????

Every now and then I come across something that totally baffles me.  To the left is a picture of the basement subwall built in a foreclosure that I evaluated for a property management company.  On the other side of that lumber is – no, not a block wall, but dirt!  (“Soil” as we engineers prefer to say, “dirt” is what you track into the house after a day on the jobsite).

The house was built with a basement that used a treated lumber subwall to support it – which I have never seen, and is against Code also.  Treated lumber foundation walls are permissible, but only for crawl spaces up to 18″ high.  The framing is 2×6 treated pine at 16″ on-center, which is not sufficient structurally.   The plywood is treated, but there is no waterproofing on the outside, so water seeps right inside.  you can see the staining down near the bottom of the wall.  The basement stinks to high heaven of mold.

What I don’t understand is – why?  The house appeared to have been built by a builder, and putting up a treated lumber subwall is not not cheap.  A block wall would probably have been cheaper.  Also, why did the County inspector allow it?  Was he blind?   Finally, being you wouldn’t save money on a wall like this, and it obviously wouldn’t hold back moisture, and probably was really unstable as it was being constructed, what is the rationale?  It’s not like it’s easier to get treated plywood than block – treated plywood can sometimes be hard to find and sometimes has to be special ordered.

It’s just one of those strange things you come across sometimes, often people put more effort into doing the job wrong than they do getting it right.  My suspicion is the builder was on a tight schedule and they ran out of block and were able to get the treated lumber, so did this construction to get the house done.  At the time (early 80′s) inspection was spotty, but they may have convinced the inspector this was “OK” because they used treated lumber.  It wasn’t, and fixing this could be expensive.

George