The floor that reports hidden damage

So one of the more common phone calls I get is a new homeowner that notices something just isn't quite right. But it wasn't a big enough of a signal for them to get a structural engineer to do an inspection before the house was purchased. In this case, what that was was a soft spot in the floor where just a little bounce in the living room floor. So what that small sign can mean is that a beam was cut, maybe a beam or joist was drilled through. Maybe it's one of those floating posts or walls, and the load path wasn't completed. So a small sign such as a soft spot in the floor or even a hump in a floor at one of the places we went to, you know, anytime you have like a chimney where it's very stiff and strong. And if you're in that section and it sometimes there's a slope that goes away from the chimney, that's not a good sign. The floor should definitely be flat. So there's lots of little signs that you should pay attention to. Fire can eat away at a section, and these floors, the floors that bounce or soft or have humps in them, they're just reporting on what it is that's underneath it. So this call that I got about a homeowner that noticed this soft spot, what happened was a fire had broken out in the basement right underneath the main living room. The main, the joists that hold up the main living room were damaged pretty significantly. And before they sold the house, what the previous owners did was they just painted over them. And so those joists, they couldn't carry the load anymore, at least not with that deflection and that bounce. They really should have gotten an engineer to take a look at it before the sale went through, but we were able to fix it for them.