ᐅ Bottom course of masonry poorly constructed?

Hello,

We are building a single-family house and have chosen a general contractor. Unfortunately, we have been facing major problems with them from the very beginning.

Our basement is now finished, and the masons have laid the first row of blocks. Currently, work is halted because the fall protection required the area to be backfilled first.

We took a close look at the first row of masonry and, as non-experts, find the quality to be very poor. Is there anyone with professional experience who can offer advice? Are there standards or guidelines regarding acceptable mortar joint thickness or similar?

Some blocks are broken, and there are vertical misalignments of about 1 cm (0.4 inches). We are concerned that this may affect the subsequent rows of masonry.

I am attaching photos.

Good luck
Nasentier

Phew, I’m not an expert, but if you have major problems from the start, wouldn’t it be time to arrange professional construction supervision? What good are the 3000€ saved if the house might have defects? I would strongly advise you to do so as soon as possible…

Hello Nasentier

The basement ceiling seems to be significantly out of level at the top. Of course, the bottom layer needs to be evened out. But something already went wrong during the pouring.

And what is shown in the second picture? Is the block shorter than the others, which is why it was placed higher?

The work looks like it was done by Albanian sub-sub-subcontractors.

Steven

nasentier schrieb:

We took a look at the first row of masonry and, as laypeople, we found the workmanship very poor. [...]
We are concerned this will affect the subsequent courses of the wall.

My advice would be: immediately contact a lawyer and arrange an emergency appointment. Construction must be stopped. Clearly, you are dealing with a subcontractor who takes the term "shell construction" (in the sense of rough building) far too literally. In this case, you don’t need to be an expert to clearly see that the masons appear to be even less skilled than yourselves. This cannot be explained away by strong beer, a bad night, or the wrong glasses alone (even combined). It’s obvious that only "volunteers", not even semi-skilled workers, were involved—likely with less training than watching at least one tutorial video on proper masonry would provide.
You can find someone in a similar situation here: https://www.hausbau-forum.de/threads/grosse-stossfugen-im-rohbau-noch-innerhalb-der-akzeptanz-oder-mangel.37381/ and https://www.hausbau-forum.de/threads/einbehalt-von-zahlungen-fuer-maengel-am-rohbau.38051/

Bauenaberwie schrieb:

but if you’ve had major problems from the very start, isn’t it about time to organize a qualified construction supervision???

Yes, for the continuation of construction—I would recommend a construction expert to supervise as well, preferably not with the current contractor, in my opinion.

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Despite the comments already made, I would like to ask you to submit more informative pictures (high-resolution overall views) instead of only detailed shots taken out of context. This way, it may be possible to detect additional errors early on and assess them more accurately.

nasentier schrieb:

Hello,

We are building a single-family house and have decided to work with a general contractor. Unfortunately, we have been having major problems with them from the very beginning.

Our basement is now finished, and the masons have laid the first course of bricks. Currently, work is on hold because the fall protection required the area to be backfilled first.

We took a closer look at the first brick course and, as laypeople, think it looks very poorly done. Is there anyone with professional experience who can help?
Are there standards for how wide mortar joints are allowed to be, or something similar?
Some bricks are broken, and there are offsets of about 1 cm (0.4 inches) vertically.
We are worried that this may affect the following courses.

I will attach pictures.

Good luck,
Nasentier

And probably another layperson building without external site supervision. A tip: pay the 3-4 thousand euros for external site supervision and you can build with more peace of mind, as all your questions will be professionally answered. That’s how it is for us. I am in almost constant contact with the site supervisor couple (the woman is an architect, the man a civil engineer) and I ask all questions. Some questions later turn out to be silly. But I don’t know that as a layperson 🙂 The advantage is that you don’t bother the tradespeople unnecessarily 😎