Walls, I Scream

I like a bit of a mystery.

It gives a little added interest to my daily workload if I come across an interesting feature of a building that should not be there or something inexplicable, at first, warrants some detective work to uncover the answer. I do liken my arrival at a property to carry out a survey to a detective's first instinctive analysis at the scene of a crime. The perpetrator of a misdemeanour in my case would be an enthusiastic DIY'er, a cowboy builder or where a property has been altered so much by successive owners and occupiers that it barely resembles its original and by definition most stable structural form.

Take the fashion, championed by Julie Walters in the film Educating Rita, in that period to sledgehammer out the supporting wall between two ground floor rooms to create the lifestyle enhancing feature of a through lounge.

In many properties which suffered this violent attack the wall is likely to have been, in successive years reinstated, removed, infilled and then further altered to take, commonly a set of double doors, a preformed classic archway or the current trend to insert and stock a tank of tropical fish. This makes both a nice room divider and a fascinating and mesmerising lighting display albeit a bit tacky and high maintenance.

Whatever the visual appearance and decades after the original assault on the structure it can still be the case that the combined weight and loading imposed by the first floors and upstairs walls is totally without anywhere near adequate support. Held in place by a few old nails, a couple of crafted wood joints and a lot of hope. Investigation to ascertain if the inevitable failure will happen within hours, weeks, months, years or a few more decades can be quite difficult with a lot of detail concealed behind plaster, linings, formwork and anaglypta or woodchip.

The homeowner, without fail, of course was not in occupation when the alterations were carried out but often alludes to remembering that the previous owner swore blind that there was a RSVP, RIP, a Joisey or a thingy-thingy girder inserted or at least that was what they had been informed but could not be sure.

This can also be difficult to verify at the inspection stage for the buyer. I often entertain the seller with a pantomime of stretches and tappings around the position of the doors, arch or aquarium (careful not to distress the inhabitants). Whilst it is obvious to me what I am trying to acheive this is met with a lot of questions by the assembled household. It is explained by parents to their young children that 'The Mister', is checking to make sure the house will not fall down. Said in a jokey voice there is still abject terror in the eyes of young siblings and a good chance that they will have nightmares on that very scenario of the house falling down. 'The Mister' therefore takes on the imaginary role as a sort of bogey-man. I do not feel that this adverse perception of a surveyor on a future generation of potential home buyers has been at all addressed by the Public Relations Consultants of my professional organisation.

There are bits of equipment available such as a hand held metal detector to imply the existence of steelwork but an unsuitable insertion causing a pinging noise could as easily be more of a hindrance than a help structurally. I did find, by this method, that the heavy weight of wall between the living rooms at a previous house that I owned was actually held in place by a long and thin piece of metal gatepost.

A very obvious sign of the absence of or inadequacies in any support can be determined from the appearance of the masonry wall and floor in the rooms directly above the investigation. I have often found a very evident dip and sag in this position but easily cloaked by the depth of a carpet or the quadrant moulding above a laminate floor. In an empty house, devoid of owners in close accompanying contact or providing a constant supply of cups of tea and ginger biscuits,  there is the luxury of being able to wrench up the carpet and prise up a floorboard or two which is a very definitive form of enquiry.This rather drastic but ideal course of action provides a lot of answers to the earlier tentative observations. I do have some concerns on a regular basis of potential and catastrophic problems of collapse and mayhem.

These are reported with sufficient emphasis and weighting to, in my mind, mobilise the resources of the building equivalent of International Rescue.

However, nine times out of ten I find upon a visit to the very same property many years later that diddly-squat has been done. It may be case of adopting a different approach to demonstrate the risks of a dodgy bit of structure. I had thought of walking around the house once a day for six consecutive days and on the seventh day do seven laps whilst playing a musical instrument but frankly it is the sort of thing that the neighbourhood watch would frown upon.