Crack in the paint or wall?

imran22

Hi All

Is there a way to differentiate between crack in the wall and crack in the paint? Does the crack in the image appears to be in the wall/roof?

Thank you for your help

maninthestreet

The horizontal cracks between the walls and the coving could just be due to shrinkage. Are those walls solid or stud partitions??

imran22

maninthestreet wrote: »

The horizontal cracks between the walls and the coving could just be due to shrinkage. Are those walls solid or stud partitions??

I am a rookie in this space and don't know the answer. However I can tell you that it is a Semi-detached house and the picture is for the wall that separates the two properties.

It makes sense about the horizontal crack parallel to the roof but then there is similar one running vertically as well.

Freecall

It is virtually impossible to tell from a single shot, remember the important thing about cracks is not how big they are but how much they move.

Even a huge crack would not necessarily be an issue if it is static but movement of relatively small cracks can reveal that something is not as it should be.

It would be worth re-taking the picture from the same spot in a few months time and making a comparison (a close up of a ruler across the crack can help). You may find that it is exactly the same, in which case fill and re-decorate.

If it is bigger (or smaller) then it may need further investigation.

AlexMac

It's probably trivial. Judging from the rough paintwork (which implies several coats of paint over many years) and the unfashionably dated artex textured ceiling, it's a fairly old house; early or mid 20th Century?

In which case. its not the minor shrinkage you get as the plaster dries out in new homes- although our 1986 property showed some shrinkage cracking after w moved in a few years ago as we put in new C/H and heated it properly and it had probably been cold and musty for years.

At very worse it could be minor structural movement, causing the walls to pull away from each other and the ceiling; but even if so, and assuming I'm right and its an older house, they are amazingly "forgiving". We had a Victorian house which moved so much in the war (a V2 doodlebug rocket fell nearby) then again in the great drought of 1976, that at one point our next-door neighbour said her mum could chat with our home's occupant through the crack in the hall wall!

Look outside- if there are major cracks in the brickwork or render, especially if these run diagonally up or down from corners of windows or door arches, you might have problems.... but if not, I bet you don't.

So, monitor it as someone suggests above, and if it doean't get worse- fill and decorate. If it does, pay a couple of hundred quid to a surveyor for peace of mind/

Grenage

That looks like a trivial crack, possibly from bad paint prep or simple expansion/contraction. A structural crack is unlikely to follow the coving like that.

If you get a major structural crack that you need to worry about, you'll know about it.

imran22

If we get the structural survey done will it establish the exact reason behind it or it will be finger in the air as well?

Is it better to upgrade the survey lender is offering or get an independent survey in addition to the basic survey lender offers?

Thanks for all your advice

Tassotti

Get an independent full survey, not the lenders one.