I live in a street where the has been some subsidence in some of the other houses. My house is a 1935 built detached 3 bedroom house.
I saw a crack in the render, and pulled some of it off to reveal a crack in the brick running down the side of the house from about halfway up the house to the bottom. The crack is actually in the bricks, not in the mortar between them.
Should my first course of action be to consult a structural engineer? What would he do and how much would he charge?
Markus
You _may_ be better consulting your insurers first. That way _they may_ pay for the investigative work.
Andrew
I have exactly the same problem, on a 1939 semi built on soil. The crack also has gone through bricks, and removing the mastic that was stuffed into it at one point, I could just see into the cavity! Looking at the cracks, front and back, I would say the Northern half of my house is sinking and rotating slightly relative to the rest. Judging from the door frames on the northern side ( I assume they were level and orthogonal once ) I reckon the north wall may have sunk at least 3/4" to 1". I was on the roof this year and saw that the tiles at the northern part of the roof had pulled apart slightly in a line going up to the roof ridge and down the other side.
None of this seems to cause any problems, except for annoying redecorating and the odd sticky door, but it is concerning. As precautions I have annihalated a
30 foot Leylandii that was 10 feet from the back step, and have knobbled a Virginia Creeper that grows from under the wall of my house and covered the south wall every year.I was going to repair the crack(s) in the outer wall this year, but was wondering whether raking out the cracks and remortaring is a bad thing to do where a brick has cracked in two: should I be thinking of cutting out any cracked bricks and inserting new ones? I know that that would give a stronger result in theory than just packing the crack with a stiff mortar mix but don't know what is considered acceptable.
I personally would rather keep away from the insurers as long as the house was structurally safe and the cracks were not growing at an alarming rate.
Andy.
engineer?
Depends what the size of crack is, and whether its moving. I would be quite cautious about involving insurers, since it'll knock a kings ransom off the resale value of the house, even after its fixed.
NT
We've seen something similar in the unattached wall of our 1937 3 bed semi. There are also cracks on the same wall inside the house. Nothing really serious but needs watching, we think.
Spouse thinks it might have something to do with heave becasue of all the wet wether we've had in the last few years. We've noticed that garden features have moved.
I'll be interested in replies.
Mary
Some friends had a similar problem with cracks appearing in their end terrace house. Some plastic sheets were glued across the cracks to monitor movement, by inisurance company appointed engineers. The movement was seasonal and was traced to the fact that the small garden had been concreted completely over.
So a 10inch gap was cut between the house and patio (one row of paving stones/tiles ?) and filled with stones to allow water into the soil and a major area lifted up and grassed over. Then over the next couple of years the gaps closed up and were not a problem.
We could do that ourselves! It's the same kind of thing as is done on ancient buildings but they often use a slip of glass. If the crack opens it breaks.
Mary
Hmm, that's something to consider when we concrete the house end of our garden. Thanks for mentioning it.
Mary
The process has changed dramatically in the last few years. 7 years ago, when we had "seasonal movement", there was months of monitoring cracks, measurement and recording of movement, digging of trial holes and so forth, followed by essentially cosmetic repairs.
We are currently going through another claim. This time, they didn't bother with the measuring and so forth. The structural engineer said they have enough experience now to generally know what the problem is and it's a waste of time and money to bother with the monitoring. So ... our lovely, but way-too-close to the house (*) oak tree is now a large pile of firewood, our heating-oil-conserving and rather unattractive Leylandii hedge on the North boundary of our property has gone away as shreddings in the back of a lorry and the builders are in in a couple of weeks.
(* The arborist said oaks should be no closer than 1.5 times the drip line. This one touched the house. Oh, and twice the drip line for willows.)
"Huge" wrote | ... our lovely, but way-too-close to the house (*) oak tree is now a | large pile of firewood,
If it was that lovely you could have made it into some furniture.
Owain
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