The CRACKS Are Coming

*cue scary music*

I love my house. I love the large windows, big yard, simple design, and high ceiling in the front room. But my house is cracking.

Yep, cracking. My house is made entirely of concrete block, like almost all the other buildings in this city. (As a good Californian, I do hope that we never have an earthquake).

When we moved in, there were a number of large cracks in some of the walls. We asked the landlord to have them filled in. She did. Six months later, they had reappeared again. A couple months ago I made an effort to use caulk to fill in all the cracks in our two bathrooms, because they were pretty ugly on the tile.

But now, just in the last month, the cracks opened up again. And lately it seems like they have been daily been getting worse.

It’s a little unnerving–to go into the bathroom in the morning and find new cracks that weren’t there the day before.

We have a good friend in construction, and I asked him about this, and he said that it’s probably because our house’s foundation is clay. Which means that if it rains hard (which it has lately), then water gets into the foundation and causes the walls to shift slightly. He said we don’t need to worry unless the floor or the ceiling starts cracking. Comforting. Um, yeah, I guess so.

I love this house. So I don’t think I will be convinced to move. But I do hope that the walls decide to stop cracking any day now.

The hallway

These are new as of last week.

Just the other day, this big chunk fell out of the tile on the bathroom wall. Sigh. That’s going to take a lot of caulk to fill in….

This one has got to be the biggest crack of all. It’s about 1/4 inch wide. Thankfully, just in my closet.