What Mike Holmes Doesn’t Know About Foun­da­tion Struc­tur­al Problems.

Dec 22, 2016 • By Matthew Stock with Todd Bunge.

When smart peo­ple need foun­da­tion repair they know they should enlist an expert. When they think of experts, one name that would be at the top of their list would be Mike Holmes. He is inter­na­tion­al­ly known, high­ly-expe­ri­enced with res­i­den­tial build­ing and remod­el­ing and has been called ​“Canada’s most trust­ed con­trac­tor”. When it comes to Gen­er­al Con­trac­tors you’d be hard pressed to find one more qual­i­fied to work on hous­es than him.

But even with all his knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence, he still knows lit­tle about foun­da­tion struc­tur­al issues and here’s why. When Gen­er­al Con­tac­tors build new con­struc­tion, the foun­da­tions they build on are new. And when they do remod­el­ing projects, the changes they make are inside, out­side and on top of exist­ing foun­da­tions. But rarely do they do work to an exist­ing foun­da­tion. So they nev­er gain the expe­ri­ence and spe­cial­ized knowl­edge nec­es­sary to diag­nose and fix them correctly. 

Mike Holmes’ Lack Of Foun­da­tion Knowl­edge Is Down­right Dangerous

Here’s a per­fect exam­ple to illus­trate this statement.

Mike Holmes has used his exten­sive hands-on build­ing expe­ri­ence to edu­cate home­own­ers about house prob­lems for over three decades. He has cre­at­ed mul­ti­ple tele­vi­sion series, syn­di­cat­ed news­pa­per columns, best­selling books, DVDs, and mag­a­zines about homes. He has an unques­tion­able rep­u­ta­tion in the con­struc­tion indus­try for qual­i­ty, integri­ty and hon­esty. His ​“Make it Right” cre­do is inte­grat­ed into every one of his TV shows – Holmes on Homes, Holmes Inspec­tion, Holmes: Makes it Right and most recent­ly, Holmes: Buy It Right, a show where he does pre­sale inspec­tions on homes and advis­es peo­ple on the best one to purchase.

In the intro­duc­tion to this series, Holmes starts out each show with a sin­cere state­ment of his mission: 

I’m Mike Holmes. I’ve been a con­trac­tor for over 30 years… Buy­ing a home can be the All Amer­i­can Dream… or an absolute night­mare… You’re going to need all the infor­ma­tion about that home before you can buy… I’m mak­ing sure home buy­ers know all they can. We’re going to look for signs of any issues what­so­ev­er, so they can make the right choice… This is about buy­ing smart. This is Holmes – Buy it Right.

On one of his recent episodes, Mike Holmes was in Thorn­ton, Col­orado help­ing new­ly­weds Jen­nifer and Matt Mor­ris to make a buy­ing deci­sion for their first home. Dur­ing the show he inspect­ed three hous­es for the cou­ple and found rot­ted win­dow trim, a rot­ted door and a rot­ted deck. He also dis­cov­ered miss­ing roof flash­ing, insu­la­tion and HVAC prob­lems, a loose rail­ing, as well as elec­tri­cal and plumb­ing problems. 

One thing he missed at the third house was a seri­ous foun­da­tion prob­lem. He saw the symp­tom — a wide, stair-step sep­a­ra­tion in the bricks — but with­out foun­da­tion repair expe­ri­ence, Holmes failed to rec­og­nize it as an indi­ca­tion of sig­nif­i­cant foun­da­tion move­ment. Holmes wasn’t try­ing to gloss over the prob­lem. In fact, when he found out the house was being sold by a house flip­per he told the cou­ple he was going to scru­ti­nize it even clos­er. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, even though he’d been fix­ing hous­es for over thir­ty years, he lacked the spe­cif­ic foun­da­tion knowl­edge to help him real­ize he was look­ing at a seri­ous struc­tur­al issue. 

Holmes told the cou­ple fix­ing the crack was easy and only required a tube of cement caulk to fill the sep­a­ra­tion. Essen­tial­ly he was rec­om­mend­ing a band-aid for a bro­ken leg. Once he inspect­ed the rest of the house and made a list of nec­es­sary repairs, Holmes told them they’d need about $15,000 to repair all the items on his list. They were excit­ed because they liked it the best of the three hous­es even though it was $60,000 above their bud­get. The sad truth is, from our expe­ri­ence with foun­da­tion repair costs, those kinds of cracks in brick­work usu­al­ly mean a $35,000 to $50,000 repair because they’d need engi­neer­ing plans and a city per­mit, exca­vat­ing out­side, dis­as­sem­bling the remod­eled base­ment inside, sta­bi­liz­ing the foun­da­tion walls, remod­el­ing the base­ment again and restor­ing the land­scap­ing. Holmes’ exten­sive gen­er­al con­struc­tion knowl­edge fell short and caused him to unin­ten­tion­al­ly hurt the cou­ple he was try­ing to help.

Now if a high­ly-expe­ri­enced Gen­er­al Con­trac­tor like Mike Holmes can make this kind of over­sight, how much more of a mis­take is it for you to trust the repair of your home’s foun­da­tion to just a local Gen­er­al Con­trac­tor? U.S. Water­proof­ing and Con­struc­tion spe­cial­izes in foun­da­tions, is very famil­iar with all their prob­lems, and reli­able meth­ods to fix them. Your home is your largest invest­ment. Why not trust us to prop­er­ly diag­nose and repair your foun­da­tion issues so your All-Amer­i­can Dream doesn’t end up turn­ing into an absolute nightmare.

Tags: structural foundation damage, structural foundation repair, foundation damage, foundation cracks

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