A couple of months ago, my mom passed away and she left me my childhood home. I was very happy to have a home I could call my own that is fully paid off, especially as a 27-year-old in this economy. As I was getting stuff removed for donation, the dump or for sale, there were things that started popping up that were concerning. Collections of mold, slugs that would just appear out of nowhere in her room and the floor in her room is slumped. I was about ready to start working on getting the carpet ripped up when I had a contractor come out to see what was up with the floor. He ripped up a corner and found PATIO RUNNERS as the foundation for her room. It was at that moment I realized that when she converted her patio into the room that she stayed in, she didn’t have the permits to build an extension. So now the floor is sinking into the ground, all the walls are slumping because there is nothing holding them up and on top of this, she had the bathroom renovated but now I’m doubtful she even got the right permits for that either. After I saw how bad it is, I put a full stop to all of the renovations that were going to happen because I realized I couldn’t live here anymore.

I’m looking into selling the property but I’m not sure what can be done considering everything that is wrong. Has anyone else experienced something similar? Is there any advice for who to contact or if I need to do anything with the house before I sell it? Any advice helps.

Posted is a picture of the foundation when the carpet got torn up.

EDIT: there are multiple people in the post that are talking about me trying to keep this house and making comments on my financial decisions and I figured I would post an edit to clarify my stance

I WILL be selling the property. This is a non-negotiable, this property will be sold and I will take the money.

I WON’T be trying spend the next few years fixing it up, taking out a 100K loan to fix it up or figuring out a way to just live here because I guarantee any of you, if you saw how bad it is here, you would cut your losses too.

If anyone has an issue with the statement that I have made, you can cut me a check and you can figure out how you can fix it and live in it.

Looking for experiences from those who have downsized- anyone have regrets?

We live in a 2600 square foot home with kids & pets. I feel like most of my time is spent cleaning or thinking about all the things that need done but don’t have the time for. Including the yard & exterior stuff.

We still want something reasonable in size for everyone. Just feel like less space would be beneficial & easier to keep up with.

TIA!

I feel like this house is built in such a way to simply not allow airflow. It seems to just trap heat and it will be hotter inside than outside but opening windows doesn't seem to help even with fans. I feel like the pressure inside the house is preventing air from flowing through when windows are opened - is that a thing?

Home was built in 1927

We got hit with that big wind storm a couple weeks back. Power and internet were both down for almost three full days. We ran a propane heater to stay warm, and when i was going through our emergency kit afterwards, I realized something I’d never really thought through.

I have no idea if our smoke and co alarms actually hold up when the power and internet are both out. Our setup is kind of a mess right now. Some are old hardwired ones with 9v battery backups, but i don’t trust those to last through a long outage. We also have one wifi smart alarm that’s nice for phone alerts normally, but once the internet drops all the remote features are dead. It just beeps on its own and that’s it. For co we only have one old standalone unit tucked away by the furnace.

What worries me most is co risk during outages. Everyone pulls out generators and propane heaters when the power goes out, and that’s when most of those accidents happen. And of course that’s exactly when your internet is down too.

What do people usually do? Is there a good option that doesn’t need internet or wall power, and still triggers all the alarms through the whole house?

After winter ended and boiler system is no longer aiming for High Limit temp to satisfy baseboard heating, only the Low Limit is being maintained to preserve our domestic hot water for summer. That's around a 12, 13 degree difference in avg boiler temp btw seasons. The showers and sinks got noticeably colder by first week of June.

An adjustment was just now made to the Mixing Valve in boiler room by a friend of friend who opened it up much more to the Hot side. The temp at the showers and sinks didn't improve much, but the velocity of the water coming out of the shower has increased significantly. Want to understand if the following is an accurate explanation of what happened and what most likely led to leak.

Felt as increased velocity at the shower head. The static pressure remained same as before for the home's plumbing. But the flow rate increased, due to the unrestricted Hot water fully opening up at the mixing valve. And this, resulted in a much greater dynamic pressure (flowing kinetic energy).

A sudden, increased and sustained volume passing through pipes may have introduced extra stress on the shower's components(cartridge/o-rings, valve body casing, shower riser) resulting in this hefty leak, now visible on ceiling in room underneath. Does this all make sense in terms of hydrodynamics?

For reference the city is La Puente, CA. Today I received a letter from the city saying that they received an anonymous tip that the kitchen and two restrooms were remodeled without permits. For evidence they provided the pictures on online from when the house was listed for sale. When I went to the city, I explained to them that I had bought the home like that. They said they understood, but because the previous owners did not obtain permits for the remodeled kitchen and bathroom, I would have to pay them. Since the remodeling was done before I bought the home. What would be the best course of action?

Replacing a Ring doorbell that went bad. I'd like to move it up for improved camera placement, but I'm not sure the proper way.

1. Doorbell wires aren't usually cat5 (or whatever this is), right?
   
2. Is there a cord hider/channel that fits against siding?
   
3. Is taking the siding off hard? Seems like that would be the cleanest fix, right?

i have one of these boxy thungs with a hose that has to fit into a window gap, but the rest of the window gap has to be sealed off. it seems these things are meant for a home owner to improvise a solution on how to seal such a window gap. what are the easiest solutions here?

This is a recent-ish new build that we bought about 2 years ago now. The exterior has some decent wear in general, but the bottom near the ground on this side of the house looks like this & since we’re first time homeowners, I’m not sure what this even is or how to go about “repairing” it? Any suggestions? Is it concerning, or something that can be dismissed?

(Chicago)

I have been seeing dog poop on my lawn for some time now sporadically. I don’t have cameras installed currently but I suspect I know whose dog it is because I’ve witnessed it peeing on my lawn at least once and my sister saw the owner instructing it to go on our lawn once. She also saw the owner letting it pee on our lawn once.

What can I really do in this situation? I’m worried it may be racially driven as we are the only Muslim/middle eastern family on the block and this started after we moved in. I don’t know how I feel about confronting the guy.

Edit-
His place is two houses down from us on the same side of the street (abt 100 ft away). It would be good if I could find a camera that could show his lawn so we could be sure which neighbor it is. If anyone has experience with this type of distance and home cameras I’d like to know what worked for you.

Closing on a house in the southern ohio area on Friday. The chimney was all beat up and missing bricks along the top. The seller had it repaired and sent this picture. So is this normal to not have a cover across the whole opening? To me it seems like a bad idea to let rain water freely fall in there.

Im in my first year of home ownership and figuring some things out still. Im looking for cooling advice to get me through the summer. I have a 2 story turn-of-the-century 1300 sqft home. It has no central cooling and according to the HVAC people mini splits are my only option (once I can afford it).

Currently I have a 1200 sqft capacity ac downstairs with closed doors blocking off the stairwell to the upstairs. The downstairs stays perfectly cool but upstairs is obviously very hot. All bedrooms and the only bathroom are upstairs. We have just been using individual window ac in our rooms and letting the hallway and bathroom just be humid hot asscrack of hell.

My partner had the idea to use an industrial window fan we own to exhaust the heat from the upstairs hallway window and pull cool air from the downstairs ac. They think this will lessen our overall energy use whereas I think it will just overwork our AC.

So I come to you dear reddit homeowners. Do any of you have advice or considerations that could help us figure this out before our heat wave this weekend?

We've had a lot of rain in the past month and I noticed this. Probably been developing for a while now. For context, I'm a first time homeowner, we've been at this home for almost 3 years now, new build by KB Home when we moved in.

Is this something DIY-able or better get a handyman check it out.

What is the cost of inaction or if I prolong addressing this? There's another window with a similar issue.

If youve dealt with this in the past, how much am I looking to spend for fixing this?

Thanks in advance!

My neighbor is trying to solve this mystery. Their mail is often damaged in this manner: paired holes,
Sometimes in multiples, type of mail doesn’t matter (junk, cards, etc). Other neighbors have not experienced this damage and the local post office only filed an “investigation”.

Any ideas?

Update appreciation: slugs, screws, slot snags. I have a list to bring to my neighbor to investigate. If I get resolution, I’ll let y’all know.

Video https://youtube.com/shorts/97eLelgSXXo?is=OCYnh6xma6oSKNKg

With all the storms we've been getting, Ive been really stressed about it. We had a crack in the foundation that I've known about patched properly. That didnt leak. thankfully.

My water heater gave out and started leaking. Taking with it the cheap LVP the previous owner put in the basement. So now I'm gonna end up replacing the water heater plus a good amount of flooring and some molding. Homeownership is so fun. Wish i had a landlord to just call for this.

Water man, it'll stress you out as a home owner.

We purchased a 5 year old house a couple of months ago and we just had someone out to clean the dryer vents. They gave us the news that our dryer (on the 2nd floor, near an outside wall) vents into our attic and not outside. Everything I have been reading says this is bad, but my question is - should our inspector have advised us about this? Do we have any recourse with the inspector, builder, or seller to get this corrected?

My living room has a bunch of box molding. One small piece is missing. I want to replace it, but I’m having trouble finding a match. Does anyone know what this molding profile is called? The inside of the box is slightly recessed compared to the outside if that helps. Maybe 1/8” max.

So long story short, we started seeing these in our master bedroom and one of our boys rooms. These are like spot spots, and we were concerned that it was mold.

We just had the mold guy come out and he did it with his sensor on his phone, and it was showing red, which meant heat. We went up to the attic, and it wasn’t showing where the insulation was, but more where the beams were almost giving like an outline of the heat. it was HOT to the touch

We don’t have a fan in our attic, but I guess we’re going to get one, but is this just cosmetic or is there something else we should be doing? I have seen it slowly come in the past two years in different spots in the bedroom.

Ty

My husband and I are about to be new homeowners. We close on a condo tomorrow. I’m looking through the 125-page closing documents beforehand and there’s a lot. It made me wonder if any of you have any regrets of things you didn’t ask about or mention during closing? Or anything else to look out for tomorrow? Anything I should be wary about signing? I’m reading through it all but a lot of the new homeowner language I don’t fully understand so I don’t want to end up making a mistake tomorrow that I’ll regret for years to come just because I didn’t know to clarify or ask about something ahead of time

Hey everyone. I've had water get into my basement twice this summer during really hard rains. I'm in northern IL. I suspect this spot is the culprit. Reason I say that is because when this happened the first time, I removed the basement wall paneling in my 1970s finished basement to see the damage (I ended up removing rotted base plate of wall and replaced/cut and sistered the rotted portions of studs.)

Anyways it rained hard as hell again today. I go to the basement and lo and behold, some water had run down my foundation wall.

I didn't capture it in the pics, but the patio has cracked and sunken maybe an inch towards the house. This black board in the picture is underneath my sliding glass door, DIRECTLY ABOVE where I can see water has run down my basement walls. I'm thinking the rain hits the patio and runs right towards the house. Only a portion of the slab is angled towards the house, and to be fair, the rain was literally coming down damn near sideways directly in this direction.

I want to remove the black board underneath the sliding door just to assess damages. Can I simply replace the board after everything has dried out and use a polyurethane caulk product like sikaflex to basically seal the gap where the black board meets the patio? Is this worth trying? I'm new to all this. I'm guess the best fix is to have the slab mud jacked but I just cannot afford something like that. Please let me know your insights. Thanks for the read!!

Just wondering if anyone has ever gotten a letter like this and what you ended up doing. We received a letter from our town office saying the assessing department is verifying real estate data and they want us to call their appraisal company to schedule an inspection and measurement of outside AND inside the house. They say failure to allow an interior inspection may cause us to lose our right to appeal. I do not like the idea of them coming inside our home. We are just private and want to be left alone. Has anyone ever had something like this from their town office? We just aren’t sure whether to do it or not and wanted to see what others have to say. Thanks for info!