As a former real estate agent several decades ago, and a property investor/flipper, and now as a property consultant/home inspector, I’ve had the opportunity to see the best and worst of renovation and remodeling. My own definition of the two is that remodeling is small scale and involves only select rooms. Renovation gets much more extensive.

I’m sure we’ve all remodeled a kitchen or bathroom. But how many of us have remodeled every room in the house, and replaced every appliance in the house, and replaced the roof, repaired the foundation, redone the exterior walls, renovated the fireplace and chimney, installed new doors and windows, etc.? That’s renovation. Regardless of whether or not you’re remodeling a room or renovating the structure, I have just one suggestion:

• Start with the foundation.

If you follow that suggestion, 99% of the time your remodeling and renovation will hold up. On the other hand, if you remodel a room but don’t address any foundation problems, it’s highly likely that you’ll get cracks in the walls, ceilings, and the beautiful tile floor you just installed.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in renovated homes over in Bankers Hill, Mission Hills, and Kensington where the beautiful remodeling and renovation was done “just last year” but is already full of cracks again. When I crawl under the house, well, it’s no wonder. Sometimes I wonder what is holding the house up.

Here are some interesting foundation work in homes that I’ve inspected. All of them were in homes that had been renovated or the owners consulted me about how to upgrade their foundations so that they wouldn’t have problems with their renovation and remodeling.

The following picture shows foundation renovation. I have not been able to find the design specifications for bent nails, perhaps because there are none.

In the following picture, you can see the brand new concrete piers that have been installed, but all the soil around the footings is gone!

Unfortunately, the tile floor, installed just a few months ago, had cracks everywhere. The owners were considering suing the floor installation people, but I believe I talked them out of it. It took a couple of months working on this problem to determine where all that soil went, but ultimately we did. Turns out that a few years previous, the city had come in and poured a new street drainage culvert to the side of this house. However, no one went out during our short rainy season to determine if the culvert was functioning properly. It wasn’t. Every time it rained, the water was running through this foundation, right to left, and carrying all the soil away. It took a couple of years to re-work the foundation and replace the tile floors, mainly because of the expense involved.

In the following renovation, a large eucalyptus tree had been removed from near the house foundation.

Hey, why not use that large tree trunk to help support the foundation? This is another instance where I could not find any structural engineering specifications for the tree trunk.

In the following picture, just a small corner of the house was sagging, so some good river rock was supposed to solve the problem.

As you can see, that front one isn’t supporting anything. This type of interesting fix could prevent the corner from sagging further, but it doesn’t address the sagging that has already occurred.

Finally, I find the following type of damage way more often that one might expect.

Usually it is caused by plumbers, but in this one, the heating and cooling company that was hired to remove the old floor heater and put in nice central heating and cooling found that the darn old foundation wall was in the way, so they just blasted through it.

Even if you recognize the fact that the foundation needs to be addressed before doing any other remodeling or renovation, once the foundation repairs have been done, have a or home inspector check up on those repairs. The good eyes of a third party can help protect your investment before the company’s warranty on their work expires.

There’s more to being a home inspector than just doing home inspections for buyers and pre-listing inspections for sellers.