That math doesn't always work out the way people say though. A $450 hit sounds cheap until you add delivery, haul away, and the new hoses and install kit, which is another $80 or so on top. Sometimes the old one is worth one more shot if the parts are cheap and you can do the work yourself. The real killer is when a $15 seal turns into a $200 bearing job like yours did.

The inspector told me the grading was perfect too, and I believed him because the only thing I know about grading is that it sounds like something you do to a school paper. So of course my crawl space turned into a small indoor swimming pool after my neighbor put in a patio. The fancy word for what happened is "water finds a way," but my wallet prefers to call it "a very expensive lesson in trusting my own eyes over a clipboard." I get it though, you pay someone to tell you everything is fine and you want to believe them because fixing stuff is hard and costs $850. My fix ended up being a gutter extension and a pile of dirt I moved by hand, which is basically a French drain if you squint and don't mind shoveling in the rain.