The Crack Continues

On the excellent advice of my father-in-law, Jeff and I headed outside today to see if there were any other signs of cracking or settling at the corner of our foundation. Unfortunately, what we discovered was not reassuring. There is a piece of siding with a really big crack the whole length of it right near this area, although it's much lower down on the house than the crack on the inside. As to the actual foundation, we saw some cracking in the mortar, but no bricks with cracks through them. It was hard to say if we actually saw one big continuous crack in the mortar or if we were just imagining several small cracks could connect to form one big crack. We also couldn't get a good picture of the brick foundation cracks, but here's the siding that's cracked.

The crack continues onto the other side of the fence. All the way to that weird piece of siding that runs vertical (but doesn't go all the way to the top of the house - it's always stuck out to me and I've wondered why it was done that way). These clues feel like they are adding up to something not good (and I'm feeling like I'm on House Detective without the benefit of a handy home inspector telling me exactly what's wrong).

The siding crack up close...

We're pretty sure that crack was not there before, but I'm going to scour through old photos to see if I can spot it. There were also some other disturbing (but probably unrelated) signs of the siding really needing some work. We knew we needed to repaint, but this actually looks like the siding is pulling away from the house in a few places. Yikes. We walked around the house and didn't notice this on any other sides.

So we decided to call our realtor Montie (whom we already had much fondness for) to see if he had someone he'd recommend come take a look. And you know what? He offered to come take a look himself!! How nice is that?? So he's going to stop by tomorrow and give us some advice, which is quite a relief. He did say, however, that the clay soils around here can really get dried out (we haven't had rain in ages and are in "severe drought" stage) which can lead to foundations settling and cracking. Yikes. And of course we just spent $3,000 on non-refundable plane tickets and hotel reservations for our trip to Belize in November...