Home sweet... oh, never mind.
The back story:
A long time ago, same galaxy, the beloved and I bought land. However, when we moved from the city we didn't have enough saved up to build and no bank was going to give us a building loan (this is not a theoretical statement). Fortunately, although not for her, the elderly woman who lived in the house on the property next to ours had just gone into a nursing home so we arranged to rent her house while we saved.
A little less than a year later, she died and we decided we didn't want to pack the books. Her heirs asked for X+45 thousand dollars for the house and the land. We'd been living in the house for a year so we wrote up a two page list of why it wasn't worth X+45 thousand and got it for X.
Now, one of the points on that two page list was that the crawlspace was always damp. Usually wet. When we first moved in it was full because the sump pump had rusted and died. Seriously, we opened the crawlspace door and water lapped against the edge - right under the two regular baseboard heaters running full blast, hot enough they could be felt through the floor above them. (This was not the only instance of "if this house wasn't so wet it would have burned down".)(the electrician had an extended riff on it when he kept finding wires cobbled together in random junction boxes)
In retrospect, burning down would have been a good thing. So would have hiring a house inspector but this was years and years (and years) before Holmes on Holmes so, who knew?
The crawlspace could not be dried out because:
1.The water table is at 21 inches below grade.
2.The crawlspace is at 23 inches below grade on bedrock.
3.You can't put drainage tiles around the crawlspace because of the bedrock.
4.The sump hole is about three inches deep and can't be made deeper because of the bedrock.
5.The concrete for the foundation was mixed 1/7 concrete/aggregate instead of 1/5 thus it has all the water repellent capabilities of a sponge. When the water table is at its highest, our weight on the concrete floor of the crawlspace is enough to bring more water up through the floor. More water because when the water table is at its highest, there's enough water running through the crawlspace to raise trout. Which we've considered.
We tried to dry it out. Nothing worked, so we decided to treat the underside of the house like the underside of a dock. After all, we don't have kids so it only had to last another thirty years, forty tops. It's a house, fcol, they last longer than that. Uh... well...
The Problem:
Because of the damp, the laundry room needed to be gutted to studs. New floor joists, new flooring, new insulation (okay, the new insulation wasn't because of the damp but because the insulation in 2 by 4 studs sucks). The contractor got the floor up and... paused. And showed us that the water had seeped up through the foundation and into the wall and we had the kind of dry rot that turned lumber into compost. And had, in fact, turned lumber into compost.
You know what grows on compost? Well, cold compost not the well regulated kind which is too hot to for anything to actually grow on it. (sorry, gardening digression)
Mold. Black mold. Texas tea... (sorry, Beverly Hillbillies digression) We have black mold in the walls, in the subfloors, in the ceiling. Black mold can't be removed.
"I can make your laundry room usable," the contractor said. "I can keep doing the jobs that'll keep the house up, but at the end of it, you won't have a house you can sell because you can't sell a house with black mold in it. Oh, and, fyi, you shouldn't be living in it either."
I'm paraphrasing a bit. He was a little more... terrified we were going to yell at him.
The Solution:
So when I said yesterday we had to rebuild the house, I meant from the ground up.
We'll keep the 500 square foot addition (no crawlspace, no damp, no mould) and build onto it. Then we'll move everything from the main house into the new larger addition, demolish the main house, and rebuild what's actually a smaller addition on the addition before moving back into that. Additionally, we'll need one heck of a lot of fill. Actually, I just wanted to say additionally there.
The time frame depends on the bank because we still don't tick the bank's ticky boxes. Fortunately, the local loans officer considers us a challenge. Unfortunately, he doesn't have the final word.
I work at home. I'll be working at home during the build, demolish, rebuild, oh and the installation of a new septic system so there'll be about 72 hours with no working toilet. (The septic has nothing to do with the crawlspace, it's just that it was put in by the same dumbasses who built the house and, since the new bathroom will be about fifteen feet further south, it seemed like it was time. You know what they say: in for a penny in for one whole f*ck of a lot of pennies.)
This should be fun. I'll keep you posted.
ETA: Trust me guys, we considered EVERY option before making a decision. This is the ONLY one that works with the animals, the county, our well, and our budget.