For the residents of house No. 36 on Brest Salnikov Street, the expression “bursting at the seams” is not a phraseology, but the very reality. The five-story building, built in 2014, began to behave strangely after a few years. Today, through cracks in the walls and foundation haunt new residents. Residents consider their home to be in disrepair. Construction customer - management capital construction Brest City Executive Committee - no. It has been officially announced that the shrinkage of the house has stopped, cracks are not opening, and nothing threatens the life and health of the residents. An SB correspondent looked into the situation.

Victor Kurilyuk, the owner of apartment No. 3 on the ground floor, has been on the waiting list for housing construction for almost 10 years. When we moved in with my wife and two children, we couldn’t be happier. But two years later the wallpaper began to crack, and Victor realized that they had bought a pig in a poke:

In apartment number 3.

- They took itcreditat 5 percent for 20 years. Will this house last that long? I doubt. If the foundation is cracking, nothing can be fixed.

Victor and his family moved into a replacement apartment. He says he demanded relocation, believing that living in his house on Salnikov was dangerous. Builders are now working in one of the rooms of his apartment, strengthening a window. To avoid disaster, safety racks were installed.

Anna Kalyagina's two-room apartment is on the second floor, exactly above Viktor Kurilyuk's apartment. Anna with two children on her own square meters didn't even move:

“I hadn’t even finished the repairs when splits appeared in the wall. We didn’t take any risks, we didn’t move in, we live with my mother.

After technical diagnostics, Anna was given a document: it is prohibited to use the room due to the 4th level of danger. The window openings have sagged, the wind is blowing into the room through the masonry...

Chairman of the housing cooperative Nikolai Kuchinsky scolds the builders:

- 27 out of 35 apartment owners wrote statements that they had cracks in the walls. Residents of apartments 3, 7 and 11 are prohibited from using private rooms. Not everyone noticed the cracks right away. Some people have a suspended ceiling, vinyl wallpaper stretches and does not burst. In one apartment on the third floor, I asked, on my own responsibility, to tear off the wallpaper. And there was a crack. The house was built intermittently. The project was revised several times and became cheaper. The project included ceramic bricks, but they installed silicate bricks. There should have been a pitched roof, which ended up being flat. The finishing lines, the painting - even this is poorly done. There is no aesthetics, not to mention the structural elements. Stroitrest No. 8 knows how to build houses, but here they built not a house, but something unclear. Good owners build better barns. People are unhappy, indignant, wondering how they can live here.

Nikolai Vladimirovich shows me the basement under the first entrance. Several meters of holes were drilled into the ground in two places. Experts took the soil for examination. The entire foundation is cracked. There are beacons on the walls to monitor the movement of the splits. Safety stands are installed in several places.

Pit for soil research.

- They were supposed to build on a monolithic pad, but they did strip foundation, - Nikolai Kuchinsky is sure that the beginning of all troubles is in the foundation.

Experts say: prefabricated strip foundations cannot be built on weak, watery and plastic soils. It is not recommended to build such a foundation even if the groundwater level is high. The new microdistrict is being built near the Mukhavets River. Just twenty years ago, seagulls nested in the grass here. There was a swamp here...

In the Brest City Executive Committee emergency house they don't recognize it. Deputy Chairman Nikolai Yakubovsky, who oversees the city’s construction industry, believes that there is no threat to the lives of residents:

- The situation with this house has been under the control of the City Executive Committee since the problem arose - since September last year. We are completing the complete restoration of the decoration of the affected apartments so that people can move into their premises.

And here are the details from the customer - the capital construction department of the Brest City Executive Committee:

“JSC Brestproekt issued recommendations for strengthening the walls and piers at the site, after which a project was quickly developed to strengthen window openings on three floors. On February 21, builders of the SU No. 32 branch of Stroytrest No. 8 OJSC began work to strengthen the emergency walls. The bottom line: the window opening is placed in a metal band, and spiral connections will be installed along the longitudinal cracks that run along the window. This method is one of the most reliable for eliminating cracks. When the final conclusion comes, which will indicate the reasons for the formation of cracks in the house, the responsible services will take up the issue of strengthening the foundation.”

Nikolai Kuchinsky, like the residents of the house, saw this information on the website of the Brest City Executive Committee:

- For some reason, no one considers it necessary to meet with people - homeowners - and tell us all what and how is being done. The house is under warranty. We have one more year to have time to present and substantiate our claims against the builders. Now the house is being examined by specialists from the Technical Diagnostics of Structures ODO. If we don’t agree with the results of the examination, which is carried out at the request of the construction trust, we will hire our own.

“We build quickly, efficiently, reliably. We build to last!”- this slogan is posted on home page website of construction trust No. 8. And the company is in no hurry to abandon it. Deputy general director construction trust Mikhail Volchok believes that we need to wait for the result of the examination:

- Built in accordance with the project. There is no fault of our builders, guilt has not been proven. Another thing is that opposite this house, another construction organization is building a school, and piles were being driven. But the soil here is not very good, there is clay, because there was a swamp here. Perhaps the vibration had an effect on the strip foundations of the houses across the road...

By the way, the City Council of the City Executive Committee together with the construction trust are planning to monitor other five-story buildings in this microdistrict. There is information that cracks are a problem not only at house No. 36.

“It seemed like an earthquake had started,” people later admitted. It turned out that at the level of the 4th and 5th floors, the facing brick burst along the entire length of the wall.

Construction defect?

This residential building was built in 2009, the base is a monolith, the cladding is brick. According to townspeople, the outer surface began to crumble a long time ago: covered up cracks are visible throughout the building, and several bricks are missing from the wall at one of the entrances.

Our house is not very good,” says local resident Irina Stepanova. - There is always a crackling sound somewhere, pipes are leaking, the seams on the ceiling are flooded from heavy rains. And audibility is impossible! When the emergency happened on May 13, we were at home. They jumped in horror. We looked out the window, and below people were shouting: “Run out quickly, the house is cracked!”

Employees from various services arrived at the scene. They examined the wall and reported that there was no likelihood of collapse.

Everyone was allowed to return to their apartments, but we continue to live in fear,” Irina shares her experiences.

The commission made a preliminary conclusion: the facing layer of the brick suffered from a hidden construction defect. Probably a microcrack was left on the façade. Air accumulated in it, which led to the “shooting” of the brick cladding.

If this version is confirmed, construction company will have to be punished for poor quality work. However, representatives of the developer do not agree with this version and believe that the residents who were making repairs in one of the apartments may be to blame for the collapse.
“Perhaps the fact that there is no expansion joint played a role,” said Alexey Gunin, a representative of the developer company. “Somewhere the ceiling came out, and in that place the tension appeared. As for the cladding that does not rest on the monolith, an examination was passed on this decision. In the early 2000s they did this to make it more beautiful. But the method turned out to be not very successful, and now it is not used.

Photo: AiF / Artem Kurtov

Save on everything

This is not the first time that facades have collapsed in relatively new high-rise buildings. So, a year ago in a house on Solidarity Avenue, 21, bldg. 3, part of the wall collapsed facing bricks. The reason was renovation work on the 13th floor. Tiles also began to crumble in houses No. 2 and 6 on Nepokorennykh Avenue. Employees of the State Construction Supervision Service came to the conclusion that the developer used low-quality materials during construction.

Experts are confident that none of the new buildings are immune from such troubles. Quality rests entirely with the developers. The latter, as a rule, save on materials. They use cheap hollow bricks for cladding, the floors are filled with concrete, which begins to crack, and the most short-lived sewer and water pipes are purchased. As a result, after 5-10 years, residents of new buildings face serious problems. This is what happened on Pulkovskaya Street.

A crack may appear on the wall of a house at any moment, and the owners of the building immediately wonder how dangerous this phenomenon is. Experts distinguish between two types of cracks – passive and active. And if in the first case the defect in question can be “removed” with your own hands, then in the second case you will have to involve professionals in the work. But first you need to understand what factors provoke the appearance of cracks.

Table of contents: - -

Causes of cracks in the house

It is believed that in the first five years after the construction of a house, cracks appear on the walls in 90% of cases - experts call this natural shrinkage, which does not pose any danger. But it also happens that the house is many years old, it is quite lived-in, all structures are regularly repaired, but cracks still appear. What is the reason for this phenomenon?

Firstly, cracks in the house may appear due to violations in the technology of constructing the walls themselves. For example, if the dressing of brickwork was carried out incorrectly.

Secondly, the phenomenon in question on the walls of a house may be caused by non-compliance with the sequence of construction work. For example, communication systems (water supply, sewerage) are often installed after the house has been built - the foundation has to be excavated, which negatively affects its quality characteristics.

Thirdly, settlement of the foundation often occurs - for example, due to compression of the foundation soil or too much pressure from the house on the foundation. This is possible if the construction of the foundation was carried out without preliminary calculations and design. The most common mistakes:

• During the construction of the foundation, geodetic surveys were not carried out, the nature of the soil was not studied;
• the ground resistance taken as a basis was erroneous and greatly overestimated;
• geodetic surveys on construction site were carried out in the summer - the level of groundwater rise was not calculated;
• a mistake was made when choosing the type of foundation - for example, instead of a columnar one, a linear one was laid;
• calculations of the depth of the foundation and its thickness were not made - usually data from past construction projects are taken as the basis for these parameters;
• violations of the technology for laying a sand cushion under the foundation - for example, insufficient layer thickness or poor-quality sand compaction.

Note:cracks in an old house can also occur due to structural changes in the building. Often, owners install a subfloor in a foundation that is not intended for this purpose, and the result will be displacement/shrinkage of the foundation base.

When even a small crack is detected, the main question arises: is it dangerous? Checking this is quite simple - you need to install a control beacon and observe the “behavior” of the crack for a long time. Professionals install special control beacons - plate ones, which must be registered in supervisory authorities. At home, when solving the problem yourself, you can use one of the following methods:

• stick a strip of paper onto the crack indicating the installation date;
• prepare a gypsum solution and place a strip of it on the crack.

And then all that remains is to wait and periodically check the status of the control beacon. It may take several months before any conclusions can be drawn - experts say that the crack needs to be monitored for 8-12 months.

How dangerous it is will be shown by the rupture of the control beacon - if there is such a phenomenon, then it will be necessary to use complex technical solutions to fix the problem, if there is no gap in the beacon, then you should not worry at all.

Methods for eliminating cracks in the house

Different cracks can be fixed in certain ways - you must first determine the level of the problem.

Note:if the control beacon shows a rapidly expanding crack, then no methods of eliminating cracks with your own hands will help - they will only have a short-term effect. Be sure to invite specialists to solve the problem, otherwise the consequences will be the most terrible - the collapse of the wall or the entire structure!

How to fix a crack in a house from the inside

If small cracks are found on the wall inside the house, then eliminating them is as easy as shelling pears. All you need is a primer and a special putty mesh. You need to act according to the instructions below:

• we clean the surface of building materials and finishing - the wall should be perfectly clean;
• we use a deep penetration primer (with exactly this marking!) - we cover the entire cleaned surface;
• glue the putty mesh onto the entire prepared surface;

Note:a special mesh must be used to cover the entire area of ​​damage on the wall - even small sections of cracks should not protrude beyond its boundaries.

• Apply a small layer of putty to the mesh and leave until completely dry.

Only after the putty layer has completely dried can you begin to grout the surface and glue wallpaper or other finishing materials.

Repairing a crack in a house from the outside of a wall

If small cracks appear on the outside of the house, you should proceed according to the same principle as in the above option. Procedure:

• the crack site is cleared of plaster or debris;
• apply a layer of deep penetration primer and glue the putty mesh onto it;
• apply putty. But! In case of eliminating cracks on external walls, it is advisable to use a special reinforced putty - it is resistant to negative impact atmospheric changes.

If cracks on the outside of the walls of the house go not only along the plaster, but also spread to brickwork, then you will have to put in a lot more effort. And in this case, the algorithm of actions will be as follows:

Note:the metal mesh must cover the entire surface intended for applying a new layer of plaster. This way, the new plaster will not spread, which will allow finishing materials to be applied flawlessly.

This situation means only one thing - it is urgently necessary to take drastic measures to eliminate this problem. If you ignore all the recommendations of specialists and limit yourself only to the repair options described above, the result will be the collapse of the entire house. But even a beginner can cope with the work of eliminating such complex active cracks - the main thing is to strictly adhere to the following instructions:

1. All the plaster on the wall at the location of the crack is knocked off - be sure to maintain a distance of 50 cm on each side of the crack.
2. The crack is cleaned of mortar and dirt - this can be done with a metal spatula.
3. The cleaned crack is filled with polyurethane foam.
4. Fastening metal plates that will tighten the crack, preventing it from spreading further. The following points must be taken into account::

• the plate must be selected from thick, high-quality metal;
• to obtain an optimal result, you will need to tighten the crack with at least 3 plates, and if the crack is long, then you may need 4 or 5 metal plates;
• The plates are fastened using self-tapping screws, but using dowels.

After applying the fastening metal plates, you can continue working according to the usual algorithm - priming/fixing the reinforcing mesh/applying new plaster.

But keep in mind that such measures serve as a temporary measure, since without a specific formation it will not be possible to determine the cause of the appearance of active cracks. Most often, in the future, it will be necessary to carry out corrective work on the foundation - it will either be strengthened/strengthened, or the walls/roof of the house will be raised and complete replacement grounds.

Preventing cracks in the house

To avoid having to deal with cracks in your home, you should familiarize yourself with the prevention of this phenomenon.

Firstly, if you are just designing a house, you need to take several points into account:

• carrying out geodetic surveys must be passed - this will help determine the type of soil, the location of aquifers, the depth of the groundwater;
• Even at the design stage, it is necessary to provide for the possibility of building a subfloor/cellar under the house - this will entail serious design changes;
• It is imperative to familiarize yourself with the depth of soil freezing - the depth of the foundation will depend on this.

Secondly, when buying an old house, pay attention to the existing walls, invite specialists to assess their condition - often small cracks hide serious problems in the stability/reliability of the entire structure. One more point - there should be a blind area around the entire house - this will prevent moisture from entering the foundation, and therefore will prevent its destruction.

What to do if there is a crack in the wall of your apartment or house? The first advice is to observe, but not to delay.

Drawing: Polina Vasilyeva

New building

It happens like this: I waited for the house to be delivered, received the keys to a brand new apartment, and made repairs. Less than a year later, the expensive wallpaper, chosen with love, began to fail: an ugly fold formed on the canvas, the pattern shifted. You decided to re-glue the unfortunate piece and discovered several cracks in the plaster under the wallpaper. Our advice - don't worry in advance.

The most common cause of such cracks in a new building is natural shrinkage of soil, which can last up to five years. If you remove the finishing layers, you will most likely see that the joints between the slabs have come apart, which is especially typical for panel houses, the walls of which, as experts say, have been shaking all their lives. Therefore, it is recommended not to make major repairs immediately after moving in. A fine network of cracks on the walls and ceiling can be remove with putty. To do this, you need to clear the problem area up to the slab, wipe and dry the surface well, then apply a primer, and fill the gaps between the joints of the slabs, then attach a reinforcing mesh (it will give strength and will not allow the walls and ceiling to deform in the future), and then plaster with using gypsum mixture.

What to do if you find something under the wallpaper? serious crack? Then you first need to check whether it diverges. To do this, apply a palm-wide gypsum composition across the crack. If nothing happens to the mark within a month, it means the crack is stable; it can be repaired in the manner already described, after first expanding it and clearing it of construction debris and dust. But if the mark is torn, it means the crack is growing. In this situation, it is better not to wait, but to contact the management company to receive professional help. However, even in this case there is no need to panic, because if the house is put into operation, the likelihood of truly serious violations of construction technologies is extremely small. In any case, a special commission will inspect the property and make recommendations for the developer to eliminate shortcomings.

So, experts recommend that lucky owners of apartments in new buildings reinforce the walls, floor screed, and also provide expansion joints. Make the ceiling in the new apartment suspended, cover the walls and, most importantly, don’t get carried away with expensive ones finishing materials, because the costs may not justify themselves.

an old house

Even in a reliable brick building with walls a meter thick, cracks sometimes form. The reasons can be very diverse: changes in the composition of the soil and its deformation, and as a result - a change in the load on the foundation, an increase in groundwater levels, temperature changes, vibrations, excavation work and the construction of new houses in the neighborhood, improper operation engineering systems and eventually wear and tear. In the latter case, it is necessary to achieve.

Even if the commission does not recognize the house as such, it is obliged to give full permission technical inspection Houses to establish the reasons for what is happening. If the situation is not so serious, small cracks in the internal walls of the premises, provided that they do not diverge, can be repaired quite easily: the damaged area must be cleared, moistened generously with water and cement mortar.

However, we emphasize that deep cracks in the walls brick house – this is pretty serious, because most often the reason for such destruction lies in the unsatisfactory condition of the foundation, which has been soaked for years groundwater, suffered due to burst pipes and water in the basement. In this case, the house will have to go through a number of serious and expensive measures, including waterproofing the foundation and basements, installing a drainage system, repairing pipelines, strengthening the foundation and eliminating the causes of soil subsidence. Naturally, this cannot be done without the help of specialists.

IN panel houses cracks appear at the junctions of the panels, so the seams between the panels must be qualitatively sealed. Previously, they were filled with rubber and cemented in the old fashioned way. Now there are more modern materials: polyurethane seals, polyurethane foam, various mastics. However, it is worth remembering that each such material has its own recommendations and application technology. Therefore, we strongly recommend that you do not carry out repairs yourself, but entrust the work to professional craftsmen.

Alisa Orlova

Residents of building 55 building 3 on Moskovsky Avenue reported that before they had time to move into new social housing under the resettlement program, the walls in their apartments began to show cracks. The site's correspondent looked into the new building and found out what else the new residents were concerned about.

“I miss my apartment on Badigina”

House 55 building 3 on Moskovsky Avenue was built quite quickly. In total, it has two entrances and 80 apartments. All of them are intended for citizens whose previous housing was recognized as unsafe and subject to demolition before January 1, 2012. In the new building, all apartments are one- and two-room, which makes it possible to provide separate housing for displaced people. Residents joke that the city authorities were not in such a hurry to help them as they were to report to Moscow on the results of the resettlement program. Be that as it may, they left their dilapidated wooden houses and have now moved into comfortable apartments, but they are still dissatisfied.

The entrances are dark, there is construction debris and the elevators do not work, but residents are more concerned about another fact - recently the walls in the apartments began to become covered with cracks. The largest of them go from the floor to the ceiling. This is the situation in Tamara Stepanovna’s apartment.

There are many such cracks in every room, the largest - from floor to ceiling

We were very surprised that there were cracks in the walls in the kitchen, in the hallway, and in the rooms,” she comments. - We don’t know how to start cosmetic repairs, what to expect next? This is the social housing we have been dreaming about since 2010. We lived on Badigina, our house was declared unsafe, but you know, I sincerely miss my apartment. There was convenient layout. Large rooms. And here they are tiny, but there is a gigantic corridor. These are, of course, trifles. Cracks and water supply are alarming - hot water flows normally, but cold water barely flows.

Tamara Stepanovna says that neighbors on the sixth floor complained that their windows not only started to crack, but also burst.

Everything is done on the ball, say the residents. - The house was built in a year, on a swampy area. It was hastily cobbled together from what was there, and now it is bursting at the seams.

Cracks appeared in apartments not only on the first floor, like Tamara Alekseevna’s, but throughout the entire building, for example, on the sixth floor

People were forcibly moved from the center to Galushin

Several such houses have been built on Galushina, where people are being resettled from dilapidated and dilapidated housing. There are still few residents in building 55 building 3 - this is evidenced by the empty parking lot and the silence when the doorbell rings.

The house was built extremely quickly, even the box was assembled in an emergency mode, not to mention interior decoration“,” comments Alexey Vorobyov, chairman of the board of the Arkhangelsk regional public movement “Society for the Protection of Consumer Rights,” “social networks are already full of panic messages that in their brand new apartments the walls are cracking and window blocks are bursting. As we noticed, cracks do not occur everywhere, but only on specific floors. We are not builders, we cannot draw conclusions, but we are concerned about the situation. Spring will come - the soil will float, there are fears that everything will be even worse. We have information that needs to be verified that the slabs in this house were not knitted, that is, they were not fastened together during assembly.

It is interesting that some families are settled there practically by force, - this is confirmed by Alexey Vorobyov, who represents the interests of one of these Arkhangelsk residents in court.

View at the entrance

They literally tried to force people to settle there,” he says. - And there are a lot of questions - both about the area and about the surcharge. Everything is not as simple as it seems to people from the outside. There are citizens who are not happy with such a “gift” from the authorities.

Tamara Alekseevna, whom we met at the first entrance, also remembers without joy how her family found out about the move.

We received a summons to evict from old apartment, although there hasn’t been a word about new housing yet,” says Tamara Alekseevna. - We came to court. They ask us - why don’t you move out? We were surprised: “Where?” We went there for two months, and in the end we were told to hand over the keys to the apartment on Badigina. Where to sleep? On the street? As a result, they invited us to hand over the keys to new apartment. So we forcibly moved out - from the center to Galushina.

Not all residents are disappointed with the new house; there was an optimist in the yard:

I am a builder by profession; in the summer I will close the cracks myself - it’s not critical,” he says. - The foundation will move like any house. The ground will thaw in the spring, and the building will settle, and cracks will spread throughout the house! This is fine. No need to panic.

According to the housing and communal services portal of the Arkhangelsk region, deficiencies in construction and finishing works identified during settlement will be eliminated by the contractor and management company according to residents' statements. Specialists from the Department of Municipal Economy are also ready to participate in organizing this work.