Pro tip: Stop calling every little crack in the foundation a disaster

I swear, every time I walk through an open house with friends someone spots a hairline crack in the basement floor and starts talking about structural failure. Last month my neighbor sold his 1950s bungalow near Euclid Avenue and the buyer's inspector flagged a tiny vertical crack in the slab. My neighbor panicked, paid $2,800 for an engineer to look at it, and the guy basically said it's just normal settling from 70 years of Ohio clay soil expanding and contracting. I've seen the same thing on three homes I've helped flip: a crack less than 1/8 inch wide with no displacement is almost never a problem unless water is seeping through or it's actively growing. Meanwhile people ignore actual issues like a furnace from 1987 that's wheezing or gutters dumping water right next to the footer. Has anyone else had to talk a buyer down from demolition panic over a routine crack?

2 comments

2 Comments

jordanl822d agoMost Upvoted

That 1/8 inch rule is dead on, I've had buyers freak out over cracks smaller than a credit card thickness and had to pull out old photos of houses that stood for 60 years with the same lines. A good rule of thumb I've seen work is to stick a dollar bill in it, if the bill sits flat and doesn't snag or show movement you're probably fine. Have you found a solid way to explain the difference between settlement cracks and actual structural issues without losing people?

andrewh432d ago

Dollar bill trick works okay but people still get worked up about it. Honestly sometimes I wonder if we make too big a deal about these cracks in the first place. Most of these houses have been sitting there for decades with the same hairline cracks and nobody cared until an inspection came along. I've seen people walk away from perfectly good houses over stuff that's basically cosmetic. At the end of the day a lot of this is just normal settling and we've convinced everyone it's a disaster waiting to happen.