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Foundation Inspection · Ricketts, IA

Foundation Inspection in Ricketts

Foundation Inspection in Ricketts, IA by Closer Look Inspectors. A photo-mapped digital report within 24 hours.

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Ricketts · Crawford County

Foundation Inspection in Ricketts

Foundation Inspection in Ricketts, Crawford County, by Closer Look Inspectors. Ricketts is a Middle Soldier River railroad town of about a hundred people, platted in 1899.

A foundation inspection reads a home's structure — poured concrete, block and the grading around it — for cracking, movement, settlement and water entry, so you know whether a crack is cosmetic or a genuine budget line.

Ricketts is served by our Ida Grove team →  ·  (563) 517-7815

Craftsman bungalow with a covered front porch and stone columns — Foundation Inspection in Ricketts, IARicketts
Local housing

Homes in Ricketts.

Ricketts housing runs to a small stock of houses from the 1899 rail town and its early-1900s rebuilding, some vacant or lightly used, with a few later homes, across the small townsite along the old rail line on the Middle Soldier River, and the farm ground around it, on loess-mantled drift plain along the Middle Soldier River in the Southern Iowa Drift Plain — and that mix shapes what a foundation inspection here needs to find.

Local conditions in Ricketts

No Iowa law requires a home inspection before a sale — the one mandatory time-of-transfer inspection covers private septic systems (Iowa Code 455B.172) — which makes an independent inspection the only thorough, buyer-side read on a Ricketts home. Ricketts sits in Crawford County, and every Iowa county is EPA Radon Zone 1. Iowa HHS reports Iowa has the largest percentage of homes above the 4.0 pCi/L action level of any state — 71.6 percent in the Iowa Radon Survey — and the Iowa seller disclosure form asks for any known radon test results. Finished basements concentrate it, and only a 48-hour test gives you this home's number. Iowa leaves frost depth to the local building code rather than one statewide number, and the annual freeze-thaw cycle drives the settlement cracks and ice-dam wear that Ricketts-area homes face.

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Questions

Common questions.

Are foundation cracks always serious?
No. We separate routine settlement cracking from active structural movement and explain which one you are looking at.
What is common in Iowa foundations?
Block and poured walls with frost and settlement cracking, and water entry that traces back to grading and downspouts.
Ricketts fell from 145 people to 109 in ten years. What does that mean for a house here?
It means more vacant and lightly used houses than a growing town would have. Ricketts was platted in 1899 with the Boyer Valley Railroad, lost much of its business district to a fire in 1907, and rebuilt. Houses that sit empty over winters can have frozen and split supply lines, dry traps, rodent entry, failed sump pumps and roofs no one has looked at. We date the wiring, plumbing, heating and roof, check the foundation and drainage, and find out whether the well and septic are live. Crawford County is EPA Radon Zone 1.
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