The House

Building our new home.

What’s under your house?

As I mentioned in the previous post, the biggest question mark when we looked at buying our house was the foundation. How much do you know about your foundation? I didn’t know a thing about them.

The house has a crawl space under it. Around the outside of the house there is a cement foundation poured that goes down into the ground. Beams are slung across that wall to hold the house up. At some points in the middle of long spans, feet go down and rest against boards laid on the bare ground. This is a fairly typical “perimeter” foundation in an old house in a dry climate.

The seller recognized that having a house visibly sagging in one direction was going to be tough to sell and they were busy getting a quote on the foundation. It was performed by a local contractor and came in at about $10k.

To my mind that seemed too low. To my experienced real-estate agent it seemed wrong as well. At that point we already had both a whole-house inspection and an electric inspection planned, so we scheduled a foundation inspection as well.

It was interesting that our house inspector noted a hole in the foundation wall on the north side of the house. You can put your hand into it and reach through. The electric inspector even mentioned it. Our foundation guy noted it as one of the larger question marks. From under the house, it’s hard to miss; the light comes in through the hole. Their foundation guy didn’t mention it in his report or quote.

Our foundation guy came back with a rather comprehensive plan to rebuild the foundation and square the house. He had his stuff together; including a break down of materials, rough sketches of the plans already done, estimates for proper licenses, etc. His bid was $22.5k.

We sorted the financials out with the sellers and went forward with buying the house and doing the work.

Our foundation guy was Moore Construction of Los Gatos. He specializes in foundation leveling, and is familiar with these older craftsman and Victorians.

What was done:

– Temporary beams were slid under the house and jacks placed under them.

– The house was then jacked up until the temp beams were holding the load of the house:

Jack and Cribbing

Bottle jack sitting on cribbing. This is temporarily lifting the house with a temp beam out-of-frame above.

– The old wood-on-dirt footings and supports (non-perimeter) that were under the house were removed. Redwood is bug resistant and we’re in a dry climate, but after 80 years of wood sitting on dirt, a lot of them were long-gone for support.

– 24 new footings were dug, and cement poured around the interior of the house to replace these footings. That’s right, they dug twenty-four 1.5-foot square holes while in the crawl space in August:

Example footing.

Example footing. Below the square of the cement block you can see the bulge of the poured footing in the gravel.

– New beams were put under the house, front to back, setting on the new feet. At this point the house has gone from mostly sitting on the outside foundation, to most of its weight transferred to the new inside footings.

– Around the outside of the house, the old perimeter foundation was coated with a layer of fresh cement on both sides, “laminating” it.

– The south wall foundation (where the sagging was) had the most damage, so about 20 foot of the perimeter wall support was rebuilt, and was “scaled” with a layer of plywood on the inside for extra support:

Deterioration of the south wall.

An example of the deterioration in the south wall.

– Since the south wall was being reconstructed and the main room floor was a large span, we doubled the floor joists in that room. Small expense, but since the house was open, I now have a rock-solid floor:

Rebuilt South Wall

A section of the rebuilt south wall. The red-ended board is a new floor joist placed between the two older joists. In the background you can see a bottle jack holding one of the tan temporary beams going left to right.

– All around the perimeter, the house was now bolted to the foundation. This is earthquake retrofitting.

– The house was jacked past level over the course of two days. This was to reverse the sagging and “square” the structure back in place. During this time, they were constantly on site, checking windows, doors, and moving weight around on the floors to level and flatten them.

I wish I had some great photo to compare the house out-of-level versus level. But it’s one of those things that doesn’t photograph as well. Before the floor bulged in the middle and the shelves in the built-in and house just felt slanted. Now that it is level, many cracks in the plaster have closed, and it just feels square and solid. Such a difference!

Now, if I could digress a moment: One of the things that is interesting for me when getting to play with professional musicians is how they innately know their craft. There’s an air of natural understanding in what they do. Mr. Moore very much strikes me as that same level of knowledge. He likes lifting and fixing old houses, and knows it inside and out. That’s his puzzle and his talent.

The work was done on-time, on-budget, and came out exactly like he said at every step. And on the way he helped me deal with other surprises in plumbing and electric, but that’s another post. I can’t recommend this guy enough if you have contracting work. (He is a general contractor and not just specific to foundation and leveling work.)

Leigh Moore, Moore Construction, (408) 849-9509

Tell him you heard about him from Phil Pollard.

Buying a project.

One of the factors in the decision of buying this house was the amount of work it needed.

When you find yourself thinking about pulling out the hammers and pounding nails on where you live, you need to be honest with yourself: Can I do this sort of work myself? Do I have the time? Do I want to? Can I pay someone to do a good job? Etc.

Lets face it, you live in your house for comfort. If your home is nothing but endless renovation it can do things like end marriages from the stress.

That being said, the work this house needed was half the reason we could bid and buy it. It had two very scary problems that probably chased off a lot of buyers.

The Foundation

It did not take a genius to know the house had a foundation problem. The living room and dining room sloped visibly several inches to the outside wall. A glance down the wall of the house on the outside showed it was leaning several inches out of line and was buckling. The plaster in the house had corresponding cracks.

Normally a foundation issue is a “bone” issue. That is, if a property has “good bones” you can buy it, because a lot of the ugly might just be paint. But “bad bones” you should avoid.

But one thing caused me not to dismiss it outright: there was a visible repair to the shift in the floor. Repair. Singular. A visibly old repair that showed no further signs of shifting or spreading. I may not know much, but that meant things had been stable and for quite some time.

We put our bid in with a rough mental estimate of repairing the foundation knowing that we would get a full inspection of it later and could negotiate or back out on that point if needed.

The Electric

I like antiques. I like old things. I do not like active antique wiring. I have now lived something on the order of 20 years in houses with knob and tube wiring. I’d like to be done with that danger.

Normally, old electric is something you can fix later but this house is special: The entire service is 30 amps, and is fused in 4 runs. That’s something that can run say, a few light bulbs and a TV.

On top of the wiring being woefully inadequate, it runs through the attic and has been covered in loose insulation. That’s a classic fire hazard.

And here’s a look at the fuse “panel” on the porch:

Cutting Edge Electronics

The fuse “panel” in the new house.

The small transformer wired into the service on the upper right is the transformer for the doorbell.

If you look closely on the left side, below the fuses, you see there is a brass knife switch you can pull to kill the circuit.

I have never seen an open knife switch on house electric before. Reach up and grab that and you will be grounding the house service through your body.

Fixing It All

So as part of our bid, we planned of having the electric and foundation renovated by licensed contractors. We got bids for the work and as of today, the foundation is done and the electric is in progress.

More about that soon…

 

Basic Pictures of the house.

These are the pictures that made us go look at the house. These were what were on the listing.

When looking at houses, we would check the pictures and info to see if we were interested. We’d also look at the neighborhood and its crime statistics.

Initially, Sue and I both almost passed on this, as we were mostly looking at modern condos. But I figured “what the heck”, this one looks really nice. Lets go see it.

Initial impression was of a wonderful property that was just run-down from age. All the original built-ins and similar woodwork was basically unmolested. Everything had been painted, as you can see. A lot of these older houses have things changed over the years. To find it all in good shape was a surprise.

The house had some obvious problems: one side was sagging internally, so there were obvious foundational issues. And the electric was visibly out of date: knob and tube. But we really did like the property and the location. And we figured we might be able to estimate the repairs and balance our bid according to that.

Buying a House

I avoided posting a lot online about the process of buying a house. For a few reasons: I didn’t want to spam people with stuff, I didn’t know if I would succeed, and I didn’t want to “jinx” the process any.

Right now is a tough time to buy a house in Silicon Valley. There are a lot of foreclosures, yes. About 50% of the houses on the market are foreclosures. Another 30% are short-sales. And the final 20% are “normal” sales.

That would usually be good news, but right now demand is out-stripping supplies. You have to move very fast and bid well to get a house. In some cases, houses are on the market a day or two before being put under contract.

In our case we broadened our search and horizons and had settled on a condo down at the south end of the bay. But our luck was not there. While we bid a good price, we were beat by a comparable cash offer. (Cash tends to win over bank-financed.)

Within a day or two, however, we spotted an old craftsman style house in a nice neighborhood and dove for a quick bid on it.

The letter

We crafted a nice letter to go along with the bid. This is something we did with our previous bid on the condo, as well. There is a human being on the other side of any deal we make, so we would include a letter introducing ourselves and stating why we liked the house, etc. It humanized our bid.

You might think, what good is a letter?

In the case of the older house we sent a letter stating that we wanted to fix it up and live in it. Both Sue and I like older property and the neighborhood felt like home and we said that. Sue and I are also a young(ish) couple and that appeals as well. We included a photo taken of us playing around at Yosemite after being married.

It turns out the house was being sold by the now fairly-elderly children of a man who had died at 103. This was the house that they grew up in as children. Several offers were submitted that were better than ours. One developer submitted a half-cash offer.

But they took our offer. Our bid was 8 grand less than the top offer. But it meant quite a lot to them to have the house occupied and cared for. Instead of some faceless developer, they have the good joy of seeing their home passed on. Never underestimate what a few written words can do.

They asked us to meet them halfway on that top bid and we did. I suppose you could say that letter was worth the $4k they came down from the top-bid price, but it is more than that. We got the house! By all rights we should not even have been in the running.

Banks and Privacy

I’m not going to talk much about the month between that moment of making the bid and getting the final loan documents done. It was an interesting experience, but I don’t think I want to talk online about banks and that process. I’d like to keep that private.

I’d also like to keep the address of my house private too. I want to talk here about the process of fixing it up and making it home, but I’m not comfortable posting all the details and my home address online at the same time. Some of you doubtlessly will know it sooner or later. I don’t mind that. I’m just not going to publicize it.

Anyway… more posted later. For now, I think this image pretty much sums up the wonderful moment that is buying your first house:

Keys to my house.

The keys to my house, from the day I finally owned it.