Am I missing something here? It wouldn't cost $10k to throw some props in to keep things from collapsing while you pour back in the missing concrete. It looks unreinforced but even if you did the whole shebang with dowels and bonding agent I have trouble imagining this costing half that much.
All depends what you're doing, sealing a few cracks can cost a few hundred but the upper limit is hundreds of thousands to temporarily support the whole house and replacing the walls entirely.
The cost of materials on this job would be like a few hundred bucks, labor would at least double it but hard to estimate the "pain in the ass" multiplier for ticky tacky work in a yard to access spot.
I believe you are missing the insurance a license and bonded 'foundation repair' person needs to pay out to. Taking responsibility for a 400k home is not cheap.
They're not taking responsibility for the whole home, just the very narrow thing you hired them for. If they fill a hole for you and the next day and entirely different corner of the house collapses they're not responsible.
I'm a structural engineer and literally do this for a living.
I absolutely do not take responsibility for every square inch of a building every time I do a project in an existing building. No engineer does. Exactly what we did and didn't do will be front and center in the contract you sign and the report or drawings we deliver. The entire construction industry would grind to a halt if every time I walked into a building with a hard hat I had to inspect and test everything and sign off on it all being perfect or find every flaw. If I see anything clearly problematic I'll write you a nice cleae letter urging you to have it looked at by any engineer (not necessarily me, because I don't want you to think I'm drumming up business for myself and ignore a safety issue) and what you should do about it until then, in a form that will help that engineer get right to working on it, but that letter will also be clear that I was hired for a different task entirely and I'm only writing this out of concern after being onsite for that other reason.
But please, tell me more about the importance of foundations or how projects in part of a building work.
It's just the stem wall above the foundation footing. Some people have houses sitting on a couple of besa bricks for 20 years. A new pour of wall is going to be more than adequate, and it's only a small section anyway; make it thicker if concerned.
For 3k more I can post-inspection check it, and for 1k more I can do the final priming, and 500$ more gets you a SwLur certificate of the work done. Don't half ass it.
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u/buddhistredneck 5d ago
$10,000+ for the engineer and the foundation re-work.
$2000+ for the plumbing rework
Complete ballpark estimate