Frame Inspection- there is more to it than you think!

Last Saturday I inspected a two storey house frame. It had already passed mandatory frame inspection and looked pretty good. I did not find any significant defects to report except that upper level Rumpus room had excessive bounce.

When I was walking it was shaking and then I remembered few years ago about a court case. In that case a house owner (it was a multi million dollar home) sued the builder because his chandeliers rattled when he was having his dinner and someone walked over the room above.

In this case you can just imagine kids jumping around in Rumpus room and the ceiling below bouncing.

I had a similar potential problem few years ago, building an upper storey extension, so what happened?

Well it seems that some modern building materials such as engineered timber beams have lower resistance to dynamic loading than hardwood. That is to say that even if on paper they pass all the requirements of static loading design (strength and deflection) they will bounce around.

The real expertise is about what to do. How do you fix it? This is where experience comes into it and I have recommended two stage fix.

The first stage was to improve stiffening and bracing followed by re inspection to see if that did the trick. There was actually a very good chance that this inexpensive fix would be all that was required.

If not then selective insertion of additional structural members in the right locations and the trick is what and where.

The good thing is that at this frame stage owner had the opportunity to fix his floor at the time where it was easy and relatively inexpensive.

The message of this story is that you can have your house built and everything passes mandatory inspections and it will still be wrong and you won’t know until it’s to late or too expensive to fix.

This is where depth of inspection experience can help you avoid construction problems.

 

This entry was posted in frame inspection, New Home Inspections. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.


+ 2 = 9