Is my house brick veneer, or double brick?

Well your house is timber framed, so it's brick veneer.
 

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If your looking at older homes and don't have photo's I reckon an easy way to check is to unscrew a power point from the wall, if it's double brick you will have a little metal box and see some brick, if it's just gyprock walls you see nice thin gyprock.

Usually I just tap (hit lightly) the walls and gyprock walls give a more hollow sound while brick is a dull thud.

Hope that helps someone.

Cheers
Graeme
 
quoll said:
Usually I just tap (hit lightly) the walls and gyprock walls give a more hollow sound while brick is a dull thud.
Click to expand...

While this is usually correct, note for older houses this may not be the case. For houses suffering from salt damp or cracks, people sometimes place furring channels on the brick wall and line it with gypock to hide the damage rather than fix it.
 
Zeddy said:
While this is usually correct, note for older houses this may not be the case. For houses suffering from salt damp or cracks, people sometimes place furring channels on the brick wall and line it with gypock to hide the damage rather than fix it.
Click to expand...
But then you notice that door frames and window frames are thicker than would be expected. So yet another hint that something is different to the majority.

How do you tell a steel frame from timber frame house? Other than looking in the roof space which is a dead give away but don't see many people doing that at an open inspection.

Cheers
Graeme
 
quoll said:
But then you notice that door frames and window frames are thicker than would be expected. So yet another hint that something is different to the majority.

How do you tell a steel frame from timber frame house? Other than looking in the roof space which is a dead give away but don't see many people doing that at an open inspection.

Cheers
Graeme
Click to expand...

Yes, you are right with regards to the door and window framing. However older houses sometimes have thick layers of render and odd masonry wall constructions (which can sometimes itself hint at things - why is the render so amazingly thick?).

Re: steel and timber - it's not often done in an open inspection, but you can be sure I would be sticking my head into the roof space to check the roof framing type and layout before laying down money! ;)

For the last house I bought I did an open inspection, then later requested a private one saying I'd also be thinking of putting down an offer. When the agent opened the door, we went nuts with a moisture meter, torches, spirit level, climbed into the roof space, started whacking wall render near the floor, juming up and down to see if the floor bounced... they probably thought I was a bit crazy! ;)
 
Zeddy said:
juming up and down to see if the floor bounced... they probably thought I was a bit crazy! ;)
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LOL, I've done the jumping up and down thing as well, found one timber floor with a lot of white ant damage under the carpet. The house was really in need of a knock down so not very surprising.

Cheers
Graeme
 
Zeddy said:
Yes, you are right with regards to the door and window framing. However older houses sometimes have thick layers of render and odd masonry wall constructions (which can sometimes itself hint at things - why is the render so amazingly thick?).
Click to expand...
Hah, sometimes the render is thick just because it is. We knocked a doorway through a stone wall in our old house - cut the render first so it would come away clean in the hole. One side it was really thin, done well, and was very hard to get off the stone. On the other side it was pushing 2 inches thick, came off really easily ... and half the REST of the wall fell off so we had to get it redone. We figure it was just rendered by a different person, there are a few other construction differences between the two halves of the house too. Considering that the mud between the stones under the render had handprints all through it (house built by hand in 1876) we could have called the forensics in to verify that ;)

Zeddy said:
For the last house I bought I did an open inspection, then later requested a private one saying I'd also be thinking of putting down an offer. When the agent opened the door, we went nuts with a moisture meter, torches, spirit level, climbed into the roof space, started whacking wall render near the floor, juming up and down to see if the floor bounced... they probably thought I was a bit crazy! ;)
Click to expand...
LOL! I had a look at a 1910's house a few weeks ago - no moisture meter though, and didn't get into the roof, but I was doing a fair bit of that too. House hadn't been touched for decor since the 1970s so no recent work hiding anything and had no salt damp or termite damage, which is pretty impressive if you ask me.

And the funny thing is I STILL couldn't work out what the floors were made out of, except for the 'recently' added wood paneled room with the lime green built in and shag pile carpet which had a fair amount of movement. They seemed woodish (some slight give) but had no bounce at all in the bedrooms, but I only weigh 55kg so I can jump up and down on some floors that an adult man would fall through without trying. The hallway was tiled concrete. With a ramp in it. Bizarre.

Don't you just love poking around in old houses :)
 
in clay areas in perth, some builders use double brick but dry line the internal walls.

everyone thinks they're brick veneer, but they aint, so ask.
 
Blue Card! said:
in clay areas in perth, some builders use double brick but dry line the internal walls.
Click to expand...
But for new builds I think double brick would be counterproductive.. Preventing cracks from reactive soils is achieved from the stiffness of the raft slab, not the number of brick leafs. Going from clad frame to brick, to double brick, requires deeper footing beams.
 
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