Hi,

I bought my house about 6 months ago, and have just noticed a number of cracks. It is a modern (1986) house which was built as a block of 4 one bedroom houses (ie a block with a house at each corner). It is also on quite a steep slope, so two of the house are raised, and the front door (at the bottom of the slope) is about 1 metre above the ground. There are also a number of trees on the neighbouring property nearby.

I'd previously noticed that the structure containing the steps leading up to the house, a shared porch and outside cupboards has obviously moved with respect to the house (maybe 0.5-1cm). Some of the brick work has shifted and there are cracks which were obviously filled in by a previous person. None of this was mentioned in the home buyers survey I got 6 months ago. Last week I noticed that in the upstairs room at the front of the house (ie at the bottom of the slope), there are a number of cracks in the plaster on the side wall. These are small hairline cracks, but there is a pattern zigzagging down and along from the ceiling downwards and towards the front of the house. It looks like it is tracing the edges of the building blocks. From a photo taken when I moved in, some of the cracks are certainly visible, but again nothing was mentioned on the survey.

Should I not worry about the cracks? Should I complain to the surveyor and ask them to do another survey? Or are there any other recommendations? Thanks

Can you post pics of the cracking, inside and out? might help our "Experts" on here..

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Verwood Handyman
I Know it says I'm On-line, but I might have just left myself logged in, whilst I'm out....

Okay, here are some photos, thanks.

1st pic: (0997) - Outside porch area, see bricks shifted (bottom right)



2nd pic: (1000) - cracking in porch which has been filled in


3rd pic: (1199) - cracks in plaster. The pattern continues fainter over and past the mirror till it fades. Front of house (downhill) is to right and this is a wall in between my house and a neighbours (which is on the same level)


4th pic: (1200) - more cracks. These are to right of 3rd pic. There is some buckling of the plaster.

You have to watch out for trees near houses as they can suck out the moisture from the sub soil, if it is built on clay the clay shrinks and you get cracks all over the place!

I'm not sure what has happened in the last picture, those bricks look to have moved a long way

A friend of mine said that this can be caused if too much cement is put into the mortar mix, hence they use a weak mix now with more sand. Apparently if you use too much cement in the mix it expands in hot weather causing the type of thing you have at the bottom of the last picture.

What kind of survey did you have done when you bought it?

I've zoomed in then people can see how the bricks have moved

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Thanks for the reply. I should point out that that shift in the bricks is in the porch area which is not part of the main house structure. It is a raised area built of bricks and cement and I suspect that it doesn't even have a foundation. The base is not attached to the house (there is gap now of about 1cm between the house just below the door and the porch base), so I suspect the base has shifted with respect to the house, causing the shift in the bricks and the cracks by the door. Since it's not actually part of the main house it is not as serious as it might seem, but I think the surveyor should have picked it up! I had a normal homebuyers report.

That's clearly been there for a long time and I probably have grounds for complaint that it wasn't pointed out in the survey. The cracks in the plaster on the other hand look less serious, but weren't noted in the survey either (though they can just be seen in a photo I took about a month later)

Home buyers report is NOT a structural survey...more like a quick glance around.."Does it have walls and a roof..."
chances are any action against the surveyor would end up costing you....

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Verwood Handyman
I Know it says I'm On-line, but I might have just left myself logged in, whilst I'm out....

A lot of surveys etc. are just a waste of time and are just to ensure that the property actually exists. I have been at a few houses when they have been surveyed and they often miss some critical points.

You get a better survey if you buy a full structural survey, but they are a lot more expensive.

The whole home buying process in this country is a shambles. You pay for searches to see if there is a coal mine near your house, then you sell the house a year later and someone else pays for the search- just in case someone has decided to dig for coal

And those HIPS were a complete waste of time and totally useless

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The good old HIPS!!! a licence to print money, thank fork they dropped that 1. surveys & searches exactly the same.
money for old rope! i worked on a house a lot of years ago that had a crack in the party wall that i could fit my hand through!
from ground floor right up to 2ft below the chimney stack, it was overboarded with 8x4 plasterboards (dot n dabbed) groundfloor, 2nd floor & rendered in the roof space to hide it.
some poor person bought it when it was all magnoliad out & looked beautifull
would really like to know what the survey said , probably good report for the few hundred quid they paid.
Never judge a book by its cover.
as uhm says the whole house buying system is a total shambles.

To be fair the original plan for HIPS was a great one and would have been much better than the current system, it is just a shame it got watered down to such an extent that it became nothing more than an added expense.

I fear the original draft for HIPS was scrapped because it would have shaken up the whole valuation process and as such would have down valued millions of properties.

As builders you can look at 2 houses next to each other which cosmetically look the same but you can see that the fabric of one is far superior. It doesn't matter to an estate agent or home buyer, they will see the properties as equal. The state of the electrics, plumbing, carpentry is of no value to an estate agent... This house in the street sold for x amount last week, therefore this house is worth x. HIPS in the original form would have changed this, but seeing as we were heading for a crash, the Gov decided to water it down rather than throw a spanner in the works


errr.. rant off

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