Hi guys,
I have a five year old brick veneer home in Melbourne's east and we have recently had a large crack open up on the external garage wall. It looks as the the slab has sunk slightly and caused the top 5 coarses of brick at the front of garage engaged to shift forward 20mm, this has also seperated our eaves at the corner, pushed a small fence/gate closer to the point the gap has closed and now we can't close it, plus the external window in that wall has moved and is now crooked and then a continuing hairline crack further along the wall is cascading down through the mortar courses towards bottom coarses from the front of the garage to the back. It began around Christmas last year and seems to have stopped at this point. I have engaged with our builder (private builder and a friend ours) and he brought his current engineer (not the original engineer) out to inspect it about 6-8 weeks ago. The engineers conclusion was that it needed "stabalizing" and then to wait for another 6 months to see if it gets any worse as the ground dries up again. During inspection it was made noted that where that corner of the garage is sinking seems to be a low point at our block and it was possible that a lot of water could be running towards that point. Now given the home is only 5 years old and it began opening up in summer, what defence do I have if our builder tries to blame it on landscaping. Now given that he originally did the site scrape and effectively levelled the block does it fall back on him, the only landscaping we have done is add about 80-100mm of tuscan topping through the front yard as a path. The block is very level overall. Regardless of this situation does is this still a structural warranty issue therefore he has to fix it? Has anyone else gone through this?