this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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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.

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[–] Brkdncr@kbin.social 9 points 1 year ago

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.