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We want to put in an offer for an eight years old home with a top addition to a three car garage. The house just drop from 575K to 334K within in the last 4 years. It is a foreclosed home and is sold as is. There are some hair line cracks on the walls in the main house, but much more on the huge 2nd story room added on top of the garage. The house is located fairly close to a busy rail road track (within a mile). Does anyone have an idea on the approximate cost to fix the cracks on the wall? Should we even consider buying the house? Thank you ;)
Depends what's causing the cracks. You can buy a bucket of joint compound for less than fifteen bucks, but if the cracks come back a month later, that's no help!
I'd ask a home inspector or an engineer to look at it to see if the house is still settling or if there's a more serious problem with the foundation that might be causing the cracks.
I would recommend hiring a qualified home inspector--if the house is being sold as-is you can't ask for repairs to be made, but you can at least get an idea of what all is wrong with the house and you can get the appropriate professionals in to give you estimates. The cracks themselves would be cheap and easy to fix, but the key is figuring out why they happened in the first place--fixing the underlying cause could get quite expensive! This is where the home inspection would come in handy--he can probably tell whether the cracks are purely cosmetic in which case it's a cheap fix that you could even do yourself, or if they're caused by structural defects in which case the fix could be quite expensive. My guess on the more significant cracks in the "huge second story room added above the garage" are that the addition was probably not done correctly and the cracks are structural--too often people do stuff like that without permits and don't follow the appropriate building codes, possibly the garage underneath is not sufficiently strong to hold a 2nd story and is slowly shifting under the added weight, or possibly not enough support was included in the addition itself (if it's a really big room and has no interior walls or support posts, that could cause cracks in the wall too). The smaller cracks in the main house have a better chance of being cosmetic, but they still could be caused by foundation issues, or perhaps the previous owners knocked out a load bearing wall or something like that. Again, a home inspector could probably shed some light on whether they're something to worry about or not. I would definitely not buy the house without getting an inspection done so you know what you're getting into financially to fix the place up. I would also think twice about the railroad tracks--find out whether trains are coming through there all hours of the night as well as the day, I've lived several miles from RR tracks and still been woken up by trains occasionally so make sure you know what you're getting into with that too.
Thank you claypa and ecrane3 for your replies. I have just figured out how to view my post. We have put in an offer for the house and are waiting for the bank to agree to sell. We will definitely get an inspector to check the addition (2 rooms totaled 1500sqft). We met the original owner of the house who happens to be by while we were looking at the house. He said that the addition was done without city permits and inspections because when he built it, the area was unincorporated and permits were not required. The house and the addition are really nice. I hope cracks are not due to structural problems. I will keep you updated. Should we get city permits now?
I would make sure to do an extra thorough examination of that addition, everything you've told me about it raises a big red flag and the fact that it was done without permits makes the flag bigger and redder! At least nobody was violating the law by doing it without permits, but for you it still is a cause for concern because there are no guarantees that it was done to code. Your home inspector can probably comment on obvious things that could be a problem, and you could also contact the department that handles building permits and ask if they could send an inspector out to check out the addition, he may know things that the inspector wouldn't. I don't think it's possible to get permits after the fact since a lot of the permit process involves inspections of work as it is in progress as well as the final inspection at the end. This makes sure things that are hidden after the job is done (the studs in the wall, electrical/plumbing, etc) are all done up to code. But I would contact the bldg department and tell them the situation, they might be able to advise you on the best way to find out whether your addition was done to code or not and then at least you can feel good about it, but realize that if you ever sell the house, they will have similar suspicions that you'll have to deal with.
My suspicion remains what I had mentioned in my previous post--either the garage itself was not designed to support a second story (if they didn't do any reinforcement on the garage itself when the addition was done, this is a very strong possibility), or there are not enough interior load bearing walls or other supports in the addition itself. To have 1500 square feet only divided into 2 rooms, I would suspect there would need to be some additional support structures put in place. The beauty of getting permits is that it forces people to think about this type of issues, but without permits and who knows who the contractor was who did the job (or was it a DIY by the previous owner and bunch of his buddies!) I would strongly suspect that some of these details may have slipped through the cracks (no pun intended!)
You are scaring me ;) We tried to check out the contractor who built the add-on, but the owner said they went out of business. (I hope not from being sued.) There 2 metal supporting poles (about 4 inch in diameters each) added downstairs at the 2/3rd point of the 3 cars garage. This is where the dividing wall is for the two rooms up stairs also. We looked at the supporting poles and they seem sound, there are no cracks at the base or top of the poles. My husband said there are also some bracing, at least in the front of the garage that he noticed. I will try to see if I can talk to the city inspector tomorrow. Thank you for the follow up.
I'm glad to hear they did some support in the downstairs part of the garage, means there's at least a chance that the job was done right (although definitely not a guarantee!). The fact that there's major looking cracks in the upstairs addition though is still a sign to me that something wasn't done properly. But I think as long as you find all these things out before you purchase the house, then there's really no problem, you find out what's wrong and decide if you want to deal with it or not. I'll keep my fingers crossed for you!
Thank you, we should hear from the bank tomorrow. Then we'll see how much it will cost to fix the house. Since this is a foreclosure and sold as is, is there a chance the bank will deal with us if the cost comes up more than we anticipate?
It depends on how much money you are putting down and things like that. If you are borrowing less than the house is worth even in its current as-is condition, then I wouldn't think you'd have too much trouble, but if you don't have much down payment and are trying to borrow money to cover the purchase price plus the repairs, then it could get a little dicier. Even in that case, I think as long as you have good credit and the house isn't stretching you too much financially can probably still get a loan, but it might come at a higher interest rate than you would get otherwise. But I don't work for a bank and I've never tried to get a mortgage on a distressed or foreclosed property, so I don't necessarily know all their rules! If your bank won't help, you might talk to the bank who owns the house now--they'd love to get rid of it I'm sure so they might be a little more willing to work with you!
Putting money down on the house won't be a problem. I was thinking about negotiating with the bank who owns the house now if the cost to fix is going to be really high. The thing is, there was another party who had put in an offer for the same house, but we were told the bank was more interested in our contract because our "best offer" was higher than the other party’s. Now I am having second thoughts. I am hoping everything is cosmetic so it won’t cost much to fix up. The house is really pretty and is in a great neighborhood. We’d really love to call it home.
Well, all you can really do is wait and see how the inspections come out. My guess is that the main house will turn out to be fine (at least from the cracking standpoint...not sure what other problems there might be), and if there are serious issues with the cracks in the addition, you could always think about just living in the main house for now, then save up money over time and make the repairs to the addition in a year or two. I will keep my fingers crossed that everything turns out OK!
We bought the house and are fixing it up right now. The inspector said the cracks are all cosmetic in the main house and in the addition. He feels that the structure of the addition is sound. He said we could pay a lot of money and get a structural engineer for another opionion, but he thinks we would get the same answer. He said the trusses on the ceiling should have been 16 to 24 inches apart, however, the contractor built a tall soaring ceiling using only 2 giant trusses in the middle of the ad-on. Thank you for sharing your wisdom.
