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

[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.)