Surveyor saying external brick wall is not sealed. Help!

[nabby]

Hi!
I'm looking for some advice here.
We have a house for sale which has a ground floor extension that was completed last year.
The construction is a cavity wall with blocks on the inside and facing brick on the outside. There are foundations all the way round and the walls are tied to the existing house. There is a damp proof course running all the way round too.
We have now had two buyers pull out due to their survey reports. Both are citing that the wall is not weather/waterproof and that it will deteriorate rapidly under exposure to the elements.
We have not been given further info but we are confident that the structure is sound, as our architects are happy and our surveyors (that signed off the work and issued the certificate) are satisfied. There is no indication of water penetrating into the inside of the structure.
My question is should we consider having the wall either waterproofed, weatherproofed or rendered?
Or are we the victims of over-zealous surveyors?
Thanks in advance for your comments and thoughts
Neil

 

[tony1851]

It seems unusual for a surveyor to claim that the walls are not 'sealed', whatever that means.
Before doing anything, you need to find out, if possible, what they are on about, particularly if there is no evidence of damp penetration.

 

[rjm2k]

Did the same company do the survey?

Maybe post a photo of part of the wall to see if anyone spots anything "special" about it.

 

[nabby]

It seems unusual for a surveyor to claim that the walls are not 'sealed', whatever that means.
Before doing anything, you need to find out, if possible, what they are on about, particularly if there is no evidence of damp penetration.

That's what we're going to try and do, I reckon.
Thanks for the reply!

 

[nabby]

Did the same company do the survey?

Maybe post a photo of part of the wall to see if anyone spots anything "special" about it.

I'll try to post a photo of it on here later on.

It was two different surveyors for two different buyers.

 

[noseall]

Ar you in a flood zone?

 

[nabby]

Ar you in a flood zone?

No. A pity as it might make it easier to work out what the surveyors were thinking.
It's a London suburb and the house is on a gentle slop and raised above street level, by something like 6 or 7 feet (difference between street and ground floor), I reckon.

 

[^woody^]

Give us a clue

What is not sealed?

 

[nabby]

Right, we've got to the bottom of this. It's good and bad news.
There are three sides to the extension. Two have been built with facing red brick as the external wall of the cavity. The third, which is only 400mm-odd from the boundary fence with next door, is built with high density concrete blocks. Our builder should have rendered it and we thought he had, but he hadn't.
It's lucky he didn't as we have now found that the top few courses have been done in breeze block, i.e. high density concrete blocks to about halfway up, then breeze blocks the rest of the way up!!!
The way forward seems to be to seal the whole wall and then render it. I think we'll need to allow drain holes in the wall at low level to allow moisture out.
Any thoughts on this course of action are most welcome.
Our builder is no longer around so we can't go back to him to rectify it. We'll need to get someone reputable in to do the work instead.

 

[noseall]

Erm....how come you never spotted an entire elevation not rendered?

 

[nabby]

Erm....how come you never spotted an entire elevation not rendered?

Because they said they did it and it's not an easy elevation to access or look at. I accept we're partly at fault here
It's no excuse but at the time they were rendering various bits of the house, they were meant to do this one. We saw everything else they rendered and we (wrongly) assumed they'd done this elevation too.

And tbh, they did pretty much everything we'd asked them to do in the rest of the house so it wasn't like we had any reason to not believe them. But hey, with various distractions all over the place, it was an oversight.

Still, onwards and upwards

 

[freddiemercurystwin]

 

[Nige F]

. Our builder should have rendered it and we thought he had, but he hadn't.
Our builder is no longer around so we can't go back to him to rectify it. We'll need to get someone reputable in to do the work instead.

You got one of the Surrey Travelling builders then - They love Surrey . The minted County. How is someone going to get to it to render if it`s close to the neighbours boundary ?

 

[Bodgeitandleggit]

Howcome it was signed off and certs was issued?????????

 

[^woody^]

Blocks don't need to be sealed. They might not look nice, but that's it.

That surveyor must be a numpty