THE RENOVATION FILES CASE #6: THE THIN BRICK WALLS
Early last year I received an email from the distressed owner of a Victorian terraced house. “I am at my wits’ end as I don’t know what to do or who to contact,” it began.
The author of this frantic email was a first-time renovator who had made the rather shocking discovery that the entire flank wall of his three-storey end terrace house was built of potentially unstable single skin brickwork. Neither the mortgage valuation nor the homebuyer survey he’d commissioned from a leading corporate survey firm had identified this major concern. The issue only came to light when, following advice in his survey report to insert additional air bricks, he’d drilled through the lower wall and noted that it was only half the normal thickness. He’d duly contacted his surveying firm who had responded by emailing over their ‘complaints procedure’, a densely
