It’s funny, foundation and drainage was the very top of the list of what I avoided because those issues are very expensive to remedy and will slowly destroy your home. Oh and roof issues, too.

Drainage is especially difficult to fix if the topography is to blame. You can’t move your home out of a low spot or off a floodplain.

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bombcar 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Drainage is super annoying, but noticeable actual foundation problems are more solvable than people realize. Some real bargains can be found there (save $100-200k on a house needing an $80k repair).

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Waterluvian 8 hours ago | parent [-]

There's deals to be had anywhere that a problem looks or is big, for sure. But I'm wondering what kinds of problems a home might have that are harder to deal with than a failing foundation. I guess major mold issues? Someone else discovering and claiming mineral rights under your dwelling?

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bob1029 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

A foundation issue might seem totally beyond reach for someone who has never owned a home before, but it's still a lot less painful than living in a bad location. Once you spend some time learning how the foundation systems work, it gets a lot less scary. There is a solution for everything.

Pier and beam foundation issues are essentially a non-event in my view. If you can literally crawl underneath your house and touch everything, it's basically like cheating.

With slab-on-grade things get more challenging, but installing piers on the perimeter and fixing internal slabs is not really a crisis situation. Concrete work has a huge advantage at repair time in that it can be polyjacked. This is easily the least intrusive form of concrete repair that is available. You can raise a slab of arbitrary weight in 15 minutes with a half inch hole. This repair technique will last ~indefinitely if you also have a tough talk with your landscapers about getting water away from the house.

	▲	Waterluvian 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> If you can literally crawl underneath your house and touch everything, it's basically like cheating. Maybe this is part of it. Where I live, the crawlspace under my home is a fully finished basement with my office and such. But the more these comments get me thinking, the more I recognize that it’s more subjective than not. I weighted for problems I could tackle slowly over five years, many of them myself, because I worked from home and had two kids under 2. So the home is on a hill with a sump pump that’s dryer than the desert, a solid foundation and new roof, and a few dozen smaller issues like flooring, new carpet, replace lower deck with patio, etc.

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bombcar 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Foundation has a limit - the cost to raise the house as if moving, removing the whole foundation, and building a new one.

Other structural issues can be much worse (mold is one, but think cross beams that miss the load beam).