SUMMARY KEYWORDS
soil, cracks, foundation, house, slab, expansive, home, built, couple, door, marble, put, talking, buy, fill, people, called, plumbing, frame, rock
00:03
Before you start your next do it yourself project listen to this. You Got This! is on the air. You Got This! is hosted by ABT plumbing electric heat and air owner, Andrew Twidwell and Rosalie Brown with a helpful hand. Here are Andrew and Rosalie.
00:18
Hi, this is Andrew Twidwell, owner of ABT plumbing, electric heat and air, once again with the show You Got This! It’s a show of DIY do’s and don’ts. And I’m sitting in here in the KNCO studio. How big is this thing? Five by eight? It’s a little closet with a couple of mics. I’m here with Chuck Kull, previous owner of Holdredge & Kull, and now a Principal Engineer at NV5. We have a lot to talk about. But first we’re just gonna talk about some fun stuff because our kids kind of grew up together here in Nevada County, and now you got kids working for you. How’s that going?
00:50
I do. Yeah, I’ve got to our oldest son is got his degree in engineering from Cal Poly. And then he went and got his master’s degree at U INR. And now he’s back to work with us. He did a couple of interns with us back to work full time.
01:04
So local, local, local, um, you guys go back pretty far. You’ve been up here for 35 years, I’ve been up here for 20. So you grew up in Palo Alto, or Los Altos Hills. Yeah, I grew up in San Francisco. But yeah, like everybody else up here, right. We’re all a lot of us are transplants. Yeah, I got a couple of people that work for us that are born and raised and go back to the Cornish miners. But those are few and far between.
01:33
My kids love to say we’re local, and you’re not dad. Yeah.
01:37
They were born and raised. And we can just go into this because we got to actually get a lot of information to share. So we could go on to bantering. But we could also just talk about what we were talking about. So some so what is it exactly what is exactly that? You do? I mean, what is the job that you do? I mean, I know you get into some really big jobs. And you were just talking about you’re putting a bid in for replacing a valve it Orville dam, you know, what is 100,000? Pound, Venerable 50,000 150,000 pound valve, this is just to turn water on and off, essentially. So exactly. And then all the way down to just home foundations and retaining walls, right? I mean, right, what’s your background? What do you do?
02:27
Fortunately, unfortunately, about 95% of what we do, you never get to see because it’s always under the ground. rock bolts and temporary shoring systems and like the foundations on Dorsey are for the new. We put highway 49 and the expansion for Dorsey drive, a lot of those foundations are drilled partially in rock and then we drill in grout bolts into the rock. And then we tie the foundation to the rock. So why take out 30,000 psi rock and replace it with 4000 psi concrete, right? Just doesn’t make sense.
03:00
Right? So So that’s the kind of stuff I mean, so you’re dealing with everything from from huge to small. And we thought we talked a little bit weird. We’re chatting because I have the starters building a van. They’re doing the van life. Right. And we had some plumbing we talked about a little bit last. I hope I wasn’t too bad. We talked about that on the last show. And I’m like, I texted him like they texted you. I hope I didn’t throw you under the bus too bad. So did I you didn’t know it’s actually
03:25
pretty pretty my house. No, it’s actually pretty funny. person at their own trade, put it that way.
03:32
And that’s what we thought, well, we were we were talking about what to look for in terms of, you know, as a professional or not, and also things we’ve talked in the past about, when you buy a home things you want to look at. And he and Chuck and I were chatting while we were working on on that shower valve. And he was like I could tell people what to look for in terms of when they go in to buy a new house. And things that you should worry about and things that you maybe not worry about. So we can kind of start in on that. So you’re we’re just kind of chatting a little bit like so what are some what would be a thing that something that you would not you would go in and you may get called out or you may have a friend that calls you up and say, Hey, I got this crack? What would be something like that, that would be like don’t worry about?
04:16
Well, we do get called out a lot for
04:20
we’re talking structural, and foundations and stuff here. So this is the stuff that Chuck deals with just
04:25
the the structural elements. So we get called to look at a home that someone may be buying or maybe they’ve owned it for a few years, and now they’re seeing something that they didn’t see before. And we go out and looking at the homes, especially in our area here. We we have, you know, homes that are at 100 years old and some there are several years old and we could call to an older home. Let’s say well, we want to buy this but it’s got these cracks in the sheetrock over here, right? And I say well, okay, well it’s 100 years old. That’s gonna have Next move, things move they do. And he’s Creek. Yeah. But you still we want to go look at the foundation and look and see what kind of foundations cracked and how wide the cracks are. Typically, if the crack is less than about an eighth of an inch wide, it’s not breaking rebar was 100 years ago, they didn’t use us. Yeah, right. But so we look at that we we look at the cracks in the pattern. Typically, cracks will form diagonally off of doors, frames and multiple window frames. Because that’s has at least structural shear in a building. That’s open. Right? And so that’s normally where they see the cracks. And then we look at the doorframes the things that are really quick to look at our open up the doors, and look at the strike plate, which is you probably describe better than I can but you know, it’s where this the steel
05:55
meets at the top or or meet to the bottom or the latch or the latch. Right? Oh, yeah, actually, okay.
06:01
Yeah, the latch? Yeah, take a look at it and see if it’s
06:03
not if it’s describing by the you you had a better
06:07
but look and see if it’s been moved up or down from its original position.
06:10
Yeah. So what are you talking about? It’s that little, that little metal plate that you’ve got, where that where the door hinge or the door latch goes into. And I literally did that to my front door? I don’t know, about three months ago, I just took it off because it was It wasn’t locking anymore. I’m like, alright, I’ll deal with it later. But yeah, things shift things move, right, it was off by an eighth of an inch and no longer the latch won’t work anymore. So that’s what we’re talking about. Look at that and see if it’s moved or if they
06:36
have been adjusted. Yes. Look at the top of the doors where the doors have been placed. And older homes probably don’t have this. But homes that had been built with manufactured doors, the top of the door will be rough from the cut, right when you buy them. So we run your hand across the top of it, it’s rough, it probably hasn’t been shaved down, right. If it’s smooth, there’s a chance someone has sanded it down or shaved it down to try and get it to fit.
07:02
Right. So you’ll also see where the paint has been scraped off sometimes exactly at the top of the of the top of the doorframe because it’s moving around.
07:10
So those are some of the things to look at if you’re purchasing a home. The other thing is opening. And are
07:16
those something that they should be worried about? If they’re seeing if they’ve adjusted the strike plate or shaved the door down? Is this something that be concerned and call an engineer out to him take a look at the foundation.
07:28
We can get into that. It could be and it may not be a big deal. Okay, so the looking at the, you know, open, close a sliding glass door and slide it close to where it’s just barely hitting the door or the frame and look to see if the gap is the same at the top and the bottom right. Those start to give you indications that there’s either settlement, or worse expansive soil. All right. And we have we have a pretty bad problem with expansive soil up here.
07:58
And this is I just learned about this last week because I I always just kind of attributed this to just earthquakes growing up in San Francisco. I always figured Yeah, the Earth moves. But you started talking to me about expanding soil, which just kind of blew my mind.
08:11
Yeah, it’s expensive soil. It used to be the most expensive repair on homes, combined with tornadoes, floods, everything. Well, not anymore, probably with the fires, right. But the the thing is, you don’t read about in the newspaper because no one’s gonna say these three homes have cracks in their foundations because they have expansive soil. Right? It’s, you don’t die from expansive soils, put it that way.
08:41
And it’s and it’s soil. So I mean, it’s nothing that’s happening. It’s not like a fire, what happens immediately? It’s something that’s happened over the last 1015 2050 to 100 years. Right, typically, that’s correct.
08:53
Yeah, that’s correct. But what happens with expansive soil, and our expansive soil around here is normally only a couple of feet thick, and it lies right above the rock. Right? And so it’s a weathering of the rock below and it creates a clay layer, which is expansive or can be expansive, not always, but it can be. And so what happens is the clay gets wet and expands right. And then the other half of the year, it dries out. And it has to
09:21
live in this Mediterranean climate where you we have this water wet season and completely dry season during the summer. So you
09:28
get these cyclic events and so you ask the question, does the store stick it sometimes and not other times? Yeah, it does. Yes. Sticks this time of year But doesn’t the other time you Ah, okay, let’s know sounds like expensive soil. Yeah. So that is and if it stayed always wet or always dry, you wouldn’t have that cycle. Right? Right. But unfortunately, we have that right. The which then leads into crop going into the crawlspace. If you have a crawlspace and that’s to look at the soil in the crawlspace. All you’re looking for is desiccation cracks are there big open cracks in the soil. Oh, yeah. Because lot mostly in underneath housing, as you mentioned,
10:06
I’ve seen that a lot. Yeah, that you have. I mean, we’ll go through crawl spaces and, and or houses that are on hillsides specific, especially where you see the huge cracks. Um, you can drop a tool in the sometimes.
10:21
That’s correct. Yeah. So there’s shrinkage cracks. Yeah. And they normally occur. More like they’re easier to see under the house and around the outside of the house, because most of the time underneath the house should be dry.
10:33
Right. And they’re not their main site, filling them in with soil during runoff or whatever, right. It’s exactly, yeah, exactly.
10:39
Yeah. So that that is one of the main indicators of expansive swell. Wow, that is
10:47
I’m learning something new every day. I love this. Because yeah, I’ve always wondered like, you know, an ass is drying out. Yeah, when they built it. But now it’s happening over a period of time.
10:56
Right. And so it, because it’s a cycle, that it can start propagating and getting bigger, right, bigger as it starts racking the house a little bit and writing it a little bit more and pull the nail out that was there that is starting to right move on itself like that. And so it and the thing with expansive soil is, what can you what can you live with? And what can’t you live with? Right? And people say, I just don’t like to store smoking. But can you live with it? Well, I guess I can live with it. Right? Because repairs are very expensive. Yeah, I
11:31
mean, a sticking door, we get a carpenter out or handyman out to to clean it down. Right? Right. Or do it yourself, oh, there’s a DIY project. Planning a door down is pretty simple. You know, take the two pins off the door, put it on, you might want to build a jig makes a little bit easier, just a couple two by fours, something to hold it up like a bike frame, like a bike rack kind of thing to put it in and then plane it down. And you can do it with a hand plane. I’ve done it with just a belt sander to at a desperation just because I didn’t have a planner Andy. Yeah,
12:01
no, that’s exactly true. And you know if you can live with it, that’s great. Yeah. But we talked a little bit about the cracks in houses. And, you know, if it’s a 40 year old house, and it’s sitting on a hill, chances are it’s sitting on half fill and half cut, which is typically what we do, right? And it settles over time. What he’s talking
12:21
about there is what we’ll do, you know, the topography is not flat, right, especially in Nevada County. I mean, there’s that thing about a county flat, right? So they’ll have to take a certain amount of soil off to level it off. And then you take that soil and then you fill it in on the downhill side. And so you got cut and fill. So you got native soil that’s compacted to whatever it is native and then loose soil, hopefully that compacted it but not all the time. That’s just it. Not all the time. Yeah, maybe you now but not 3040 years ago, we weren’t doing a lot of compaction, so we weren’t. Yeah.
12:57
And so if it’s old like that, it’s not the weight of the house that’s causing the settlement most of the time. Yeah, it’s the weight of the soil itself.
13:05
And that another thing that blew me away when he told me that last week, because I had always envisioned just the weight of the framing on the perimeter Foundation, just pushing the soil down. Whereas you’re describing to me as a geoengineer. I mean, this is something that you studied for, and if done for many, many years. 3540 years 38 You’ve been doing it a while, where the soil is actually moving. And it has very little to do with the the fit the structure or the foundation itself. It’s the soil is going to move regardless if this if the house is there or not.
13:40
Correct? Yeah, it can settle. Without a house on it. Yeah, is because they are very, very lightly loaded. A building only weighs well on a single family home. Building weighs about 600 pounds per foot per lineal foot. So if your footing is 12 inches wide, there’s only 600 pounds being put on that. Yeah, that’s that’s about the weight of one person standing on one foot, you’re gonna throw a square foot there. Right. So that’s about what it is. Less than a wheel on a car. Exactly how much less than a wheel macaque? Yeah. So they’re, they’re lightly loaded. So they can move around a lot, because they don’t weigh much. Yeah. And and this
14:20
is your entire home. Yes, exactly. Your biggest expense. Right. And you think of it is this really heavy object on the soil? Yeah. Yeah.
14:29
So we talked about the older homes and I say, I’ve got these cracks there. Well, again, yeah, your house is 4050 years old, and it’s sitting on some fill here. Most likely it’s done what it’s going to do the settlement occurs quickly, in two to 510 years something is done. So then it’s a good time to just go in and fill your cracks and be done with it. The what gets alarming is when you look at a house, it’s two or three years old, and has cracks and it’s like my house is two or three year old shouldn’t have cracks like So yeah, so there’s something going on either the Fill wasn’t compacted, it’s on expansive soil. And then it starts getting more.
15:06
So if if, if it was compacted properly, would you still have the expansion and contraction?
15:14
Yes, you would, because it’s the it’s the chemistry, the makeup of the soil
15:19
itself. So regardless of how tight that soil is going to be, it’s still going to move. It has potential, correct?
15:25
Yeah. Especially if you’ve cut the soil on one side, as you were describing, and then put it on the other side of the fill. Right? You may have the fill that you placed has a lot of clay in it. But you’ve cut all that clay out on the uphill side. Right. So now you have the differential movement. Right? Right to one side doesn’t want to move the other side does, right? It’s like a teeter totter. It’s right, up and down, up and down. Yeah. But it’s very, it’s very expensive to try and fix. Yeah, I
15:53
mean, that’s what I’m envisioning. I mean, it’s not something that. So I mean, this is definitely if you’re looking at a house and you’ve got these issues, it’s definitely something you might want to have somebody come out to look for. So what would be something that would prompt me calling a company like yours to come out and take a look at the foundation?
16:11
Well, sometimes we just look at it. For people that regard they just want to stay, they just want peace of mind. Right? A lot of people from the Bay Area have us come look at a house regardless if there’s cracks in it or no, yeah. But to look at it, if it’s moving. You know, sometimes we’ll just send me some photos, we take a look at it, and say, Well, can you live with it? Oh, yeah. But he just didn’t like those cracks. Well, yeah, then cover it up. Do some Yeah,
16:39
I mean, because you can’t you can’t cover it. I mean, the the issue where you know, like, I know, you know, the house that my family owned, my grandmother bought a house in San Francisco, an apartment building, that my whole family kind of lived in, off and on throughout, you know, from the 70s on, and you could literally put a marble on the floor, and it would just catch bead going down towards the end of the house. And so that was my aunt finally got that fixed. And I think she paid to the tune of about $300,000, something like that to Jack that house up and put a foundation and this was 10 years ago. I know it’s vastly more expensive now. But I mean, this, this is something you. So in terms of something that you want to have looked at, if it is something like that, if you’ve got a marble that’s rolling down the hill, you might want to have an engineer come out and look at it before you buy this house, or some big cracks. You might want to have an engineer come and take a look at the house because of the fact that it is it can be so expensive to fix this stuff,
17:32
right? And more expensive for a what we call a frame. I mean, sorry, more expensive for a slab on grade foundation than a framed floor, right frame floor. We can get our neath it you can put some screw jacks underneath there, right. And you can underpin that out by my foundation. But you’re correct in the marble manufacturing, I always keep a couple golf balls in my car. So we can do that same thing.
17:54
Yeah, yeah. It’s a great visual representation of the fact that you’ve got the ironically that you could literally feel it in this house. You walked around and you know, as a kid, I just remember having that sense of like, I’m going downhill. Yeah, yeah. You do feel in the house.
18:08
Yeah. So if you if you did that, and your roller marble on a, on a hardwood floor or something like that, and it started picking up speed or you roll it one direction and starts going the other direction. Right? That’s, that’s, that’s an issue. Certainly, yeah. Then then you might want to follow up. If you have tile, then take a I want to say a hammer, because you’ll you’ll break your tile, but take some metal and tap on the tiles. And yeah, see if you can hear a hollow sound, right? If you’re hollow sound, it’s not adhering to the floor anymore, or that portion of four o’clock. Practice that a little bit. So then you really got to start wondering how much do I want to put into this house? Or do I want to buy this house? Or you
18:46
do actually do want? Yeah, do you want to buy it? And I know a lot of people are buying houses, or having buying houses without even having inspections, which we do not recommend? I don’t recommend that. Because yeah, you can get yourself into some pretty, pretty bad situation. Yeah.
18:59
Now, the one other thing that talks about is water under a house. We get a lot of people that say I’ve got water into my house. Yeah. And I say, Well, do you have problems with that? Well, there’s water in my house. I still have water under my house. What do you do? I don’t look. I mean, I know there’s mold issues and that those kinds of things. But if that’s that’s not a concern, water is not going to deteriorate your concrete foundation. Matter of fact, water. Concrete likes water. Yeah, we have concrete structures that are in the water all the time. Yeah. Think of a dam. Right. But it’s also another very costly thing to fix. Yeah, moisture intrusion coming through your slab. It’s it’s slabs can’t be lifted that easily. We do it. We do it. Yeah. And then but it’s not cheap. Now. It’s not in the state. No, no, especially up here because we don’t have that, that. That level of expertise. They come up from the Bay Area or they come up from the valley and they have a mobilization and D mobiles. charge of 10 grand just to open set or quit?
20:03
Yeah, it’s not the South. I mean, it’s I’ve watched videos of people working in South and I’ve had some contractor friends that live in the south and work in the South. Yeah. And that’s just something they do all the time, they will tunnel underneath the foundation underneath the slab and then tunnel spaces and lift the slab up to bring it up and people crawling around. Yeah, yeah. Totally different. Totally different ballgame. So what are some of the things people should be looking for in terms of buying a home and being aware of where the potential expansion? soil?
20:36
Yeah, that that covers the the, the ones that are easily discernible that you can just take a look at? And then look at look at the, the garage door, there’s a good one. Oh, yeah, we’re mentioning you close the garage door. And look at how the seal on the bottom of garage doors sits across the slab? Yeah. And if the if the seal has a gap on both sides of the garage door, the frame, but no gap in the middle, right? So it’s kind of crowning in the center. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So that’s, that’s, there’s a good chance there that that is an expensive soil problem. Yeah.
21:15
And that’s again, one of those things I’ve seen see that all the time.
21:20
So what happens is that parts of the year, the soil will heave, right, and then it shrinks. But once the moisture gets into the center of the slab doesn’t dry out, so it stays high, and the rest of it drops, right. And then as that cycle happens on and on and on again, it can drop more and more and more, right. And so, so look at the look of the garage door, look at the crotch slab because everything else probably has carpet or hardwood floors. Yeah. And see if it’s cracked. Yeah, some cracks are are just common. They’re there. They just didn’t put enough expansion joints, fancy joints, control joints. And yeah, and others are the pattern. If it’s it’s
21:57
pretty common with older, older slabs. They didn’t really quite understand how many expansion joints they had to put Exactly. Or they don’t understand the dynamics of how concrete actually works. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, the house I grew up in in San Francisco was built in the turn of the century. And they used native sand for the for the foundation. And yeah, I mean, it was just falling apart. Yeah, for sure. My mom’s sold it before she ever had to deal with that. Because again, I’m sure that was a quarter million dollar, John. Yeah.
22:28
So another thing to do is a lot of people, when they get ready to sell a house, it’ll freshen up the paint, they’ll seal their cracks. So if you take a flashlight and hold it at a low angle in the corners of windows and doors, normally, you can see if there’s been a repair made. Yeah,
22:47
so you’re looking for kind of a shadow that’s being cast from the shot from a high spot in the drywall, essentially, exactly, or a low spot in the drywall. Exactly. And you can kind of see where somebody’s patched it. And I’ve had a couple of those, but my house was built. Well, the original house was built in the 30s. And then other subsequent additions were done over the course of the last 100 years or whatever, 90 years. So yeah, we got a lot of those but the those you can kind of see from the foundation to that that there was an expanding it wasn’t missed the house was multiple editions. It wasn’t necessarily anything settling. So but that is something you want to look for. For sure. Yeah. So that’s our show. We did it. Yay. You did it. Good. We got through this. All you 12 Willis years, you got to listen to the two of us banter about engineering. So check what would be if they do want to get a hold of you what would be a good or get a hold of your company? Would it be a good contact for you to for them to reach you?
23:45
They can restart our company was bought by a firm called envy five and as a Nancy V as in Victor five, the number five, and we’re on serials Avenue. Phone number. Yeah. 530-478-1305 you wanna give it again, just in case somebody didn’t get it? Yeah. 530-478-1305.
24:06
Great. And then if you need any plumbing, electrical heating or air work done, where you guys, we can help you. Our phone number is 530230909 to the number again 25302309092. You can find us on the web at easy as abc.com You can find us on facebook, please like our page. And with that, we’ll catch you guys next week. Thanks for listening. Bye.
24:26
Thanks, Andrew. Thanks, Rosalie. Now let’s get that project started. You got this. We’ll be back next Friday morning at nine o’clock on TNT on Newstalk 830