Walls and Ceilings - Old Craftsman House. Easy Question. More Than Settling?

I live in a craftsman style house in San Diego that has some wall cracks that expand/contract, but I think this may be more than just settling and seasonal changes. Pictures at: http://video-by.us/house

The load bearing walls are cracking near things that are framed in (windows/doors). The Master bedroom door area crack is so bad now that the door no longer closes correctly - leaning/shifted.

I'm about to crawl into the attic to check for moisture - just finished raining - and inspect for cracks, rot, gremlins, etc. Any advice for specific indicators to look for while I'm up there?

What is holding up the house's framing?

Do neighbors have similar problems say built on the same soil type?

What is holding up the house's framing?

Do neighbors have similar problems say built on the same soil type?

Holding up the house's framing: I'm fairly sure the framing is supported by footers on the slab foundation, but I'm not 100% on this b/c I've never taken down any drywall to check. My vocab/knowledge of terms is limited, so let me know if I should give more info (or pictures). The doors and windows are attached to studs - again, making an assumption.

Neighbors: Great question. Should have mentioned this in the original post. My house is one of 3 identical houses next to each other. All have same floor plan, all built @ the same time. The other two houses are still on a pier and beam foundation (mine is on a slab), but yes, they have the same problem(s) around framed in features. All three houses are built on what would probably be considered fairly loose/unstable soil. The grade of the soil is pretty much flat for the whole neighborhood.

You have carpet by that one door you photo'ed? Do you feel anything weird on the floor like an offset hump? Have you layed a level on the floor across the width of that door?

I DEFINATELY recommend you hire a structural Engineer to come to your house and evaluate the situation if you have cracks that you don't know the cause of. That goes for any house, anywhere, any time.

One can have a sinkhole under the foundation and never even know it, and the house could be getting ready to collapse.

My .02

I used a 3 foot level. Floor checks out. Don't have anything bigger right now.

I looked through the big crack next to the door near the top of the frame and noticed that the header for door frame isn't connected to the vertical stud. There is about a 1/4 inch gap between the two. Basically, this http://www.doityourself.com/stry/h2frameadoor isn't what my door looks like.

Thoughts on the idea of poor construction techniques being the reason why cracks show only near things that are framed?

I'm willing to entertain the idea of hiring an engineer, but would like to try and eliminate a few other causes before shelling out that kind of cash.

An engineer would evaluate the entire situation regardless of what you may have concluded / discovered. So investigating yourself wouldn't necessarily save you money, but would give you a better feel for what they were talking about.

One possibility that you are seeing door and window areas cracking more than other areas is that doors and windows have headers that are nailed horizontally between studs, and so when a wall begins to slant, it is more easily seen in those areas as they become parallelograms.

Not having the header resting on the top of the door frame is normal. The header is what transfers the load above the door to the outside jack and king studs and then down to the bottom plate. The gap between the top of the door and the header is needed to have room to level the door inside the frame in the event that the wall framing is off, the header is warped, or if the framing lumber shrinks in the first couple years the house is "under roof", or during seasonal changes, it won't crush the door frame and seize the door.

Perhaps you should check the walls to see if they have shifted too. If one wall is out at the top, and the opposite is out at the bottom by the same amount, then the house may have shifted.



I hope this helps

MS

Floor is level? Really? Hmmm. This is getting intersting because now we have to explain how IF the door jamb is on the slab on each side (is it?, or is the right side being lifted to the ceiling?) how one side can be higher than the other. Or IS it? Maybe the house is leaning to the right. THAT would create the same door appearance. Check the sides of the door jamb for plumb and also go over to the wall on the left or right and see if those walls are plumb or not ("plumb " is the term for being level, vertically).

IF the floor is level and IF the side door jambs are equally down on the floor (are they?), and IF the jambs and walls are plumb, then that only leaves the ceiling, and so check THAT for level above the door, so we can determine if you have some wierd situation there where indeed you are right about some header issue, and maybe the house was not framed according to normal standards.

Ok,

While the base of the door frame is level, based on the feedback I've received here, I decided to take leveler readings in several different places to be a little more thorough.

The walls of the room parallel to the door frame aren't plumb. It's an old house. The forward wall (toward the front door) leans slightly toward the front, the rear wall (exterior wall) leans slightly toward the rear.

There IS a high point in the floor of the mudroom that seems to slope rearward and toward the bedroom. I've made a rough topo drawing (http://www.video-by.us/media/Floorplan-hump.jpg) based on several readings of the leveler that I made in the bedroom and mud room.

I updated the site where I've posted pictures and have put in leveler shots of the door between the mud room and bedroom (http://video-by.us/house/door.htm). Long story short, the vertical parts of the frame are plumb. The header leans down toward the rear of the house. The floor seems to be mostly parallel to the door frame header - lower toward the rear of the house.

On the first page I posted (http://video-by.us/house), I've also included a shot of my front porch. After reading what mudslinger wrote, I started to look for signs of shift. In addition to the stuff I mentioned about the uneven floor, I noticed the pillars on my front porch seem pitched forward.....Damn....

While I didn't plan on anxiously crawling around the floor of my house with a leveler this weekend, I've learned a ton. The floor has a few high spots throughout the houses. Not surprisingly, all of the high spots are near cracks in the wall.

Does this sound like foundation settling or something more serious? What should my next steps be?

Thanks for all the help.

Looked at your pics. Measure from top corners of top casing over door to ceiling. From my eyes, this looks way off and if true, you will get different measurements up to the ceiling. IF the door side jambs are equally down tight on the floor, that can only mean the floor went crooked. And on one of yor floor leveler pics it IS out of level.

But what also is intriguing about this is the fact that there is this sudden lean at just an opening in the wall where a door or window was framed in. Either the added pressure of the bearing weight from above transfering to king studs, or someone did something unusual with the pouring of the slab in areas where they knew openings were going to be.

Did you say this is seasonal? And you live in a climate where you don't get frost heave. It's like your ground takes on different moisture content.

Do you have a land drainage problem allowing water to run and pool under the slab? Do you have gutters? Often load bearing sides of the house are the side where water runs off the roof at and this could be your problem. It may be seasonal because maybe the problem occurs or unoccurs during the rainy season?

Yes, it's seasonal. We definitely don't have many/any occasions where temperatures even get close to freezing, so a winter heave by the slab is a very unlikely culprit.

We do, however, get a significant amount of rain during our winters. Significant at least in comparison to the amount of rain we get in the summer. And it has been raining a lot lately (storms now in the midwest were here when this post began).

We don't have gutters, and neither do our neighbors, whose house is no more than 15 feet from ours. We should probably have those anyway.

If the front wall, and the rear wall are both leaning "out" at the top, along with the porch, it can get suspicious.

Do any of those rooms have vaulted ceilings where the roof ridge is parallel to the walls that are leaning out?

If they do, or if the joists were removed in order to make a ceiling vaulted, it is possible that the weight of the roof is pushing the front and back walls out. In which case I would definately get a structural engineer in to see the situation. (essentially, if cross bracing is removed and the walls are pushing out, it is only time until the walls push out and the roof collapses.)

This could also help explain the door rack if the door is perpendicular to the walls that are pushing out at the tops.

Although my thoughts are sight unseen as to your situation, I have seen when people want a vaulted ceiling without putting in the proper bracing, and the walls have done things nobody wanted them to do.

If you shop around for a good engineer, the few hundred bucks you spend for piece of mind is usually well worth the investment.

In my time doing drywall etc, if I fixed a crack and a year or so later it was 1/2 wide again, I would definately wonder what in the framing shifted so much.

MS