House rant

So, I'm outside, doing some gardening and some clean-up of my thoroughly shabby lawn. As I'm tending to the flowerbed at the front of the lawn, I notice something. A bit of mortar missing from between some bricks. Oh look, there's a crack under the missing mortar. And look, that crack spreads down through the brick underneath it. Then through more mortar. Then another brick. Then it turns sharply to the right. Then into the foundation. Then underground...FUCK.

So I call in a foundation guy to assess the house. On my five-year old house that I've owned for two years, I have four cracks in the foundation. Those of you with houses know that having a crack in the foundation is no laughing matter, much less four. The good news, if there is any, is that three of the four cracks are considered low-grade, that is, that the possibility of enough water seeping into the house to cause damage is minimal. That leaves one crack where enough water could get in, causing water damage and mold infestation. You can imagine how I feel about a mold infestation in the house my soon to be 1 year old lives in.

I have these horrible images of my beautiful basement, which aside from the open concept kitchen, was my major contributing factor to buying this house, being gutted on a mold and water hunt.

The precise reason that I bought a newer house was to try to avoid the whole roofing/foundation problems as long as possible. The bill to fix the cracks will come out to about $3K, and I was told that there's a possibility I could recover some of the costs in court or through insurance, but it's not about the money. We have enough in our contingency fund to cover most of it, and I'll just have to reroute a couple of my extra mortgage payments to cover the rest. But that doesn't include the brick repair, or the air quality testing in the basement.

More important than the money is that I know that I'm going to be paranoid for the next few years about every creak that my house makes, every rainfall and every freeze/thaw cycle, and be on the lookout for more cracks, more possibilities of my home being ruined and my investment going down the drain. I'm guessing that it will take me a long time to get over that.