We live in a housing association house that was built in the 1960s. In the past year or so we have noticed a large number of cracks appearing in the walls, when they have come out to have a look they have a quick look round and say they are settlement cracks because they are not horizontal (bearing in mind the house is about 45-50 years old).

We noticed this morning 3 horizontal cracks (smallest one about 260mm long), a lot more vertical and diagonal cracks some from floor to ceiling, the ceiling in one room has cracks in, one of the door frames has seperated from the ceiling with a gap of about 30mm and this carries on round the top of one wall in our bathroom. The majority of these are on one side of the house.

My question is should the housing association be looking into these cracks more than a visual, and is this something more serious than what they keep telling us (there is no problem, just fill over the cracks)?

Get the **** out of dodge before the first floor becomes the ground floor???

I thought the rule of thumb was that if you can get your hand in the crack its time to be concerned!

Certainly sounds more serious than to be dismissed like that to me

is there any cracks outside? and is your drive getting longer and longer?

You need to get out of there now and sit in the Housing Association offices until they find you somewhere to live that isn’t in real danger of collapsing.

No sane person with any experience of buildings should let anyone live (or even go)in an building that has cracking like that which you’ve described.

I’m not a structural engineer but I have worked in building management for most of my career.

Is it a house? or a flat? New diagonal cracks suggest new movement and are not good. I would elevate your concerns fairly robustly.
You could always put some pics up so that we can suck our teeth over the likely causes.

A structural engineer will install tell tales and monitor them. Why don’t you do the same.

A tell tale is a pair of screws, fixed into a wall either side of a crack. You keep a note of the distance between the screws, and the dates you take the measurement. This forms a log of the movement.

thanx for the input guys, we live in a house standard 2 floor semi detached. i will take a load of pics and put a link to them on flickr so whoever wants to have a look can.

seems the general opinion is the same as ours, really getting annoyed that they won’t do anything to help.

thedyslexic1 – we haven’t got a drive but we may have one soon!!!

Da-daaaaaaaa!

Did someone call for a structural engineer?

Sounds like you might have a bit of a problem. If you would like to take some photos and email them to me, or give me a call instead/as well as, then I will be happy to give you a quick professional opinion on what your options are.

Best

Tim

have you (or neighbours) removed any trees/vagitation from the garden?

what are hte ground conditions?

its fairly unusual for an older house to start moving after a period of time without a cause.

tell the HA that you will get an independant structural engineer around and they can pay the bill if its not good news.

vagitation

ho ho.

What’s the construction material?
During the 60’s due to baby booms, many prefabs were put up,cast in concrete.

Many prefabs have been condemned over the years and i suspect if your property isn’t visibly brick built, it is built of failing concrete.

However, settlement cracks appearing on buildings of that age suggest the possibility of ground heave, were the ground is drying out/getting very wet to either extreme. This could be caused by various factors.

Hard driveways stopping natural moisture getting into the ground around the foundations.
Removal of large trees but not their roots.
Trees or thick vegetation such as Laurels, sucking moisture out of the ground around the foundations.

What ever the cause, is needs a structual engineer to asses the damage and write report.

‘Tell tales’ will likely to be fitted to measure movement.

As others have said, get on the HA’s back about this till tell get it looked at by a professional. To me it appears they are just trying to avoid repair costs.

IMHO

HTH

oops. vEgitation. sorry.

tee hee

My small experience of HA’s is that they tend to want to look after their properties so I doubt they will ignore this for long.

hi toys they ignored this groring concern for a number of years now

Don’t click on the AED link on Trailertrash’s post – several people just got a Trojan from it

All,

I’ve removed that link in case it’s causing problems.

R

Cheers Robin. Now can you come and get rid of my trojan? 🙁

How come my link produced a trojan?

pics uploading to flickr now so will put up the link when its done.

Thanx for all your input again guys, we are out of our depth as to whether or not these cracks are serious and how much of what they are telling us is “normal”. Hopefully the pics will give some indication, all the cracks have appeared within the last year to 18 months with some appearing within the last couple of months.

Dunno. I clicked it and everything went crazy. I don’t suspect you for a second though.

Tim its possible your companies webshite has been hacked..

link to pics

http://www.flickr.com/photos/51390498@N06/sets/72157624968564353/

some photos are clearer than others so hopefully you can see them ok
Tim, would welcome an expert opinion from you too if possible

Looks like there’s a little ground movement.

Are these cracks, isolated to just one end/corner of the house?

The cracked path would be consistent with changing ground conditions.

The roots from that tree will still be drawing moisture but as the tree isn’t there to suck it up, the ground will now be wetter than before it was removed. However, at 8ft it may not be significant, depends alot on the size of the roots ball and what sort of tree it was.

Amateur opinion. Needs investigating but your house is not going to fall down

Subject to a more detailed examination I really wouldn’t worry too much at the moment.