Gut feeling vs spreadsheets on a house flip in Austin

I had to pick between trusting my contractor's gut on a foundation repair quote or the detailed spreadsheet my buddy made, and I went with the spreadsheet. Now the house is sitting with a cracked slab and I'm out an extra $8,000. Has anyone else had their data-driven choice backfire this bad?

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wright.michael3mo ago

Numbers on a screen can't see the shifting clay" - I get the sentiment, but let's be real for a second. Eight grand is a lot of money, no doubt about it. But is this really some kind of cautionary tale against using spreadsheets, or did you just have bad data in the first place? A good spreadsheet with proper soil reports and historical settlement data could have caught that clay issue, too. Your contractor's gut might have worked out this time, but guts can be wrong just as often as numbers can. The real lesson here might be to use both, not to throw out one because the other failed you once.

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diana3143mo ago

Holy shit, $8,000 extra for trusting a spreadsheet over your contractor's gut feeling on a foundation? That's brutal. I've been flipping houses for six years and my buddy tried to talk me into using a similar data analysis tool for estimating labor costs. I told him no way, because my guy's been doing drywall for thirty years and he knows when a ceiling is gonna crack just by looking at it. Numbers on a screen can't see the shifting clay under Austin's soil, man. Your spreadsheet probably didn't have a column for "this slab is gonna settle three inches next spring.

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