Structural Failure

A Decatur homeowner walked me down to her basement to show me a crack she thought was cosmetic. It was a horizontal line running most of the way across the block wall, about waist height, and the wall had pushed in maybe an inch and a half at the middle. That is not a cosmetic […]

Half the “foundation emergencies” I get called to look at in Marietta are hairline cracks that have been there since the house was a few years old and will still be there, unchanged, when it is sold. The other half look almost identical to a homeowner but are the early sign of something that will

In our part of Wisconsin the frost drives down several feet into the ground every winter, and it is the single most important number a foundation has to respect. Most of the foundation and flatwork failures I help assess around Grand Chute trace back to one of two things: something built above the frost line

Our place in Barrio Viejo is old adobe, and the first summer we owned it I nearly made an expensive mistake. A crack opened up in a wall after a monsoon storm, and my instinct was to fill it with the strongest patching compound the hardware store sold. A neighbor who had restored two of

Nothing sends a homeowner into a spiral faster than finding a new crack, and nothing is harder to get a straight answer about. The truth is that most cracks are harmless and a few are urgent, and you can learn to tell a lot about which is which by reading three things: how wide it

People bring me a photo of a crack and ask if it is bad. Honestly, the crack itself is the least useful thing in the picture. In forty years of masonry I learned that cracking and moving are two different things: plenty of walls crack once, settle, and never budge again, while a wall that

On claims I see two opposite mistakes about structural engineers, and they cost about equally. Some owners spend several hundred dollars on an engineer for a hairline crack that any inspector would call cosmetic. Others skip the engineer on a genuinely moving wall and let a foundation-repair salesman diagnose the problem he happens to sell

The deck and balcony failures I have investigated almost never start where people expect. The boards are fine, the posts are fine, the railing looks solid. The failure is at a connection, the spot where the deck attaches to the house, or where a post meets a beam, or where the whole thing is held