Lesson Learned PSA: Hire Engineer, Not Structure Company!

[Allan Smith]

To give back a lesson I just learned to the community that cost me $5k, I feel I should share a story about one of the local foundation companies in my area. Some are national too, but every metropolitan area has them. They come out to your property to look at cracks you are concerned about, slanting floors, wet basements or crawlspaces... One of those. In our area there's frontier, TFS, USS, etc.

I called  out a similar company to those to take a look at a house with cracks in the brick all the way up to the top of the second story. I thought it was foundation, he did too. He put 4 piers under that corner. $5k or so.

Then I had a structural engineer come by and tell me it's just the brick veneer falling off. I mentioned this to the structure company who said he finds that hard to believe since the gap at the top of the house closed when his sub lifted the foundation with the piers... But the thing is, the gap didn't close. His sub just caulked it shut after telling me it wasn't rolling back into place. Obviously, I wasted $5k. But it's scary to me to think that this gentleman goes to 5 appointments per DAY (he tells me) and didn't realize a brick vs structure problem.

The point:
1) The salespeople (and even owners, in my case) of structure companies are not engineers and though they may be right most of the time, there will be gaps in their assumptions.

2) Unless it's a small job with an obvious solution, get an engineer ($250) to look at it and sketch up a scope of work for a contractor to do.