyers hire a structural engineer, a plumber, and an electrician, plus other experts on a case-by-case basis, not a home inspector (or other types of rando inspectors), for their pre-purchase due diligence. Yes, it is absolutely more expensive up front than a home inspector, but it’s also WAY cheaper than buying a house with serious, possibly irreparable, structural issues that you don’t find out about until 2 years after closing.
The worst, though, were the tree removal “experts.” A huge number of them didn’t seem to care whether the house was still standing after they removed the tree that fell on it, and I ran across more than a few that had some truly questionable billing practices, if not outright fraudulent. I’m sure there are plenty of good ones out there, but boy it didn’t feel like it.
Good on you, OP, for doing the right thing for you and your home! I hope you have many happy and structurally sound years in it!
Oh man, I can second the tree removal experts. We have a corner lot with a lot of large mature trees, and we get tree services knocking on our door monthly, telling us we should cut all of our trees down to “protect the house”. We were concerned enough to hire a certified arborist who worked with an engineering firm, who came out for a couple hundred dollars, assessed our trees, and told us all those companies were morons and our trees were just a bunch of nice healthy oaks.
It’s usually worth getting a second opinion on anything that expensive, and it’s usually worth waiting for a good engineer if they’re backed up.
I am an engineer, and I’ve seen good engineers and shit engineers. It’s terrible I have to say this, but if you’re buying a house and the owner has an engineer look at a potentially serious problem, you should probably still pay for an engineer to look at it as well. And it’s probably going to be expensive. $450 is a steal.
Also, if you know what you want the engineer to look at, specifically, it will cost less than “getting the house checked.” The former might be a fixed fee, the latter is likely to be hourly and well into 4 figures.
I have been trying to find a structural engineer to come look at my garage but I don’t even know where to look. Google wasn’t extremely helpful. Any advice on how to find structural engineers in my area?
I’d check with medium sized contractors or smaller 1-10 person) architecture firms. Very few of us (PEs) deal with small/residential work, but those are the people who are likely to need or know an engineer that does small jobs. The local building official might know somebody, but depending on their risk aversion they might not be willing to say for fear that they have (officially) recommended someone.
Cracks are of two types: static or dynamic.
Most static cracks are fine. Cracks that are moving, changing, etc are dynamic and should be inspected by a professional.
I have an ADU that has a huge crack in the slab foundation. But it’s probably been there for 10+ years. I’ll need to spend $20k to dig it out and fix it, or I can simply mostly ignore it.
