Lost & Found-ation
Oct/28/07 11:09 PM
Randy
Johnson of Johnson Brothers foundation
specialists showed up today. And after having
spoken to him on the phone, I knew this guy
meant business. When, we spoke on the phone, he
said, “Lemme guess, it has a crawl space with
some standing room in parts of it and it’s got
too few girders sitting on top of rock and
mortar piers that have no footings and joists
that are rolling in the direction of the slope.”
I told him that if he’d said “cobwebs
everywhere” he would have hit the nail right on
the head.
When Randy showed up, 5 guys jumped out of the truck and took to measuring, drawing, and a whole lot of shouting in between. As soon as they’d walked through the door, they were pointing things out, that I wouldn’t have noticed if I’d lived in that house since it was built. Anyway, once Randy and the boys finished measuring and drawing and filling my ear full of country-boy common sense, they proceeded to the basement. The first ten minutes were spent criticizing how some jack-ass had tried to jerry-rig it all and fix it, that in my mind was the equivalent of using duct-tape to patch the Hover Dam. Well, at the end of the inspection, Randy told me that he’d be calling me with an estimate. He said that it wasn’t going to be cheap, that I shouldn’t expect a few thousand dollars, he was talking 10’s of thousands. That familiar lump in my throat returned.