If Your Home Needs Foundation Work, Don't Read This...

Have you ever heard the term 'You may love the taste of sausage but you don't want to see how it's made"? Well, you may want a level house, but you don't want to see how it's accomplished.

My new house is only a 20 min drive from my work and a 30 min drive from my parent's house (where I currently live). This means it's all to easy to run by the house and see what's going on.... like I did today....

I thought the pictures from Monday's post were scary... take a look at these...

Here is my front yard, filled with piers. Honestly when I saw this I was just happy because it meant they were actually able to do work on my house.

 

 Want to see what a pier looks like? Well, apparently it looks like this. Reminds me of towers I've built with kids while babysitting.... hope it's not as easy to knock over...

Inside is even weirder to see. Here is my hallway... giant hole, pile of dirt, giant hole. Awesome.

Here is another pier, only this time from inside the house. I just don't get how these work. I looked it up online before and I thought I understood it but now that I see it in person I'm confused. These are the piers, but the foundation guy told me on Tuesday that they aren't going to actually lift the house until today (Friday)... so what do they do to these to make them taller when they lift the house? How do they lift the house? I have more questions now then I did before...

Our future nursery... how's this for a before picture. No matter how i decorate it's going to be an improvement!  Oh, and yeah, that's the bedroom door. They had to put in a hole right where the door opens. 

My future studio:

 I made this one big so you can see everything. This is a picture from the Den into the formal living room. The formal living room has four holes, a pile of dirt in the middle and a wood plank... for some reason this looks like game to me... (don't you love how clean my Den floor is?)

Here's another extra large picture... it's of the brand new CRACK in my wall. Now, I don't want you to get the wrong idea... this is not the fault of the foundation workers. This is a known side effect of foundation work. I talked to the head guy before they started and he said a few small cracks might happen but probably not since our house didn't need a ton of piers. They then started work, dug a bunch of holes and then it RAINED FOR A FULL WEEK. I think that's what did it. I think the house wasn't supported fully because of the new holes (filled with rain) and so the house got WORSE before they could put in the piers and make it better.  Not their fault... just rotten luck.

Here is a picture of the back of our house where they are tunneling under the house to replace the piping. The other side of this wall is the master bath. This actually looks way crazier in person, I just couldn't back up enough. The hole is DEEP and there is just a TON of dirt around it. It seriously looks like the aftermath of a cartoon explosion...

And here is the side of the house... dirt, hole, dirt, hole, dirt, hole, dirt, hole... I'm sure our neighbors love us (notice no fence between the yards there - something we will be remedying soon). I can't tell how many holes are for piers and how many are for pipes. But I'll tell you this... there are DEFINITELY more than 18 piers being installed now... don't know what that's going to do to our price.... I'll keep you posted.  

So... I had planned on moving in this weekend if they were done... but taking a look at the house we might need to spend some more time cleaning than I originally thought necessary.... ughhh I'm getting a stress headache just looking at these pictures.