The problem is, I've been convinced for a year that my house is going to fall down. Okay, so maybe it's not going to fall down, but I think there's something terribly wrong with it. I waffle back and forth between being paralyzed with fear, and choosing to ignore it entirely and hope it wil fix itself. Neither being a very effective way to deal with these sorts of things.
What is my problem? Things like this.
Looks benign, you say? Read on. This started about a year ago. When it first happened, I didn't think anything of it. I don't know how permanent or long-lasing caulking is supposed to be, but it's always been my experience that no matter how well a tub is caulked, in a few years, the caulking will need replaced. No big deal. So when this first happened, last January, I thought it was just that time.
We recaulked. A few days later it looked like this again. We did it again. It did it again. We had someone else come in and completely recaulk the entire tub. It did it again. We fought with it all through the late winter and spring, until sometime in warmer weather, when the caulk finally stayed.
Till now.
I was doing okay until someone told me that it probably meant I had a crack in my slab which had caused the slab - the very foundation of my house - to shift, dropping one end of the tub just enough to leave this big gap, in which caulking would not stay - it was just too wide a gap for it to adhere and stay in place. (You can't tell in the picture, but that gap between the tub and the tile above it is about 3/4" wide.)
If that was the only problem, I might have better luck ignoring it. But there's this.
These are the bathroom door (inside, and out in the hallway), the bedroom door which is in the same hallway mere feet from the bathroom doorway, and a vent in the wall to the furnace room, also in the same hallway and a couple feet from the bathroom door.
And that's not all the little cracks congregating around this area of my home. Those are just the most photogenic. For the record, some of them have been there ever since I bought the place 13 years ago, which might indicate something that certainly isn't happening very quickly. But most of them have also gotten significantly worse in the last year. That one in the bathroom, the first picture, was only about 3" long for 10 years or more, then in the last year it shot up towards the ceiling and became it's current monstrous size.
In some panicked research online, I discovered that these door-corner cracks are all signs of foundation problems. Ironically, no one ever mentions your bathtub sinking into the floor being a sign of anything. Maybe it's too horrible to even talk about.
The good (??) news is, maybe, that this is the only area of the entire house that has such a problem. There aren't any cracks, gaps, or other disturbing phenomena any place else. Which, on the up side, is a good thing; and on the down side, leads me more and more to think there's something definitely wrong with this area of the house, or the foundation, or something. It's tempting to think if it limits itself to the bathroom and hallway, I can ignore it ... but unfortunately, it's one of those laws of physics that these things tend to spread
I don't know what to do about this, primarily because I'm terrified of what might need done to fix it. Will they have to rip up my floors and tear out walls to get to the slab? Where am I going to live while they're doing all this?
And more frightening, how much is all this going to cost?
No - saying I don't know what to do is not true. I know what I need to do, have someone come out and look at it, so I know one way or the other, and can quit waffling between pretending it's not happening at all, and imagining the very worst. But I just haven't worked up the courage to do it yet.
Ironically, every single person I've talked to about this has told me the same thing: "Ignore it." Funny that that's what I'd prefer to do, and what I did for a year, but I'm having a hard time accepting that it's really okay to do that, and I'm not just being an ostrich, while my house is collapsing around me.
Granted, none of these people are contractors or structural engineers (well, one of them might be some type of engineer), nor have any of them seen any of this, only heard me describe it. But all of them have said, fuhgettabout it. It's nothing. Normal wear and tear. You're worrying over nothing. And even if it is the slab, your house isn't going to fall down. So just ignore it. If it ever even needs fixed, it might not be for 30 more years or more.
Sure. Okay.
I'd really like to forget about it. I'd truly love to. But although I haven't done anything about it yet, I'm having a hard time truly ignoring it and forgetting about it.
If the house falls on me, does that mean I'm a bad witch?
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