Fixer Upper Woes

I want to begin by saying that it IS normal for you to run into issues when you buy an old house. When walls (or floors) are opened up that haven't been in 60 years, you find things.

Sometimes icky things. 

With that being said, a good, thorough home inspector is your friend.  We used one recommended by the Realtor since our preferred one wasn't available. DO NOT DO THAT!!  Learn from us!  When the Realtor and home inspector are buddies, the home inspector sometimes wants to help the Realtor out by getting the house sold.  While a lot of the issues with our home were brought up by the home inspector, he downplayed all of them, giving us confidence that it was something we could handle.

We were a WEE bit overwhelmed when we learned the truth.

Everyone who is renovating/remodeling a home hopes that the issues will be mostly aesthetics.  Paint, floors, new hardware, freshen up the kitchen and bathroom.  We were hoping that too!  But we quickly learned that our home had water issues.  When I say water issues, I mean the crawl space flooded every single time it rained a little bit.  When that happens, the integrity of the wood in the crawl space starts to disintegrate.  We didn't realize when we purchased the house that the 2 back bedrooms floors were a bit...bouncy.  Since it was a structural issue, we hired a contractor to repair the sill under the house (basically the frame that holds the house up around the exterior walls).  When he went under there he said most of the floor joists were rotted and he would try and salvage what he could.  This is what we ended up with:  

Our entire bedroom floor had to be removed, as well as the floor in the opposite bedroom.  They were too rotted underneath to be saved.  

You can see here the French Drain that Joe started to dig just inside the walls of the house. There was a sump pump under the house when we moved in, but water wasn't able to get to it because of the weird levels of dirt so Joe decided to give it a pathway to travel so that it could make it to the pump, digging by hand a trench all the way around.  He's a rock star.  It was a grueling job, and one that took about a month off the renovation timeline.  

We also dug one on the outside of the house, some by hand and some using a massive excavator. 

Woo hoo, big power equipment! 

A French Drain is basically an underground pipe that carries water away from places you do not want it.  There are a few different methods, and I never thought that I would know as much as I do now about yard drainage.  We also dug 2 dry wells with the help of our excavator rental and installed an exterior sump pump.  A dry well is a large hole filled with gravel or a canister that collects water and then allows it to seep back into the earth slowly.  Side note, so glad we did the dry wells when we did because we got 17 inches of rain right after we dug the initial pits. Because we had huge holes in our yard to collect water, it saved the crawlspace of our house from getting it!  Here is what one of the pits looked like after the rainfall: 

 Slam full of rain water. The trench you see leading to it is part of the exterior French Drain.  We are so thankful we got this done before the rain hit! The picture above is not the finished product. We filled the hole with gravel and landscape fabric and then dirt goes back on top.  I don't have a picture of the finished product yet, because it looks like a patchy mess but we plan on putting sod or grass seed on top to cover the telltale dirt trail.  

So the water issues were a little bit of a costly blow, but we are happy to have it done and are now working happily on the interior of the home.  Moral of the story, get a home inspector that will not downplay things.  You want someone who is going to tell you EVERY SINGLE THING wrong with the home and ideally spend about 4+ hours checking out your home.   

Next time, I hope to share some pictures of the goings-on inside our house! I'm so excited to share the progress so stick around!