you know you got issues when....

[jphanna]

guys i live in a 60 year old house, that was built on a fault line in the foothills, in adelaide fringe suburbs. my house is definately in the category of knock down and start again. it only has a footing (as opposed to a proper slab) and the 'back bone' is well and truly broken on it.

well cracks in the walls, ceilings, cornices, outside walls are everyday fact of life in 'pre concrete reinforced slab' days.

well i got sick of looking at all the new cracks appearing so i decided to stop using plaster (and choke to death with all the dust and mess) and just use silicone gap fill to fill up the never ending gaps appearing.

i bought 4 tubes of it, to use with silicone gun, and that was not enough.....

do you have any horror house stories to tell?

[sgt_doofey]

Just renovated the kitchen. Paid $4200 to a company to get a stone bench top and they've since gone broke. Ended up paying over $9000 for something that should have cost $5500.

[Powdered Toast Man]

A house I was renting from a work collegue. It amazingly is still standing today, even more amazing is somebody else rented it after me for substantially more money, but it should be condemned.

It's an old weatherboard cottage style place built on stumps. When I first looked at it you would walk in the front door, to one side was the living room and the other end were the bedrooms. As you walk toward the bedrooms the floor sloped on about a 15 degree angle.

The house was re-stumped (if thats what you call wedging all manner of scrap timber between the house and existing stumps to level it) before I moved in. The window in the laundry doesnt open because the frame is pushed out of shape, the back door couldnt be unlocked for a long time because the door frame was out of shape. There were huge sections of window frame rotted away in the back bedroom, I'm talking a gap about 5cm high and 20cm long under the glass. It was just an open hole.

There was a major mold issue in the bathroom. I scrubbed the ceiling with pure bleach twice in 2 years.

There was a gas leak under the lounge room floor (gas was furnace). There were possums living in the roof. Bushes and scub grew along the fence next to the driveway so there were only 2 places along it you could park your car and actually be able to open the door.

I put up with all this because I was paying what was essentially less than 1/2 the going rent for a 3 bedroom house in the area at the time so I was willing to put up with the dump. I was there for 4 years until I got sick of it and moved out. The work collegue had long since sold it for 3 times as much as he payed for it about 10 years ealier. It was a large block (1100 square metres) in the centre of a town that was, and still is, rapidly growing.

[MarkAW]

Originally Posted by jphanna

it only has a footing (as opposed to a proper slab) and the 'back bone' is well and truly broken on it.

jphanna

Your house is actually more suited to movement than if it was built as slab on ground. A slab on ground would have just cracked at the floor and continued up the walls until it virtually fell into two or more pieces. Houses that are built on reactive soils are nearly always on piers as the slab wont take the entire load of the house if one end drops or the other rises.

What you can do is get under your house (assuming its high enough off the deck) and chock up any pier which isnt full engaged with the floor trusses and there relieve the loading on the walls. Modern houses actually use pier which look like short acro props to re-engage the pier.

[vanman_75]

Wish I had photos ! My house in rocky is a grand old Queenslander , it was built as a box ...full floor floating walls ....way ahead of its time for a hundred year old house .

As with all old Queenslanders , mine had extensions all around and built in verandas , well I can tell ya it is a nightmare to renovate , obviously been through some wild weather as the whole box section is about 50 ml out of plumb over 2.8 .

So my joys are door frames in corners with tapered moldings , tileing is a nightmare , sliding doors don't hang plumb etc , the add ons built between house movements have all been put up plumb so I can't straighten house so I have to to some wild ..out of the ordinary stuff so it looks good . I use to be a chippy so its hard to build stuff out of square I can tell ya ,but im geytong there

[DJR-351]

I used to work on well known island resort that also had cracking problems, the solution was to mix 4 tubes of No More Gaps to 20lt's of paint......seriously it worked!!.....the paint dried but remained rubbery, so instead of the paint cracking it just stretched.....

Apparently the above is an old trick used in many "Restorations".....

Edit: Obviously this did not stop the cracking, just that the punters could not see them....

[69XWGT]

A mate rented a brand new house and was at home one night in torrential rain and heard a massive crack.
Went outside the next day and saw a heap of new cracks in the brickwork.

Turned out as soon as the concretor had his slab inspection done he pulled all the steel out and took it next door to the next house and then poured the slab. The same builder did 5 houses in a row. Apparently the concretor did the same with the footings.

After inspecting all of the houses they were all gutted and then underpinned