I'm a home inspector and carpenter in Chicago and this site is built from things I’ve learned from 30 years inspecting houses in this town.
What is tuckpointing? We’ve all heard the term “tuckpointing“. In Chicago, it’s the standard designation for any method of smearing cement on masonry walls. But, almost no one knows what this word really means. Real tuckpointing is a method for striking mortar joints between bricks of different sizes and shapes to make them appear uniform. There…
Fake stone veneer, often referred to as Adhered Concrete Masonry Veneer, the material for fake stones barely existed 10 years ago. Now, it’s on millions of homes. The material is in the class of claddings called “Rain Screens”. Rain screens allow water to pass through the surface; that water is collected in a drainage plane…
f one is going to divide wall systems into two basic types, they would be barrier and water managed. Barrier systems, as the name implies, are wall assemblies that are prophylactically impervious to water entry. Water managed walls, as you’re probably already guessing, take on some amount of moisture and through the magic of well…
In some areas of Europe, they make it 6″. In Chicago, due to developers proclivity for increasing all available square footage in their projects, this space has been smashed down to an inch or less. A 1″ cavity is not large enough for the mason to clear out excess mortar, and that excess mortar can…
It’s sure different now than it was 30 years ago. Back then, home inspections were brand new, standards of practice and reports were marginal to lousy, and only an approximate 15% of houses were inspected as part of the purchase procedure. Home inspections, as a standard operating procedure, were not a component of real estate sales….
Here’s one that’s kinda sneaky. When an eave dead ends into a wall along with a gutter, guess what happens? Water rushes past the gutter and soaks the wall. If one includes a nice “hole” in the wall in the form of a light fixture, we’ve now got a sluice gate into the wall. The…
Mold is not good. It can cause substantial problems, both health and building related. That said, let’s get to facts. There are over 100,000 mold types with probably another 100,000 that we haven’t identified yet. Mold is everywhere. There are millions, or hundreds of millions of mold spores, on every surface on the face of the Earth….
I see it everywhere. Otherwise nice and well maintained buildings that have had their windows replaced, and the window installer wraps the structural steel lintel with aluminum. Ouch. When you wrap lintels in aluminum, they remain saturated. Lintels are supposed to drain and not sealed up with aluminum or caulk. It dramatically accelerates the deterioration…
This is how bad lintels can get. And these pictures show why it’s a really bad idea to wrap lintels with aluminum.
Split face block works on: single story strip malls, warehouses, Big Box stores, and similarly industrial or mercantile structures. Split face block doesn’t work on: Multiple floor residential structure with wood floor platforms. Most of them leak. Some leak a lot. I have looked at hundreds of split face block residential buildings and I’ve never…