Home Health Checklist – Florida Property Guide

Assess Your Home’s Structural Health

The first thing you’ll want to do is assess your home’s structural supports. These include support beams in your crawl space and your foundation. If you don’t make an effort to protect these areas, including your walls and joints, they can quickly fall victim to hydrostatic pressure and unstable soil. If gone unnoticed for too long, the damage endured may rapidly become irreversible. Not only can this reduce your quality of life, but it also could decrease the value of your home by up to 30 percent.

Thankfully, your home will readily communicate structural support failure when something goes wrong. Some of the signs you’ll want to keep an eye out for when inspecting your foundation and supports include:

• Popped nails
• Wall and floor gaps
• Uneven floors
• Vertical, horizontal, diagonal, or stair-step cracks in your drywall or concrete
• Sticking doors

Don’t forget to take your inspection outside. Signs of structural damage can often be found in your exterior foundation. Here, be sure to look for various cracks alongside your home and foundation. You’ll also want to measure your foundation against your landscaping just in case it starts to sink.

Look Over Your Crawl Space

Despite their smaller size, crawl spaces hold significant sway over the health of a home. If you skip waterproofing measures for your crawl space, it can quickly become an incubator for mold. Mold acts fast, sometimes within 48 hours of a leak springing, and can cause respiratory problems for you and your family living in the home.

The most obvious signs of crawl space damage include:

If your crawl space has endured damage, you’ll notice significant changes in your utility bills. The reason for this is because your HVAC system tries to contend with the extra moisture coming from your crawl space and cannot keep the temperature regulated. Similarly, that same moisture can cause your pipes to leak and you to lose water pressure throughout your home, even as you use the same amount of water you used to.

Unlike homes in the northern part of the United States, most houses in Florida lack basements to fall victim to hydrostatic pressure. Luckily, homeowners in Orlando can focus strictly on waterproofing their crawl spaces. The good news is you don’t have to worry about a basement area to protect and waterproof. However, this means you’ll need to take extra steps to protect your foundation and crawl space, or else the health of your home may fail past the means of repair.

Keep in mind that the same signs that indicate crawl space damage can also indicate larger problems with your foundation. If you are dealing with unexpected moisture, don’t hesitate to reach out to a professional contractor working in your area. From there, you can determine what the real source of moisture in your home is and avoid any irreparable damages.