Damage to the post and beam structure of your home is very expensive to fix. Reconstructing the supporting infrastructure holding up your home is something you do not want to be facing as a homeowner/ seller.
Construct and plumb hand excavated french drains for best results with the removal of groundwater caused by faulty rain drain discharge systems and rainwater falling on the surface around your home.
Single family homes, apartment buildings, townhouse buildings, and condominiums may suffer groundwater damage to the crawlspace long before notice is taken of the home drainage problem.
Even when the buildings are sold, it is possible for the groundwater problem to go undisclosed or not noticed.
Given the fact that a home is probably the most expensive item that the owner will ever purchase, it makes good sense to become aware of the physical and financial tragedy that follows home drainage problems and as a result, post and beam reconstruction, foundation footings sinking, floors warping, doors and windows jamming and breaking, and dryrot repairs.
The job of foundation reconstruction, with respect to these problems, is a major undertaking of engineering, labor, jacking and supporting, concrete footings removed while supported the entire building with 20 ton jacks and pouring new footings, as well as replacing dryrot posts and beams.
This is very difficult work, and slow to do, which makes this work expensive, and with respect to the price, dwarfs the cost of hand excavated french drains , which would have most likely prevented all that damage and reconstruction work.
Depending on the size of the building, the cost of significant foundation and post/beam reconstruction within the crawlspace may be 10 times the amount or more than it would have cost to protect the home from home damage due to groundwater. Hand excavated french drains are vital to the health of your building infrastructure as well as the air within the building that homeowners breathe.
I have seen apartment buildings and homes where the owners continued to collect rents, ignore and stack up home drainage problems, and just let the structure turn into a bug infested nightmare of dryrot and decay.
Many of these buildings do not even make financial sense to reconstruct at that point. They get demolished. Homes are the same way.
There is a point at which the reconstruction makes less sense than demolishing the old structure, and building a new home on the site. That is just plain penny wise and pound foolish in todays real estate market, and at the current prices of real estate. It’s too late to cry when that happens. At that point it is a new down payment, and another loan. There may even be an underlying loan unpaid to calculate into the new cost projection. Little to no equity, and lots of remorse.
You will likely not prevail in your attempt to hit your insurance company up for the repair cost. Most policies exclude groundwater and catastrophic water damage from their policy that is not part of a documented storm date.
The insurance companies encourage you to buy flood insurance through FEMA, but even what constitutes a flood will likely not apply to this type of long term groundwater damage. If you believe this is not the truth, do your homework, and you will see that groundwater removal and home drainage work is a necessity, not an option.