Second Opinions: Be Aware of Your Engineering Requests

The irony of this this post is that I come from a family of engineers. I never thought that I would complain about them or their intent, however after recent experience I do have to share the following disclaimers:

Do not automatically trust the opinion of an engineer.

This is probably common sense, or should be, but again, this is a blog written by novices.

Recently we were researching with our contractor whether or not it would be necessary for us to reinforce the existing foundation of our house, considering that it was 100 years old and we would be adding an additional story.

Our initial meeting with the engineer was pre-closure with the bank. As previously mentioned, our house purchase was through a 203k loan, and being such we had to have several inspections of the home, most importantly to prove that the house was capable of withstanding a gut renovation.

At this time, we were told with a signed paper that the house was indeed capable to withstand extensive renovation.

Flash forward four months later when we start to consider whether we will need any structural improvement. We consult the same engineer and suddenly receive a very different opinion. Suddenly we need to consult him for much more detailed plans and decide to dig into our foundation to replace pilings that 'might' be deteriorated to a cost of close to $45k.

Should we?

Shouldn't we?

We are not engineers. We are first-time homeowners. We have barely been responsible for the gas and electric cost at our previous residences so how are we supposed to know what should be paid in a situation like this?

In this type of situation we actually relied heavily upon on our contractor and his experience. We were readily told how manipulative the engineers' requests could be - not of our particular engineer but in general. And again, being from a family of engineers I mean no offense of anyone in particular.

Still I would like to point out that it is a good idea to get an engineer to inspect your home if you plan to do extensive renovation.

In our personal experience, certain signs (for example our floors were slanted left to right, but we had structure issues from front to back) are not imminent proof that you need structural work.

However, to date we have decided not to do any additional exploratory work of the wood pilings in our foundation. I hope that this will not be a regret of ours, but I have to admit, there is much more ahead of us to be concerned with...