Help! New Home-Owner Needs Advice

SteveDallas · 01-23-2007, 05:47 PM

Two thoughts:

Find an independent contractor whom you trust (maybe easier said than done, especially if you're new in town) to look at it and pay them for their trouble out of your own pocket. They will either a) verify that this is actually not a serious problem with the foundation and put your mind at ease or b) give you ammunition to go out against all the "experts" who missed it.

Is this in a cookie-cutter style housing development? If so it seems extremely likely that any basic structural problem in one house has also appeared in at least some of the other houses. Ask around the neighborhood.

I feel for you... we've been in this house for about 13 years, and the roof was estimated to be about 10 years old when we bought it. So the fact that we needed a new roof was not exactly a surprise. What was a surprise was that the back porch roof had started to separate from the house and needed some repairs before it could be re-roofed. (It had been hard to notice due to a tree growing up next to the house, which we had removed before starting the roofing work.) It was probably due to settling of the porch. As you said, this probably didn't happen in the last six months. As if there were any doubt, the roofer found newspapers from 1970 stuffed in between the porch roof and the house!!

01-23-2007, 05:47 PM	#6
SteveDallas Your Bartender Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: Philly Burbs, PA Posts: 7,651	Two thoughts: Find an independent contractor whom you trust (maybe easier said than done, especially if you're new in town) to look at it and pay them for their trouble out of your own pocket. They will either a) verify that this is actually not a serious problem with the foundation and put your mind at ease or b) give you ammunition to go out against all the "experts" who missed it. Is this in a cookie-cutter style housing development? If so it seems extremely likely that any basic structural problem in one house has also appeared in at least some of the other houses. Ask around the neighborhood. I feel for you... we've been in this house for about 13 years, and the roof was estimated to be about 10 years old when we bought it. So the fact that we needed a new roof was not exactly a surprise. What was a surprise was that the back porch roof had started to separate from the house and needed some repairs before it could be re-roofed. (It had been hard to notice due to a tree growing up next to the house, which we had removed before starting the roofing work.) It was probably due to settling of the porch. As you said, this probably didn't happen in the last six months. As if there were any doubt, the roofer found newspapers from 1970 stuffed in between the porch roof and the house!!

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