Groundhog burrowed into basement of old farmhouse

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Stryker83

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Last spring I had a groundhog problem under my porch. It ended up digging a hole that went underneath my block foundation and through my interior stone retaining wall.

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I got the groundhog removed and haven't had any problems with them since luckily. I immediately blocked the interior hole with quickrete to avoid any other animals from using the same burrow.

I had someone come out to take a look at the basement and see what repairs needed made. They checked out my foundation and told me to just fill the exterior hole in. He said my foundation wasn't going anywhere.

So i filled in the hole and just let it be.

I'm looking to sell my house in the next couple of months and I had a mason come out to see about repointing my stone retaining wall. While he was there I explained what happened with the groundhog. He checked out the foundation and told me the same thing. As long as I filled in the hole I was good. He said if I was really concerned, I could break up the concrete layer on the top of my retaining wall because it sounded hollow. He said the dirt that the groundhog pulled out was likely from in there. He assumed that when they added the block foundation around the old stone foundation that they poured a footer, and the groundhog likely dug underneath it and got to the stone.



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So I broke up the concrete and found that there is no footer underneath the block. It only goes about 12 inches underground and rests on clay. The groundhog did tunnel under it and there was a void underneath the wall.

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I informed him of this and he told me to just fill the void back in with the rocks that were pushed out and put down a new layer of concrete on the retaining wall to hold the rocks in place. I have filled the void with the rocks and I'm going to add some more along the edge just to reinforce it some more and I was going to lay a few inches of quickrete to the retaining wall to keep them in place and replace what I broke up.

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Should this be sufficient? He said that if the void were big enough to affect the blocks, it would have done it by now (it has been a year).
 
If it ain't broke don't fix it and don'tbe home to answer questions when a buyer sends in an inspector.And welcome to the site.
 
Hopefully since it isn't broken, the inspector won't have questions. ;)

Thanks for the advice!
 
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