This inspection didn't involve a hardwood floor, but it could have. It did have what I would call a "pre-existing condition."
The homeowner had been away from her 30-year-old house for a couple weeks. When she came home, she noticed some cracks in the ceiling and walls of her house, and a slope to her living room floor. The neighbors indicated that lightning had hit a tree between their houses, so she was concerned that the lightning created the cracks and sloped floor.
I have seen a lightning strike damage a house before. The lightning followed a root that went under a slab, vaporizing water in and near the root, which lifted the slab and foundation wall in the steam blast.
The slab floor in this current house was elevated on fill dirt. So a serious shake could have cause the slab to settle. And it did have a significant slope to about 12 feet of one end. After moving a bunch of furniture, I noticed that the chair rail was level, but the baseboard followed the slope of the slab. You might be able to make out the difference in the photo:
Now, baseboard following the same plane as the slab indicates that the baseboard was installed against a sloped slab. So, the sloped slab occurred long ago. (The homeowner indicated no remodeling in the 15 years while she has owned the house.) The slope was not related to a lightning strike, and the homeowner can't believe the floor had been sloped the whole time she owned it. But the evidence says it was. And it could have been a hardwood floor instead of carpeting. So watch for those pre-existing conditions.
