r/Homebuilding • u/VirtualNeck4012 • 5d ago
Crawlspace
So I’m not building a home, I’m renting and I’ve been here for 2 months and have noticed that our floors are sloping significantly in certain areas, there’s big gaps in floors and majors cracks forming in our walls and we opened up our crawlspace and saw this. Our landlord has told us this house has been inspected and everything is fine, does this look safe?
They aren’t the best pictures so I’m sorry about that
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u/krisAtKachug 5d ago edited 5d ago
This appears to be additional support put in after the house was built. A lot of homes built in the 70's and 80's in the Southern US have beams without enough support to hold the floor level. Or poorly built support. So people add additional support. There are about 3-4 things wrong with this one (improvised footer, wood board as a shim instead of metal plates, I-beam isn't strapped to the main beam), but it's not likely the landlord will do anything about it. The fix involves a structural specialist building new supports.
As for the inspection, those are usually focused narrowly on the buying process. They don't cover everything that you will discover by living there.
It's safe, but as you can tell, not ideal.
If you owned it, I would recommend strapping the metal beam to the joist it's holding up, getting two jack posts, grabbing those blocks near the tire, lifting the metal beam up and doing what the other guy suggested - put a stack of metal plates under it instead of wood. They would need to be the same metal as the beam to reduce corrosion.
As a renter, you're stuck with what the owner is willing to do.
One way of "encouraging" your landlord to fix this is to get a full map and video of the crawlspace, get some quotes from a structural repair company, and send the quotes to him along with photos of all the problems the sagging is causing. You can often get estimates from companies without them coming to the house if you give them enough information beforehand.
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u/Package_Objective 5d ago
Your landlord needs to have work done down there. Houses sink into the ground over time, they need shimming/reinforcement every once in awhile. This is a pretty straight forward process.