We have been in the process of purchasing an adorable house that was built in 1905 since June of this year. We have actually been trying to purchase a larger home since June of last year.
I am not the most patient of people, as a matter of fact, I am probably one of the least patient people you have ever known. I’m a do’er, once I start something I want it done as soon as possible.
This process has gone way beyond testing my patience and has gone into the realm of:
“I really think God is trying to teach me a lesson in patience” or “God is doing this because the outcome is going to be so much better for this family”.
And from what happened last week I think it is a little of both.
You see, some repairs needed to be completed on the house before the bank would give us our loan. This is actually a good thing because these repairs involve water damage and cement removal, not something my husband was feeling. And since I’m anal retentive and must have my hands in every aspect of the process, I just so happened to go by the day they started work , with my camera, and this is what I found:
The contractors informed us that they would be leaving the rubble and using it as fill up under the concrete. Now I’m no contractor, but that just did not sound right.
Here is a close up of the busted up concrete. These are 30+ pound pieces of busted up concrete laying up against the foundation wall.
Then they told us that they were going to leave this portion of the concrete, for whatever reason.
At this point I have stopped listening to the bullshit they are feeding us and my irritation level is rising. I cannot stand being talked to like an idiot, like I cannot tell that you are trying to save money because you underbid the job with Fannie Mae.
See the arrow? Empty space due to water washing it out, that 500 pound section of concrete is pretty much just floating there. David could stick his entire arm under it; they wanted to leave it there.
I kept my mouth shut and told David that we needed to go into the crawl space since I had noticed that the Sill Plate is rotten and the contractors have told me that they will be pouring concrete tomorrow (click the link to see why Not replacing a sill plate is not a simple task). So off into the abyss we went.
Our crawl space is more like a dirt basement with 10 feet of headroom. So we walked over to the wall and this is the first thing I saw:
Ummm, that can’t be good. Then, I looked up:
That’s my foundation wall, which from the picture it is hard to tell, but on top of knocking some mason blocks loose they also bowed out the wall while removing the concrete.
At this point I am stringing expletives together like a drunken sailor, I will not share them with you here for fear that you may judge me harshly.
So, needless to say I called my real estate agent and she stopped all work and we now have a brick mason coming out to fix the wall and to jack the house up to fix the sill plate.
I guess this patience thing will eventually pay off.
On a side note, that arrow is pointing to a spider. I didn’t see it when I was down there which is probably a good thing, I don’t like spiders in dark places, they have the upper hand.
