Here's the part that bothers me the most.
That pipe wasn't just left disconnected by accident. It was cut. Someone made it look like it was draining into the ground on purpose.
I don't say that to be harsh. I say it because it's important for you to understand why this kind of thing survives for years without anyone catching it.
A crawl space is the one part of a home almost nobody looks at. You don't walk down there every week. You don't check on it the way you'd check a leaky faucet or a running toilet. Most homeowners never see their crawl space at all after the house is built.
That means whatever gets done down there — right or wrong — usually goes unnoticed. Nobody's checking. Nobody's watching. If a contractor wants to take a shortcut, that's exactly where it's easiest to get away with it.
It's not that homeowners are careless. It's that they trusted the people doing the work, the same way most of us do. You hire a professional because you assume they'll do the job right. Most of the time, that trust is reasonable. But it only takes one shortcut, hidden in a place nobody checks, to cause real problems down the road.
