EP #5: Foundations and Floor
Sergio DeCesare:
All right, everybody. Sergio here, Max business profits. I’m here again, once again, with my good friend and home inspector extraordinaire, Rick Kooyman from trade secrets inspections. And I’ve asked Rick to kind of put together this case study, because I think it’s going to blow a lot of people’s minds who live in Naples and have bought property in Naples, and I think you’re going to see some pretty dramatic things here. So I’m going to start off this by saying, or asking the question, or maybe maybe just making the statement, everybody knows that we don’t have basements in Florida, right?
Rick Kooyman:
Well, at least we could say it’s probably not a good idea, probably
Unknown:
not, and there’s probably less of a chance of a basement showing up, say, in South Florida or southwest Florida, because of being so close to a water table. Maybe there might be some, some other examples, some place in North Florida, or along that center ridge of the state. But we all know there’s no basements here in Florida, right? Well,
Rick Kooyman:
yeah, and even if there was, let’s take a moment and think about why there shouldn’t be. So. I think the topic of the conversation is, is more why we don’t have basements in Florida, right? We’re going to illustrate that very vividly today.
Unknown:
Okay, let’s, let’s get on with the mind blowing here.
Rick Kooyman:
All right, so awesome to be with you again. There, Sergio, and let’s do this PowerPoint. Hopefully you can see this little slideshow we got going on here. But, you know, I just wanted to have a little different kind of podcast presentation for everybody today, and share a little bit of what’s out there and some knowledge, and you know, a little bit about what’s going on in the industry and why it matters who you have worked for you and what they know matters. And there’s a lot of people out there that do what they’re supposed to be doing, but just don’t have the background that they maybe other people might, let’s just leave it at that. So anyways, yeah, we got this little show here. I call it lost in time, and that’s because of when I was introduced to this property, everybody was kind of like, well, how did this occur? So we’ll talk on how that happened and and why it got lost in time. But let’s start off with what we should be looking at. So I got a few slides here on basic foundation stuff and and what assemblies look like even here, this is a foundation assembly slide. It is basically what we call a stem wall, or a footer on wall with a floating slab. We have this more often than not now with the newer construction, because of the increase in elevation requirement because of the, you know, the water level flooding and all this going on. So the need to raise things. We’ve gone back to, you know, stem walls and filling in between the walls and then putting the slab on top of the fill. So that’s basically what we’re looking at here. You just have, you know, your basic footer underground, and the water should run away from it outside, and, you know, sand and gravel. And then here’s the concrete slab and your walls and the rest of the house. So that’s just what it’s supposed to look like, and that’s great. Here’s another slide of similar the one on the left is the floating slab with the stem wall poured, and the sitting foundation on the lower right here is what was more commonly done in the past, and we’re still doing it a good bit, where we’re bringing in a lot of sand and we’re elevating the lot, as long as the compaction is done correctly. This is a literal slab on grade where we’re pouring basically a monolithic thing, where the slab here wraps around and becomes part of the footer, and there’s this big, huge open trench, and then inside of this is all kinds of metal and reinforcements and all that other stuff. So it’s not just a big old hole of concrete, but this is oftentimes what’s going on on the property we’re going to discuss here today. It’s more of a situation that looks like this. Okay, so we go back to the stem wall idea, where we have the the footings, we have a block wall or a concrete wall, and then we have an interior floor, and outside could be a different elevation than inside. And then sometimes mid construction or mid span of a floor will need a load bearing point, right? So we’ll put in another foundation line or another footer, a carrying beam, essentially. So in the middle of the house, there’s often load points across the floor. So. When we have the elevated floors, as opposed to the floating slabs that are on basic backfill, and that’s the sand all the way across. So in this case, if we’re going to do an elevated house, and we can have crawl spaces, and there are several crawl space homes in Florida, it’s not uncommon to find a crawl space home. A lot of the older homes were built actually on rocks foundations. And they’re, you know, 16 to 12 inches above grade. And they’re, they are these little mini crawl spaces under there. And one of the few of those ones, they’re, they’re still hanging on. They got, you know, the obvious age and moisture issues going on, but, you know, structurally, they’re still doing it. But anyways, if we go to the extent of creating a basement, this is more of what we’re looking at, okay, where we have a big differential between what’s outside grade and inside grade, and that’s essentially what we know of as a basement, right? And it’s pretty obvious to most people, but you know, basically at the bottom of the basement floor now is where our footers are, right, and that’s what I’m basically wanting to get at with all this conversation and slideshow and just fundamental understanding that when if we have a basement, the basement then becomes very much Like the floating slab, where the slab and the footer sit together, and they’re very close to each other. So the fact that you know, like you said, we’re in Florida, there, however, any basements in Florida, I present you this. So that is the view from outside at in the back corner of the house, and you can see it’s beautiful canal, and yes, indeed, there is a basement present. Now, I will admit there are high points of elevation on the islands and places, but in general, an island is probably the last place you would want to dig a hole and create a basement in and think you could keep it dry, and you can just kind of look at this, and obviously there’s wetness and moisture, and everybody can see it. You can almost smell it, just through the photo. It was, it was a challenge to be in there. It was not a healthy environment. So are you saying this house is on an island. It is on one of our local barrier islands here in southwest Florida. I will say that for sure, yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s it’s a remarkable move, and that’s where I go back to the lost in time comment. When I was introduced to this property, my customer was from Miami, and they were like, well, how, how could it be if it was, you know, not okay to do it, basically. And I said, Well, it wasn’t that. It wasn’t okay to do it at the time it was built. Because at the time it was built, there wasn’t a Florida building code being used in this location. And what was weird to them, in particular, being from Miami, it was just after what they had experienced or knowledge of in Miami when Florida enacted the South Florida Building Code, which only Miami Dade and Broward County actually followed, and that was because Andrew came and just destroyed the place, and they didn’t want to build back and do stuff like this over there, but the whole rest of Florida didn’t recognize that for quite a while. It was 2000 and, you know, one before that, it was even accepted by the most of Florida, and it still wasn’t used by the entirety then, but this is where we get the possibility of this being permitted to be done. I mean, it wasn’t illegally built. It was built when the code had a requirement to allow a basement to be built. You know,
Unknown:
it was, it was, it was legally able to be built. But it
Rick Kooyman:
was a bad idea, not
Unknown:
best practices.
Rick Kooyman:
Yeah, it was a very, let’s go ahead and do it kind of because I know I can pull it off and I want a basement kind of thing. And again, I say the lot was elevated. It is an elevated, you know, it’s 25 foot elevated lot and but the differential between that floor and the ocean out there isn’t 25 feet for sure. But more importantly, there is a water table that exists in the ground everywhere, right? And you gotta suspect that on a barrier island, the actual natural water table would be higher than the average place. So there’s probably a pretty good likelihood if you dig a hole on an island, you’ll find water. Yeah, we’re not going to make give an address, but this right. This wasn’t Collier Kennedy, correct? Yes. It
Unknown:
was, and this was a recent thing. This wasn’t something from 10 years ago or 20 years ago.
Rick Kooyman:
No, this was, this was this map. This was actually in this last in October, not in October, September. This. I just saw this. Yeah, this is a new find for me recently, for sure. And again, it is a one of but I think it’s a great educational point to understand. And this view in particular, I want you to pay attention to. There’s a window way right here. And when we went back to that other slide, and I was talking about that partition wall right here, yeah, that’s what we’re looking at right here. This is a partition wall mid structure. And over here is the exterior wall. And back here, this is the garage, and this is the stairwell that goes up to the garage like a traditional house up north, right? So this is the back of the garage floor underground, and the garage is in front of it. And this is a partition wall. And through this hole over here, this is now a crawl space, so that the grade in there is essentially right here, right and it’s all back filled with sand, and that’s more traditional of what would be normal out here, because the outside grade was right about here. So the the crawl space grade in the outside yard grade is typically going to be the same in a crawl space, and that’s the control moisture. And this kind of gives you a reference of where that is. But in this, in this, the footer is down here, under this wall. It’s under this wall, and it’s under this wall, right, kind of like in that photo I showed you. So this is now our slab, and our footers just below this. And that’s, you know, basically we’re in this section of what we’re looking at of the house, which is right here. So right about here is that partition wall in the basement. It’s not directly under this interior wall, but it’s right about here, mid floor, so right about here’s where that window is. Now, this is the exterior wall. This is over here, right? This is this wall back here, because here’s the stairwell in the garage and the basements here, right? It’s under these. So the this is what we’re looking at in this photo. These are the floor choices that are carrying those two bedrooms, right? This has been repaired, obviously, because there’s been decay of the, what we call the the rim box on the sill plates, and all this has been replaced at some point, and there’s been some concrete repairs that have gone on. But more importantly, these are the floor joists, and they’re literally not being supported by anything. They’re toenail, they’re pin nailed in here on a sheer nail holder. There’s no brackets, there’s no ledges, there’s no nothing. I mean, this is a classic old school not the best way to build things, and it’s not very safe to have this. And, you know, I’m looking to see a lot of this. So this goes on recognized by the less experienced people. It’s, yeah, like, there’s to be water stains up here in this insulation. Oh, well, yeah, there’s all kinds of other story about it. But what I was really wanting to point out was that we have a whole exterior wall going on down here. And these are the bedroom floors that are the whole thing. The all of the joists are like that. I don’t have really a whole photo of that wall that shows it properly. This is the back corner of the same this is the basement. And here you can see, this is where that rim box is supposed to be. This is where, again, was supposed to be, and it’s gone. It’s literally, that is the stucco mesh of the outside covering of the house, right? So that’s metal mesh with stucco on it. Yeah. This is a two by six that was just set up in there to cover the void. Holy. And this is the exterior load carrying portion of the rim box that has the exterior wall sitting on it. There’s literally nothing under it, literally nothing. It’s all rotted away. And there’s all this wood rot. And that’s, you know, it’s, I mean, it’s an absolute disaster waiting to happen. But you wouldn’t know it from the top. I mean, it’s, you walk around, it’s tile, it’s all it’s holding itself together until there’s like full failure. And I’m looking at this, the plywood there. I mean, yeah, this was long term water exposure. This water exposure is actually coming from outside. It’s traveling all the way in, and it, you know, it starts at the outside, in the window, and it’s routed out the whole wall, including the rim box of the floor. Holy cow. Yeah, right. So, again, this is some a little bit more of the floor damage. This is a shot. Pan that was easily to identify. And this was basically one of the bigger problems of the house in general. Even if we could get through the foundation and structural issues, there was so much moisture going on there. It was so overwhelmed with mold that it’s literally basically impossible to recover and get it back to a healthy condition. Again, this is that exterior wall there’s a little one by two nailed to something to hold what is the edge of the floor from falling into the basement. And again, this is that same area where we were just looking in that other photo. So now we’re looking at the back wall of the basement, and this is where we get to the water table issue, right? So we went down the hall, the stairwell in the garage, and we’re going in here, and the stairwell entries back over here, and we walk into the basement, and at the back wall, there’s a sump pump right here, the plastic tote in holding the sump pump. But what it wants you to notice isn’t necessarily the sump pump or the electric and the battery backup and all that is this is the bottom of the basement floor slab, right? And if you look closely, you can see the water table is roughly about one inch below the actual concrete of the slab, and then this water is probably six to eight inches deep. So this slab is, you know, eight to 10 inches off of any kind of support, but it’s also floating above, just slightly above where the water table was sitting when I was there that day, which the pump was keeping up with and had it just not touching the floor, right. So you’re literally pumping continuously from the yard, which is surrounded by the ocean, out of that hole back into the yard. I mean, this discharge is right back out here in a circular cycle. It just keeps going on forever and ever and ever. And this is where you end up with this kind of development occurring. And this is basically why you don’t have basements in Florida. Okay, so in a great, easy picture way, this is literally the water table below the slab of a basement floor. So if you dig a hole on an island, you will find water, and you should not begin to build your house at that point and go up. It’s probably not going to work out. So my question is, looking at water that some pump.
Unknown:
I mean, is it pushing that water all the way out to the canal or just putting it in the ground inside the house? It
Rick Kooyman:
was dumping it out at the bulkhead at the back of the bulkhead of the canal, and it was eroding both the yard and the canal simultaneously, eroding like the sea wall, yeah, and we’ll see. I think I have some photos that might show the sea wall being eroded from the backside and it I’m wondering, like, okay, overall, unless you’re pumping that right off the edge sea wall into the end of the canal, okay, it might help. But ultimately, you’re not going to get the water table to go down because it’s just an endless fight. Yeah, you freaking get ahead of it. You never, never, never. It’s just, you’ll, you’ll always have very high moisture in this environment and and prior to us being there, this floor has, this is carpet glue, unfortunately. So at some point this had some kind of carpeting mesh, and there was other signs of it being a finished interior of some nature, probably a little rental apartment. This is the crawl space. When you peek your head through that window we were looking at a while back in that other slide, and a couple of things are noteworthy here is, obviously the insulation is all falling down, and that’s because of extreme moisture exposure. And it’s gotten it’s gotten heavy, basically absorb any moisture. And it’s even more interesting is, if you look right here, here’s the paper that goes on the insulation, on on paper, backed insulation. This is a vapor barrier, right? It’s meant to not allow moisture to go past it, right? The problem is, is, here’s the floor of the interior space, and it’s being air conditioned, right? So this is a cold layer, and you put your vapor barrier on top of the cold layer, and you will always, always get condensation. And hence, that is why this is hanging down, because it’s just, it’s like a system set up to fail one night, right? I mean, and again, this just goes back to not under. Understanding What materials do and what the procedures are in you bring northern practices down to a southern environment, and you don’t really understand that the environment requires things to be built. What is backwards to you, right? You want to you want your vapor barrier on the hot side of a structure, basically, right? Because it’s pretty common sense. When you look at it, if it’s cold and you put plastic on it, it’s going to condensate, right? It’s just not going to work. So that’s that’s part one of the crawl space. But here is where it really gets interesting. If you look down the interior wall. This is peeking my head through the window, and you look down the interior wall, this is basically dead center of the house, right? So we have plumbing drain here, and way back here there’s another plumbing drain. But what I noticed, what I saw, was that there’s a canal right here of water continuously running from this water leak, and then there’s this huge eroded hole here from this water leak, right? This is long term water leakage from, you know, another issue. It’s a plumbing leak, for sure, whatever. But what really concerns me is this is getting to the foundation footing level of what’s on the other side of this wall, which is the basement right so I’m standing here, in the window on the slab here, basically right here, and I’m looking, I’m out here, and I’m looking about where this 47 is, and I’m seeing this big void, and that void is here, right? So this sand is gone. It’s eroding under this footing. And now the slab, because it’s a basement that we’re looking at, it’s here, right? Our slab has water under it. This is now water, right? It’s a void to begin with, and that other foundation is here. And now the soil that was under it is also gone. And where did it go? Well, it went somewhere into this water. And that water went somewhere Well, through the pump and wherever else, through land. But basically we have is a giant void developing under both the exterior foundation footing and that mid wall foundation point right? So it’s here, right here, and you can see the water hot spots right right here and right here. And there’s literally nothing here, right? This is where all the sand is running out. This whole thing is basically floating above water, and it’s just it’s becoming a giant void. And at some point this fails, yeah, this fails, and it all settles, even if it settles six, eight inches, right? Well, it’s catastrophic. It is catastrophic. And then on the other side of it, when the load bearing points shift, remember, the outside walls are already compromised, right, right? We have misassembly, we have decay, we have rock we have like a more than a trifecta of a real catastrophe that could happen here. And the question is is, well, how can we fix it? Can we fill this? Can we remediate it, you know, can we pump foam in there, whatever? And you can do all of those things, but you gotta remember, you’ll never get rid of the moisture, and the moisture in the water table will always be there, and it will erode again, from what other you fill into it, right? So the only answer is to not have the basement right, to redo the footing and to fix the plumbing leak. But you need this fill back in. You can’t continuously pump that out forever. I was just you cannot. It won’t ever happen that it works out for the foundation, and it’s amazing that it’s still here. But the house was, I asked the customers to not go, to leave the interior of the house. It was so unhealthy to be in, and they had a young child with him, and I said, I told him there was no reason for him to be inside, and it was only going to lead to them being sick, and the amount of work that would need to be done to make it healthy is nowhere worth the structure that was sitting there. So it’s a fantastic location, and it’s a shame, because you look at it and it’s a beautiful home, so you would think, until you realize that it’s not even worth putting new paint on it. So
Unknown:
at this point, this house may, may just have to be a knockdown, and it
Rick Kooyman:
is in my eyes, and that’s what I told him, I’m like, it’s a great lot if you’re buying it for lot value. Fantastic. I encourage you to do that. If you’re thinking you want to buy this house and want to come and stay in it, you’re going to get sick. And if you spend any money trying to repair it, you’re literally throwing your money into a hole.
Unknown:
I mean, short of filling that basement with concrete,
Rick Kooyman:
yeah. And then you have the whole issue of the floor box already being compromised with mold, carrier walls, with all this water intrusion, there was all kinds of other leaks going on with, I mean, there was just, there was so much mold, and it’s a wood frame structure. It’s a loss. Is a total loss, in my opinion, right? And it, you know, it’s a tough thing to say to somebody and and ultimately, someone’s going to buy this house. And you know, the listing agent wasn’t there, fortunately, when we went through it, because I know there’s going to be hard, felt feelings about this kind of thing being said. But it is what it is, you know, and I don’t conceal facts or truths from people. I do what I do to share the knowledge and education that I have from, you know, doing this stuff my entire life. And I just think that buyer beware is ultimately the end of the story. In real estate and who you work with is extraordinarily important to how the things turn out.
Unknown:
And look what I don’t know stand I’m sure there are. And you and I probably know many people, it’s, they’re, they’re out for a commission. You know, something like this would kill a deal, clearly, but it has to be killed, you know. And there’s, there’s there’s a market has to be killed
Rick Kooyman:
and and it’s not. It’s not wrong to sell the property, it’s not wrong to sell the land, it’s not wrong to sell the house. It’s wrong to to sell it as something that it’s not. But Buyer beware. That’s my words for the beware. Most Crazy, informative and just crazy on but, you know, I also wanted to actually share that there are basements in Florida. It’s like Santa Claus. He’s real.
Unknown:
Um, yes, Virginia, there are basements in Florida.
Rick Kooyman:
Case has been proven. Well, that’s, that’s,
Unknown:
that’s great. That’s great information, and I appreciate you sharing that with everyone. Why don’t you tell them how they can get in touch with you?
Rick Kooyman:
Yeah, here’s my my my website is trade secrets inspections.com. Really easy to find. You can mail me at Rick at trade secrets, inspections, com, simple as that. My phone numbers, 239-537-1186, direct line straight to me anytime. I love to answer questions, so I just, you know, do what I do, to help out as I can.
Unknown:
Yes, you do, and you’re damn good at it. So hopefully next time, I kind of want to get into the a little bit more of why agents are the way they are, maybe
Rick Kooyman:
it’s a new changing market, and there’s a new world out there, and then real estate, it’s a dynamic thing, and I think there’s the topic to be talked about there. I agree with you. Great,
Unknown:
interesting. Well, thanks again, Rick, and we will be talking to you very soon. Great,
Rick Kooyman:
appreciate. It always good to be with you till next time you