Foundationhead

There is no such thing as a perfect house.

These cats live in a nice house. I hate them.

There is especially no such thing as a perfect house when you are buying in a market so hot your agent can't get you in to see listed properties even if they aren't technically under contract yet. It's just so damn hot out there your feet are sticking to the pavement because it's July in Texas.

But that's just how it was and the house we ended up buying had many imperfections (I already mentioned some) I overlooked in order to simply GET A HOUSE, ANY HOUSE.

Does it have doors? Windows? Is it currently on fire? Yes (narrow ones), yes (half new, half wtf these are old, might as well just be holes in the walls for all the air I can feel and have no screens?) No, not on fire.  Well, that was a plus!



The first time I walked through the house I noticed bad paint and vertical flaws in the walls.

The selling agent hung a picture over one (Nice try, lady! But you just drew more attention to them! Just like you tried to cover up the hideous cultured marble sinks with primly folded hand towels!) in a mediocre attempt at staging and subterfuge.

They don't make sinks like this anymore! Because they are ugly.

The wall flaws looked like a bad spackle job. But why? What was there before? As I ran my hand along the bumpy surface I angled my shoulder against the wall, narrowed my eyes at it, and tried not to think worst case scenario. Here in Texas worse case scenario is: foundation damage due to clay soil. If this house has foundation damage, and there were cracks in the walls that they covered up....you don't even want to think about it.

And so we continued through the house: I toed the bad linoleum: gouged and curling up against the walls. David let out a disgusted sigh at the cottage cheese ceiling. I came down the hallway, turned, and my foot hit a patch of uneven floor.

"Whoa, what's going on here?" I said and took a step back. I proceeded to do the cha-cha as our agent came over to take a look. She said, "Looks like water damage." Again, wtf? Why is there water damage in the hallway? Uneven floors are another sign of bad foundation.  All that and yet we made an offer and had the house inspected. To our knowledge: no foundation damage.

Of course, I never trusted any of it.

I continued to obsess over the flaws that could indicate a bad foundation. David continued to ignore the flaws and my hand wringing.  I stopped not doing anything about it one day when the uneven patch of floor shifted about four inches.

I know it shifted because I had been purposely stepping over that part of the floor because it made my skin crawl to walk on it. Now I know houses move, creak, and settle but the freaking floor was moving under me. I was unsettled.

So I called a foundation inspection company. A nice fellow came over to do a free inspection and patiently answered all my one hundred and one questions. I showed him the walls, we walked the perimeter, I showed him the patch.

He said the foundation looked fine and the patch was likely "bad craftsmanship" (badly poured concrete). The wall flaws were possibly more bad craftsmanship after wood paneling was removed. I breathed a little easier after he left but still the patch remained.

Today I called a plumber to snake a slow bathtub drain and get a second opinion about the patch. Slow drains are also big problems if you remember.

One plumber used a moisture detector on the patch and when it beeped, indicating the presence moisture, I closed my eyes and said: "Please don't be a busted pipe about to morph into a sinkhole." The other plumber was not as concerned. He figured it was probably just the regular old moisture found under homes.

That's when I told them to rip up the linoleum. They were a little hesitant but I insisted. I assured them I did not care about the floor and it was more important to make sure there was nothing causing real damage to the home.

I handed him a box cutter and he sliced away at the patch.  What we found was old self-leveling

The exposed patch.

liquid floor underlay that had over time crumbled and piled up to create the patch (so much for being level!). The floor under the underlay was dry, no holes, no nothing as far as we could see.

At this point I must consider my curiosity satisfied. Unless of course, I'd like to sit around and wonder why someone might have needed to use self-leveling underlay before putting the linoleum down. Is that standard procedure or was someone trying to hide something about the floors? Something like heaved, peaking concrete due to a bad foundation.