It Never Rains but it Pours

We had a bit of rain the other day. I was sitting with Stijn who is about to take occupation of the house I sold him when it started to drizzle. After a few minutes it picked up and then it began to flood. Every gutter was turned into a weir and there was water everywhere. Since the house was built in 1924, I was silently praying that there would not be the telling drip drip of a leak, especially as he was about to move in. Of course I told him it was an unusual rain and that the gutters don't always behave that badly. Fortunately a day or two later the local newspapers headlines claimed it was the worst storm in 22 years. And it was bad. Upmarket houses lost their roofs, trees were bowled over onto cars and signposts were flattened. We had Allover Mzansi's builder's toilet blown 300m down the valley and now is quite twisted. We now use it to explain to people the dangers of smoking in a pit toilet since it looks as if it's been through lift-off at Cape Canaveral. Other than that, we only lost the Clingfilm cladding that was used to seal the walls whilst curing, but on closer inspection I lost my sense of humour also.

The walls had developed a speckled look which was hardly noticeable and just added to the character. It took us a while to work out that it was the calling card left by the hail. And then we came across the crack. And the crack continues to get worse, but it was developing under the cover of the Clingfilm and by the time we saw it, there was little we could do. I was stupid not to realise that this was likely to happen, especially over a long expanse of wall that had no expansion joints. Also the bend in the wall created from differential drying rates mentioned in an earlier post should have set the alarm bells ringing. But it didn't and only after the appearance of the crack have we begun cutting expansion joints in any section of wall longer than 1.2m. This suits us as the panels are 1.2m wide and they leave a line at the joint between panels which is unsightly. Now we cut along the line and this is just as unsightly but necessary to avoid cracks developing where we don't want them.

Mike the engineer thinks that they may be stabilisation cracks. Apparently these are quite common in roads (which are also rammed earth structures except they use massive road machinery rather than hand tampers) especially if the lime content is slightly too high. So the lime content is a critical component (!!!) and Mike took off some samples to have them tested. Whether they are shrinkage or stabilisation cracks, I really don't want them and wish they had chosen someone else's wall.

I'm now beginning to believe that Johan's quote "this is not a building site, it is a school" deserved a lot more credit than I first gave it.