I dug under the foundation and found out why the house cracked [photo]

  • Dec 11, 2020
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Good afternoon, dear guests and subscribers of the "Build for Myself" channel!

My family and I bought in 2017. old brick house 1976 It has been 3 years since we live in it and our hands did not reach to figure out why the house began to "crack at the seams".

Before buying, of course, I carefully examined everything, and the presence of cracks was not critical for me, because I understood that this house was temporary housing, since the main goal for us was to acquire a good plot with the possibility of building a new house, the construction process of which is exactly what my channel.

As soon as we drove in, I covered all the cracks with mortar, but every year the house "parted" - the cracks opened even more. I didn’t start building a garden then, but got out of the situation in a quick way - every year I blew polyurethane foam.

Photo of the author
Photo of the author

There is not so much time to renovate the old house, since I am already completing a new house on the same plot, and, most likely, we will be celebrating a housewarming this year.

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Photo of the author

And now, when the newly built house stands nearby, the time has come to lay the long-awaited communications: water supply and sewerage. The routes for connecting both cold water and sewerage are planned under the wall of the old house, in order to avoid sharp bends and turns of the pipe.

Photo by the author

I confess that I have heard many times how our grandfathers built for centuries. But, I was very surprised by what I saw. Having made a trench under the foundation of the old house, I did not have to punch through the old foundation, because it was only 35 cm deep.

Photo of the author

It turns out that no one bothered with the depth of freezing. In our region, it is equal to 1 meter. Yes, and there is a foundation - no, not on clay and not even on sand, it stands on black soil, which easily shrinks. Here is every corner of the house and swims as it wants :-) Hello, cracks!

The foundation was made as follows: bricks with mortar were laid on the edge (on spoons), on top of a layer of masonry mortar, and then a masonry of stones with a height of 10 centimeters goes. Further, again, a brick, just laid on the bed and on top of one layer of waterproofing - roofing only.

There is no question of fittings...

The house is nice, solid, but there are clearly problems with the foundation! So how and to whom to believe that they used to be built for centuries? Now it is decided after moving to a new house - to pull the old house with metal and leave it on the site as a barn. I really don't want to invest in the restoration of the foundation ...

That's all, thank you for your attention! Subscribe to my channel!

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