Dirt Wall in Excavated Cellar

[Martin_65]

I own a house built in the '20s with an excavated cellar where we have the furnace and gas water heater. It's got a concrete floor with no cracks and is drained by a sump pump.

This area is surrounded by dirt walls from 4 to 5 feet high to a crawl space all around to the foundation. The exception being the outside stairs leading to the cellar door. The walls are vertical except for one slightly sloping place used to access the crawl space. We are in the southeast and the soil is pretty much red clay.

I can tell where a window was once used to deliver coal so this situation has obviously existed for a long time. I've lived here for 13 years and never had any problems with this.

Can you see where this is heading?

Now we're selling the house and the buyer's inspector is freaking out that this dirt is a safety hazard and needs to be fixed by installing a masonry retaining wall to the complete height of the dirt.

This seems like a huge and very expensive project. I don't want to deliver an unsafe house but I'm not made of money, either. No one mentioned this when *I* bought the house. Have standards changed that much in 13 years or did I have a bought-off inspector?

So I guess my main questions are... will this masonry wall be as expensive as I fear? And are there any cheaper alternative ways to secure the walls? Oh, I forgot, the reason for the sump pump, obviously, is that water seeps through the dirt when it rains, so drainage will have to be a part of any solution.

We will already be repairing other things... some pre-existing termite damage (but we've been clean and covered by a contract for our time here), some "temporary" lally poles that were never made permanent, etc. So this place will be MUCH better and safer than it was when we bought it. I just don't know how much more I can do!

Thanks for any advice.

[Snoonyb]

There is a simple ratio in engineering, its 1:1 and in section it will appear as a rite triangle.
As an example, assuming that the top of the dirt walls are also the general grade of the crawl space, and at the five ft. depth, the foundation is five ft. away, that, on the surface, meets the 1:1 ratio.
However, that would be the condition if the foundation were on the surface.
When the depth that the bottom of the foundation is placed into the soil is added to the formula, each ft. of depth of the foundation allows the vertical plain of the wall of the excavated basement, as it were, to be one ft. closer to the foundation.