Progress

I mailed off the contract and a deposit to Geofreeze today. Yay! The paperwork says I'll be on their schedule within a week of them getting my check. And cashing it, I'm sure, but still. I'm dusting off the sledgehammer and claw tool. I'm just itching to get into that wall to see what's what. Then I want it fixed and I want to paint. And drag the livingroom furniture to the curb, strip and paint in there, then move to the dining room. My friend Wendy keeps asking (and has been for months, maybe years) what COLOR do I want. Have we picked a COLOR yet. Honestly. The color comes so far down the list of why we haven't moved forward, it doesn't matter. Well, it does to Russ. I guess it does to me too, but I'm the one picking the chips and he's the one saying, "No that won't do." What he wants is no color. With white trim. I don't want it to look like the Caribbean (all hot pink and turquoise), but I want something. He doesn't seem to mind the color of dirt, fingerprints, and dog noseprints that have been there for as long as we've lived in the house.

A Visual Aid

I thought a visual aid might be helpful. This is the first floor of my house. You can click on the picture for a bigger view. I'm not sure why there needed to be an entryway in the kitchen once upon a time, but maybe it was to add an airlock. I think the room that I use as a pantry was always there, though when I moved in, it was more of a mudroom.

In any case, when the entryway was removed, the load-bearing wall (the "bad" wall) was apparently not properly reinforced. The bad wall does continue all the way to the front wall next to the front door, with an archway through to the dining room. Same on the livingroom side. So the break in the load-bearing wall is only there in the kitchen, and it is directly above that that the walls are so cracked upstairs. If the house is sagging there, it stands to reason the load-bearing wall is going to sag too.

The blue square is the masonry column in the basement the structural engineer believes is settling. This is also a reasonable theory, but John K.'s 4ft. level shows everything on the straight and narrow until you get upstairs

Indecision

I like the quote we got from the 2nd engineer, but I'm just not 100% sure that his solution will fix the problem we want him to address. On one hand, I think I trust that he knows a whole more about structural engineering than I do, his description of the settling sounds valid, and his confidence is comforting. On the other hand, John K. points out that everything from the basement to the first floor is level, that it's above the rebuilt part of the kitchen that appears to be the problem. I did point this out to the engineer, and he still went back to the support column settling scenario. I'm going to ask him to come back again to be double sure.

First of Two Estimates

The first estimate to fix our sagging floors and walls came in. It was $4,500, which struck me as not too bad, but I don't think this guy (the first engineer) correctly identified the problem. It would be terrible to spend that and still have the problem. Can't wait to see the other estimate from the guy we really liked. Engineer #2 walked around the house, outside and in, in the rain. Took his time, declared the house sound, and (I think) correctly identified the problem with that one column sagging under the load. I can relate to the column on a personal basis.