DIY Foundation...REALLY???

So the big question we needed to answer was...should we do this work ourselves, or do we hire the professionals to do it?

You might be thinking...is that even possible? Can you DIY your foundation work? I mean, it's the FOUNDATION!!! Well, we went through the same thought process. In fact, when we met with the professionals, we were very open that we typically do most of our work ourselves, but the foundation is something that is way out of our league for DIY work. Of course they agreed.

Well, there are a couple of things that changed after having the professionals come and assess the work required. The first thing we had issues with was the lack of satisfaction with the explanation the professionals had for the tact that they were taking. They didn't seem to know any more than we did on why the home was suffering so badly with foundation issues. It was obvious that we have heavy amounts of moisture in the crawl space, and that the moisture is contributing. But it seemed there had to be more to the story. In short, it felt as if they were just sort of putting a finger in the air and doing some educated guessing at the root cause.

I think it's a good time for a segue, to mention one of the oddest things about this situation, and possibly the most key piece of information. The previous owner, at some point decided to cover the entire ceiling of the crawl space with spray foam. In other words, for the purposes of "insulation", the entire subfloor and supporting structure...the beams and the trusses; were covered with spray foam. With either of the professional assessments, neither of them decided pull any of the spray foam off to inspect the underlying wood. I think they were too scared of what they might find. But it seemed to me that any level of troubleshooting would require an understanding of what lies beneath this spray foam.

While the more costly foundation expert decided it wasn't important to inspect the wood that they would be boosting up with very expensive support posts and elaborate dehumidification architecture, the lower cost foundation expert decided to at least go through half of the underbelly of my home with an ear test, pounding on the foam covered timber to "test" its integrity. Well of course he found all the timber to be pretty "sound" (pun intended).

Apart from our overall dissatisfaction with their assessment, the most influential factor to sway us to see if we could DIY this job was...the cost. The more expensive option was more than $100K, while the least expensive was still about $80K. I don't know about anybody else, but I don't have that kind of money laying around. Yes, I understand it is my foundation, but taking out another mortgage to fix the house I am already paying a mortgage on, is less than appealing. Insurance is no help, and there is pretty much no protection that I am aware of for purchasing a lemon for a house. There may have been something we could do if we knew about this in the early days of owning the home, but we're now two years in. We even bought a warranty on the home, and that didn't even cover all the water heaters in the house. So I don't think the foundation could have been a covered item.

Another thing that always frustrates me when working with contractors of any sort, is that we typically want to understand what they are doing and why. And most contractors take offense when you start asking questions. They especially take offense when I ask hard questions that they either can't or don't want to answer for whatever reason. The fact is, I don't trust anyone to do work unless they are willing to explain what and why so that I understand what I'm paying you for. Further, we are always going to be far more invested in the success of the job than any contractor. It may sound silly to some, but we want contractors to come in and fix the problem, not make more. And in our experience, the professionals are typically only interested in getting you to buy what they are selling, instead of solving the problem in front of them.

So after we settled with the solutions that were given, since after all, they are the professionals; we decided that the work shouldn't be that hard to do ourselves. The solution was basically to use a crossbeam at the midspan of the existing trusses in order to push them up where the deflection is occurring. Deflection is their fancy term for sagging. In order to support the crossbeam, you would need piers of some sort every so many feet. Seems simple. But the contractors had different ideas on how to approach this solution.

One approach is to use steel post assemblies on top of concrete footers with adjustable caps to push the crossbeam up. The other vendors approach is to build concrete piers and use shims to push the crossbeam up. The issue with the steel posts is that they are expensive, and the draw back to building the concrete piers is that they are permanent fixtures and less flexible than the steel posts. Another possible draw back to the steel posts, is that they are steel and susceptible to rust corrosion. Obviously timber shims are wood and can be susceptible to wood rot. But if we address the moisture problem, the wood and the steel posts have less chance for corrosion.