The Traveling Engineer

She called me to talk to her about the saggy roof line and falling garage. She didn't like it when I told her there was Asbestos.

So I showed up to one of those inexpensive cabins near park City. You know - the 5 million dollar kind. Honestly I have no idea what it sold for. The parties were squabbling about the basement slab. It should have been 4 inches thick and was 2 in at least 1 area. Here's what I told them.

My client today wanted to open the space in his master suite and put a golf simulator in the basement. I told him go for it. Nice day for him!

How to sometimes save a house that's leaning? I discuss that in this episode

Sometimes you just need confirmation that you're not crazy when you're buying a house.

Gotta love 80s homes. This one is very dated but it still cost nearly 1 mill. Structural questions with the stairstep cracks and drainage issues. Then he told me he wanted to open up the space between the kitchen. Here we go

So I did an inspection on a 1958 mess of a home. Super dated, bad condition, but in a great location. This one was complicated, but if you want to make 7 figures on one project, it can't be easy, right?

Um, why is there a pod about attic ventilation? How does that apply to a podcast about structural things? Well, it's because I was hired to come out and explain to a client why the crack in their ceiling was or was not a structural problem. Turns out it wasn't, and the crack was simply a ventilation problem. At least this time.

Even your best neighbor's cousin's uncle will tell you that horizontal cracks in the foundation are the bad ones. Everybody says it so it must be true, right? Well, that depends on what the cause of the crack is. I run into that today. It didn't turn out too bad.

Sometimes the client is doing the uze. (How do you spell that anyway? You know, short for usually. Uzh? Uzzz? Youzh? I guess if you're not cool enough to know, you shouldn't uze it). Anyway, this time the uze is that they're finishing the basement. Fill in this wall with framing, take out that framed structural wall and do a header. That's what we're doing this time. 16 foot sp...

Today I got called back to a newer home that was screwed up by the contractor. The framers actually put the walls eight inches away from where they should have been. This means that the footing doesn't support the walls above it in areas. Big oops. Here's my assessment.

I was called out to a 7000 square foot "cabin" in the mountains near Fairview UT. This hummer had settlement on the front left corner, where the bedrooms are. The area was of course mountainous, and the question is what to do about settlement on that side. Here's my assessment

You would think that it should be easy to convert a crawl space into basement. Not so. Here's one example of why

Sometimes contractors suck. And sometimes it's intentional. Here's how I help those kinds of clients

So I had a customer that called me to check out his house and design a cantilever support This is for a 1928 bungalow that he is remodeling. After I got there we found that this old lath and plaster wall wasn't structural. No cantilever needed.

Got called out on a quick one. The appraiser didn't like the stairstep cracks he saw on a brick and stucco rambler. Should the buyer walk away? I had an answer for that one today.

I had a client that was concerned about the structural condition of his 1920's bungalow. A previous homeowner had run the sewer line through the shelf on the back side of his shelf basement, and left a large hole - to the tune of four to five feet in height. His question was how much of a structural problem would this be? Here's the conclusion I reached.

I get a lot of calls from homeowners who want to convert their basement to a rental or something for the ma-in-law. This was a fun one for me to do because the dude was Samoan. I love polynesians - definitely want to be that in my next life. The dude was open to everything I had to say, so I helped him with the tech side of the window conversion, the stairway and the associated soil retaining, and...

Wondering if that wall in your home is structural or a partition wall? So was this client. Here's how the roof type affects that and how this inspection turned out