The Original House

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that our old house was totally shabby.  Built in the 1950’s, it was a typical home you would find on the San Francisco Peninsula.  1,400 square foot living space, 1,700 sq ft if you count the garage.  Our home was a bi-level home with the sleeping quarters built entirely on the garage.  The living quarters were all on the first floor in a separate wing.  The interior was definitely in need of some modernization.  Our kitchen for example, still had the original GE electric range that the house probably came with.

The Foundation

What’s the first, second and third rule of real estate?  Location!  Location!!  Location!!!  I purchased the house back in 2000 during the Internet boom.  During this time houses were on the market for less than 2 weeks on average.  Sellers would receive multiple bids and the winning bid was often way above the asking price - as in 6 figures over!  The main reason why I chose the house was because of the view.  We’re up in the hills and we have a decent view of SF Bay and of Devonshire Canyon.  Furthermore, we’re on a very private lot that is close to a quarter of an acre.  Had I known what I know now about structural framing and foundations, I would have probably never had picked this house, but thank God for ignorance.  The catch to the house? - the foundation had a crack in it.

Cut and Fill

Our home was built “into” the hillside.  What I mean specifically is, the builders cut into a relatively flat section of a hill and established a larger footprint of level ground to build a foundation by taking the dirt they displaced and filled it down the side of the hill.  This practice was done all the time back then, the problem was - they didn’t compact the earth before laying the perimeter foundation, so the fill was relatively soft compared to the bedrock that had cut into in the side of the hill.

Our home’s foundation was on a fulcrum point where bedrock met soft fill and at the point was where the crack occurred.  Foundations are extremely expensive to repair.

So in short, rather than just spend the money on repairing a foundation we though it only made sense to expand it while we were going through the hassle of having to deal with repairing it and remodel our house at the same time.  Another key driver for why we decided to remodel was space.  My wife and I wanted to start a family in the coming year and knew we would need more area for the our children to grow up.

I’ll be posting a follow on diagraming the problem with our foundation… stay tuned!