Three Decades of Edmonton Foundations

Thirty years of working around foundations teaches you one thing above all others: most of what worries a homeowner is not the thing that matters. A hairline crack down a basement wall reads as a catastrophe to somebody seeing it for the first time. A slight bow in the same wall, which is the one worth talking about, often goes unnoticed for years.

Telling those apart takes time on the property. It means measuring the crack rather than looking at it, checking whether the floor above has moved, walking the grading outside to see where the water actually goes, and then looking at the doors and windows on the far side of the house to see whether they tell the same story. That's 45 to 90 minutes of work, and it is not something anybody can do from the driveway.

So I started FoundationInspection.ca to do exactly that, and to write it down properly. Every finding goes into a written report within 48 hours, with a photograph attached and a plain-language call on whether to monitor it, act on it, or take it to an engineer. No jargon, no severity scores out of ten.

I don't quote or carry out repair work on any property I inspect. The report is yours: take it to whichever contractor you like, use it in a negotiation, give it to your insurer or your lawyer, or file it away as a baseline to compare against in a few years' time.