It’s a massive hole/well that was about a meter under the concrete footing. The owner had no idea this was here. Must have been there for decades.

This was taken during one of our structural inspections in North Hollywood. It’s gonna take a little more than duct tape to fix this one.

YES, this is a real skull & YES it was called in to the police and YES it was confirmed by a detective coroner. While doing a real estate inspection in the valley, one of our assessors came across the above skull. It was said to be found in Peru by the previous owners. Apparently, they brought it back in their luggage when returning from their vacation in Peru. Why they would do this is beyond me. This was later confirmed by the sellers of the property that it was in fact brought back over to the states from Peru. The skull, which was studied by the coroner, was roughly 1,000 years old. This is by far one of the craziest things we’ve seen doing foundation inspections in Los Angeles.

This one is subtle but the property is shifting like crazy! The back wall is bowing quite a bit and in the top right, where the stilts connect to the overhang, you can see the waviness of the connections and how unstable it really is.

A car jack perhaps?

A colony of bees/hornets/wasps, have created a honeycombed nest on the carcass of a dead animal.

And there goes the other half of your house.

It may seem as if this is a photo was taken at an angle, but I assure you, it was perfectly straight. The floors are just sloping down a good 6 inches from the middle of the home.

And they were wondering why their floors were sagging.

This is an abandoned home in East Los Angeles.

Yeah…that’s not legal.

We did this inspection of a house with a “broken slab” in the garage. Our assessor arrived thinking it would be a cracked slab or maybe some chipping and settling. Well…The sub floor completely collapsed and the result was a bit more extensive than we thought.

During an inspection in Los Angeles, we came across this brittle, failing foundation made of brick. The mortar simply fell right off of the brick in a dust waterfall. An earthquake would more than likely demolish this home.

hmm...

The issue is….all of it

A few more inches down and that would have made a nice half-pipe for skateboarding. Image below shows the cause of this dip!

This may look like a cool, industrial ceiling pattern in a DTLA villa, but it’s actually water intrusion coming through the cracks above.

This was a very interesting hillside home that was sliding down the hill. They needed an engineered wall to keep the house from cracking down the slope.

This is a ridiculous spalling issue. It’s as if they threw in small pieces of re-bar while the concrete was hardening.

This is a beam. A DIY glulam beam. A glulam beam is laminated peace of wood made up of other layers that are glued together. There’s 8 different pieces of lumber all glued together here. Not very stable and definitely not safe.

This is actually the door leading to Narnia. It just so happens that it’s under a house in Pasadena, CA. Seriously though, they used this as a sort of “shear wall” for additional strength. Again, an obvious DIY job.