Hello,
We are having a home built and the foundation was poured. I noticed some voids under the frame brackets of the foundation along with some shearing of the concrete on the corner of the porch and garage. Attached are the pictures relating to this.
The builder said that these are “Normal” and they won’t be fixing it. Does anyone have any advice about how to go about solving this problem or any building codes/building specifications that would be able to back me up? I am an engineer but have very little concrete experience.
Thank You!
Replies
That's pretty sloppy. I'd take a hammer to the area around the crack in the first photo and see what happens. That looks like a big void under there. The builder should be embarrassed.
Hi Florida,
Thank you for the reply.
Yes, I can actually knock on it and it has a hollow sound. Do you happen to know what to do in this situation as the builder said its normal and is cosmetic. Obviously it's not cosmetic, but is there something I can do to force them to fix it? (building codes etc). I'm in Charlotte, NC.
Thanks!
If the rest of the concrete looks even half as bad as the photos, don't pay a dime until you get someone who knows what they're doing to evaluate it.
I suspect the contractor didn't order enough concrete, then had his crew rake it out an inch or two low while he ordered another load. Meanwhile, the concrete was setting up - for an hour, two hours, who knows how long? When the truck does arrive, he has the driver add water to make the concrete soupy and easy to spread. That makes what's called a "cold joint," and explains the obvious horizontal line in the last photo.
Agreed looks bad. It looks like what I would expect from someone’s first attempt at pouring concrete. An experienced concrete guy would have done a lot better. It could possibly be a bad batch of concrete too, but usually you can tell when pouring if it’s good or bad. On a rare occasion defective concrete is poured out the shoot. Also, the environment can ruin the curing process as well. To me it almost looks like the mix was too dry and they probably added a lot of water to surface. Or they possibly over tooled when finishing bringing all the fat to the top out of the mix which in turn weakens the mix.
Be bold, break the void out so you can see exactly how big it is. It looks to me like they waiting too long to put the brackets in and didn't make any effort to make sure they were well embedded. If this is the kind of work your contractor blows off as being unimportant you need to stop work and reconsider your options.