Finally buckling down and starting the structural fixes my house needs

[dunhamjr]

everything still lined up as planned.

work should be starting 8am Monday morning.

[tngdesi]

in for updates

[dunhamjr]

Do they fill in the void under the slab? Perhaps with a material like they use for slab jacking?

i missed this before.

i would assume they can do that. but in my house it is not required.
most of the 'jacking' that the piers are doing is happening on the crawlspace side of the house. so there is no floor to slab jack.

i may eventually need them to come back and slab jack the garage pad, but i need to wait till the jacking is complete and a couple months into torquing the tie-back anchors.

[dunhamjr]

in for updates

little bit of a tease.

the work took an extra day.
apparently the footers that they had to work around sucked. the dirt was a pain to get through. the distance to a solid base for the piers was a long ways down. and the house is heavy as hell, so jacking them up took a bit more time then expected.

i have pics of most of the work.

but i had to go into work today, so i am not going to have much/any pics of the in between progress of putting the anchors in under the garage pad.

i do have pics of the 'bolts' going into the garage pad wall from outside, and of the huge hole on the inside that they jack hammered and dug out to be able to find the other end of the bolt.

i just won't likely have any pics of them putting the anchor in the ground, or attaching the plate outside.

hopefully i come home today to 3 patches of drying cement in my garage.

[1inhiding]

That's cool - the first shot makes it look almost exactly like my parents house in the Renton Highlands near Lake Kathleen - the backside of yours is a little different, but when I first looked at the picture I was confused - ""what? My parents never put their house up for sale!" They've added a third garage and built out what was originally a poorly built sunroom over it.

[dunhamjr]

so now for some pics.

This is an image of the pier and tieback placement. Each X is a pier location.


This is what the foundation is lifted with at the tops of each pier. At this point, I didn't think to break out a tape measure. The steel is about 1/2" thick.


They have to cut away a portion of the footer, so that the pier pads are tight to the foundation wall. They drilled through a lot for each placement, then used the jackhammer to break it out once the drill holes where laid out.

Holes have been drilled.


After jack hammering. They have to clear out a decent amount of space under the foundation to get the pier pads in place for the lift.


Pier pad and pier post sitting in place. This is just a rough placement. They put it all in place, then use wood shims to get it positioned tight up to the bottom of the foundation before they start pushing the piers.


Here is the pier pushing setup. The bottom clips over the pier pad and jacks the pier posts into the ground till they hit something hard enough to start lifting the house.


Once all of the piers are in place and all have been pushed to depth, the crew goes back around and starts setting smaller jacks in place in prep for the unified lifting of the foundation. After the lift, the nuts will be able to be individually tightened up so that every pier is locked into a final location while the jacks have the foundation lifted to its final height.

Close up of one small jack.


Whole row of little jacks still getting setup.


All hosed up almost ready for the lift.


After all the piers are locked into their final rest position, the extra bolt is cut down.


Once they filled all the holes back in, the end result of the work from the outside of the house is basically completely hidden.


This is basically what the piers look like for the 7 that had to be installed inside the crawlspace, rather then from the outside. They are still exposed and sprayed up with some sort of rust inhibitor.


I didn't get too many pics of them installing the tiebacks. The work went pretty fast once the garage pad holes were cut... and the crew went 4 days instead of 3, so I was at work on day 4 when most of the tieback work was completed.

Here you can see a bolt sticking out with a bit on it, and about 4-6 feet back a second bolt. This is the outside attachment for the tieback.


Hammering through the garage floor. The guy is standing in the furthest hole in the back. Garage pad is about 5 inches thick with rebar.


The furthest hole is DEEP. 4 feet, and they hadn't found the business end of the tieback bolt yet. My assumption is that with the entry angle of the hole they drilled the bolt was approx a foot closer to the camera, but pretty close to 4 feet deep, so they should have just needed to dig a little bit of the side of the hole out to find it. Unfortunately I was not there to confirm.


You can kind of see the end of the tieback bolt. Looks like its just laying in the dirt next to the ruler. This hole is about 3 ft deep.


And done. Tiebacks installed, holes filled, cement drying.


Outside, the tieback plates in place. I apparently have to torque these down to 95 lb/ft every 6 months or so, so that the wall slowly sucks itself back inline.


And so everything is back to normal.


Not really though. This is the corner of the basement ceiling. You can see that the ceiling is 'rolling' down into the wall. Yay! The fun things I get to fix.


This was the worse of the drywall issues.


Most of the rest are just broken mudlines or corners, that never had tape in them to begin with... so they were just asking to be redone anyways.


Above a window.


Where an old shelf unit was removed. You can see the obvious line where 'old paint' line on the left wall is way higher then the wall on the right. I haven't opened the wall up yet to confirm, but with this evidence, I can almost guarantee when that wall was built it wasn't fully solid on the foundation wall... else these walls would have lifted at the same rate when the house was piered. The wall on the right is part of the dividing wall between the crawlspace side and garage pad side of the house. More things to fix, yay.

[dunhamjr]

few more things from the top of my head.

the guys showed up at 7:45-8:30 every day.
they were done at about 3:30-3:45.
the crew was 3 guys.

the job was quoted at 3 days work. turned out they were there nearly a full 4 days. evidently cutting out the footers took longer then it typically does.

also pushing the piers took a little longer as well. i didn't get final specs on every single pier pushed, but the first 4-6 that they pushed were 19-22ft deep.

they push the piers down to 4000psi in most cases. for the piers along the garage pad wall, which is centerline of the house, they pushed to 6000psi in the process of lifting my heavy ass house.

overall they did lift the house a little bit. around 2.5-3 inches. the last little bit was hard earned with the 6000psi push.

the house is not truly level. its better then before though. but going in, i knew that the house wouldn't ever be really level and square. what i do know now, is that my house will not ever sink.

you saw some of the drywall stuff that needs fixing. i knew that would happen.

also over the years various doors were installed, rehung, etc... now at least 4 doors in the house are out of whack. two of them to the point that they no longer latch closed at all.

the front door is likely the worst though, since its used all the time. it closes and such. but now the door frame and the door are not in sync, and it nearly needs to be kicked open/closed.

all in all. everything was what i expected, the lifting, the pending drywall repairs, the pending door rehangs.

the house is solid now for the rest of the upgrades/repairs that are in the pipeline. the quoted price is exactly what i paid. plus tax it came in just under $25k.

[KrautFed]

Thats awesome that you didn't get tacked on for anything on that 4th day. House raising and moving amazes me. There's a lot of it here due to Katrina.

Do you have any idea as to the change in value of the home?

[dunhamjr]

Do you have any idea as to the change in value of the home?

no clue at all yet. in truth, i don't expect the value to change too much or at all.

it may depend on what happens when/if i talk to the county assessor about the house grade/condition ratings in my tax appraisal. currently on the assessors property report, the house is set at Grade = 9 aka 'Better' and Condition = Fair.

>>>
http://your.kingcounty.gov/assessor/...ryOfTerms.html

BUILDING GRADE. Represents the construction quality of improvements. Grades run from grade 1 to 13. Generally defined as:
9 Better architectural design with extra interior and exterior design and quality.

BUILDING CONDITION. Relative to age and grade. Coded 1-5.
2 = Fair- Badly worn. Much repair needed. Many items need refinishing or overhauling, deferred maintenance obvious, inadequate building utility and systems all shortening the life expectancy and increasing the effective age.
>>>

i think that the big projects we have in this next year or two will do a lot to changing the current condition value, and that change might have an affect on the tax valuation of the house. but i am not too sure that there will be any actual value added from the condition rating itself.

of course. once we get the roof cleaned/treated, do the deck replacement and get the siding redone, we will definitely see a value increase. but that is with us spending another $60k or so.

i am just not sure that the $25k into the foundation will help the value since really the foundation repairs just bring the house back to a proper condition to allow the house to get actual market value anyways.

[dunhamjr]

Thats awesome that you didn't get tacked on for anything on that 4th day.

Yep.
But truthfully, I didn't expect it to change.

The bid was specifically for 14 piers and 3 tie backs, installed. There was no break out of labor on the bid.

But I am also equally sure, that if the work took 2 days, I wouldn't have paid less either.

[KrautFed]

no clue at all yet. in truth, i don't expect the value to change too much or at all.

it may depend on what happens when/if i talk to the county assessor about the house grade/condition ratings in my tax appraisal. currently on the assessors property report, the house is set at Grade = 9 aka 'Better' and Condition = Fair.

>>>
http://your.kingcounty.gov/assessor/...ryOfTerms.html

BUILDING GRADE. Represents the construction quality of improvements. Grades run from grade 1 to 13. Generally defined as:
9 Better architectural design with extra interior and exterior design and quality.

BUILDING CONDITION. Relative to age and grade. Coded 1-5.
2 = Fair- Badly worn. Much repair needed. Many items need refinishing or overhauling, deferred maintenance obvious, inadequate building utility and systems all shortening the life expectancy and increasing the effective age.
>>>

i think that the big projects we have in this next year or two will do a lot to changing the current condition value, and that change might have an affect on the tax valuation of the house. but i am not too sure that there will be any actual value added from the condition rating itself.

of course. once we get the roof cleaned/treated, do the deck replacement and get the siding redone, we will definitely see a value increase. but that is with us spending another $60k or so.

i am just not sure that the $25k into the foundation will help the value since really the foundation repairs just bring the house back to a proper condition to allow the house to get actual market value anyways.

I can definitely see where a home buyer/agent wouldn't see the value of foundation work. I also wouldn't have the tax assessors come out until you got ready to sell it. No need in paying the extra taxes. Obviously when the time comes, I'd let them see all the paperwork from this work.

[dunhamjr]

I can definitely see where a home buyer/agent wouldn't see the value of foundation work.

I also wouldn't have the tax assessors come out until you got ready to sell it. No need in paying the extra taxes.

Obviously when the time comes, I'd let them see all the paperwork from this work.

yep, yep and yep.

as long as the foundation is right. the rest of the work can happen and foundation issues will no longer be able to degrade any other work we do on the house.

once its all said and done, if/when we go to sell... i will look into the process of getting the house re-assessed by the county.

but then again. maybe i won't worry about it, and let the new owner look into it if they want.

[GeoffD]

I can definitely see where a home buyer/agent wouldn't see the value of foundation work. I also wouldn't have the tax assessors come out until you got ready to sell it. No need in paying the extra taxes. Obviously when the time comes, I'd let them see all the paperwork from this work.

They come out every time you pull and complete a building permit. My summer cottage had a major amount of work done to it. The town assesses land and structures separately. The structure is valued mostly by square footage and then depreciated based on age and condition. My structure went from 40% depreciation to 25% depreciation. They split out features like fireplace, garage, and swimming pool and value those separately. My fireplace bumps up the value $2,900. The garage another $6,100.

My bathroom remodel is almost finished with a complete gut/do-over. Since it's a 65 year old structure, I doubt they can bump it up much more no matter what I do to the place.

[dunhamjr]

They come out every time you pull and complete a building permit. My summer cottage had a major amount of work done to it.

hmm. didn't know that.
so maybe i won't be skirting higher assessed value/taxes.

oh well i guess.

[KrautFed]

They come out every time you pull and complete a building permit. My summer cottage had a major amount of work done to it.

I think it depends on the local government. When I worked with investors in Alabama, they did not re-assess tax value after permit unless it was a complete demo. In fact, I was surprised at just how easy it was to contest an assessors value (and win). Most of the investors would contest so they could lower their taxes. They assessed every 4 years, and my coworkers house went up from $170k to $400k due to location and remodeling. He contested and they lowered it to tax value of $250k. 2 years later he sold it for $415k.

[dunhamjr]

In fact, I was surprised at just how easy it was to contest an assessors value (and win).

when i first bought my house i had to fight the assessed value.
it was actually fairly easy, but i was preparing to go to an interview/hearing if i needed.

turned out, just showing comps plus documenting the issue on the house... and having the assessor drive by and look at the repairs needed (i wasn't even home), was enough to get the value drastically cutback.

[FlashRedGLS1.8T]

Wow that's a lot of work.

I don't recall, how old is your place?

[dunhamjr]

Wow that's a lot of work.

I don't recall, how old is your place?

not very. built in 1979.

[lojasmo]

not very. built in 1979.

I love your house (sure I've told you that before)