The continuing saga

[unixronin]

We were told that when the water damage along the bottom of the front wall was "repaired" (more on that later), a proper French drain was put in to carry water away from the front of the house.

This, by you, is a French drain?

A French drain is supposed to be a trench a foot or more deep, with a perforated pipe at the bottom, a mesh screen on top of that, then filled with crushed rock.  This thing was just a couple inches of crushed rock on top of a sheet of roughly folded plastic.

I'm beginning to believe more and more strongly that the previous owners of the house were cheated by the contractors who "repaired" their water damage.  They didn't "repair" a damned thing.  They slapped up a piece of poor-quality interior-grade strand board up against already wet and rotting wood, stuccoed over it, scabbed a few joist ends, threw some cosmetic chunks of board in between them to hide the rot, tacked up some styrofoam insulation to conceal what they'd done, put down some plastic sheeting at grade level and threw two or three inches of crushed rock on top of it, and called it done.

Comments

[lebo-superman.livejournal.com]

That's just pathetic. Fully.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

A "French drain" doesn't have to contain a pipe, but should be deeper than a couple of feet in our northern climate. Should be crushed rock, should have filter fabric wrap to keep silt out, should extend below local frost depth, should lead to "daylight" at grade.

Or, if you have gravel subgrade, may not be needed at all . . .

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

True, it doesn't have to have a pipe at the bottom. But it needs to be adequately deep, needs to be silt screened, and needs — as you observe — to open to "daylight" downhill. This meets none of those. This is cosmetic.

To be fair, we don't know what we're going to find when we dig deeper. There does seem to be a lot of crushed rock in the soil below that, but it's mostly just packed earth. And there is theoretically a real foundation drain down there somewhere.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

One other thing I infer from your descriptions of what's going on -- I think your house is set lower to grade than it should be. There's a reason why our 1850s house has floor levels more than three feet above grade, with brick or granite exposed below the sills.

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

Jim, oh hell yes. The landscaping is at the TOP of the foundation wall. Stupid gits. This sort of thing is why I don't want to do residential construction and wish industrial construction would pick back up.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

That. They should have put AT LEAST one more full course of cement blocks, perhaps even two, on the foundation wall before they laid the sill plates.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

I'll note, just for useless advice, that your home-inspector might have mentioned this in the report. *That* is visible without tearing anything off.

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

The home inspector called it a poured foundation...

Jim, we've dug down about 4'. I think it would be good enough to power wash the foundation, put a rubber blanket on it, put in the retaining wall, fill trench with sand up to 3' then put the perforated pipe, filter fabric, crushed rock and call it good.

The contractor (he lives across from us) walked with me down the side yard looking for where the foundation drain came out. We didn't see it. We did however found a section of perforated PVC pipe (about 3" diameter) that was laying out in the yard but unconnected to anything.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I don't know how he came to mistake it for a poured foundation. When you look around the crawl space or under the lower deck it's fairly obvious that it's a cement-block foundation.

[hugh-mannity.livejournal.com]

Oh boy. Just don't rent the movie The Money Pit (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091541/).

I don't suppose you've got any sort of recourse at this point... Did you get it inspected at time of purchase?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

We did. The inspector missed this, because he's not allowed to pull anything off that can't be put right back (like wallplates etc) to inspect behind, and frankly it's hard to avoid concluding that this was deliberately concealed.

Update: There actually was one item on the inspection report on which he recommended an invasive inspection. This, however, was not it. It looked properly fixed, given what could be seen.

(The item in question was active wood-boring insect damage in the topmost deck. Invasive inspection on that turned out to be moot because when we asked for that to be fixed as a condition of the sale, the owners had that entire deck torn down and rebuilt from scratch. As a bonus, that meant it matches all the other decks now, which it didn't before.)

[wyrdling.livejournal.com]

do you have any recourse with the contractors yourself?

[cipherpunk.livejournal.com]

IANAL. That said, under my limited understanding of tort claims he does not. If Alice screws up and delivers a defective good to Bob, and Bob in turn unknowingly sells the defective good to Charlie, the courts will not allow Charlie to go after Alice.

The legal theory is that Alice and Charlie had no contract, so there can be no claim of breach of contract. Bob and Charlie did, though. Bob promised to deliver a good of appropriate quality to Charlie and did not, so Charlie can go after Bob for damages. Likewise, since Alice promised to deliver a good of appropriate quality to Bob and did not, Bob can sue Alice for damages.

However, until Charlie’s lawsuit against Bob is completed, Bob will not know how extensive his damages are — and thus, usually Bob will not sue Alice until after a judgment is issued or a settlement reached in the lawsuit with Charlie.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the explanation.

[wyrdling.livejournal.com]

that makes sense, but...
the wheels of law grind awful slowly....

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I don't know. We've sent a query to our agent for advice.

[masgramondou.livejournal.com]

Actually given actual French building standards (ranging mostly from sloppy to OMG! WTF! are you trying to kiil yourself?) your description of your French drain sounds pretty culturally correct....

And the don't repair do conceal attitude is definitely alive here in France. Hoo boy yes. But your discoveries are ranking up near the top of construction screwups. Not at the top - that goes for the house with only 20cm of foundation - but close.

My sympathies (and as a fellow property owner a certain amount of "there but for the grace of god...")

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

Actually, French drains are named after Henry French. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_drain