crumbling sounds behind our walls / renovation next door

I thought I posted this but it seems to not have gone through. Apologies if this is coming through a second time.

Let me preface this by saying we did a gut renovation several years ago, so I want to be accommodating to our next door neighbors so long as it is safe to our house.

We live in an attached wood frame house. Our next door neighbors sold recently and the new owners are doing a gut or near-gut reno. They just started demo about 2 weeks ago. They are banging directly onto our party wall, and when they do so, I hear loud crumbling noises behind our wall. It must be the brick/stone that was filled into the wooden framing crumbling and falling to the floor. I’m not complaining about the loud banging noises. What I AM concerned about is the loud crumbling noises. Is this normal? How concerned should I be that this would affect the integrity of our house? Sometimes the crumbling sounds metallic, I assume from hitting the metal studs behind our walls. TIA.

ps158

in General Discussion 6 years and 9 months ago

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ps158 | 6 years and 9 months ago

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Where are the emojis when I need them! You
freaking me out now, I was all ready to stop worrying so much LOL…

CarmenR | 6 years and 9 months ago

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The situation bobjbkln described is what our house is like and is what our neighbor did when he renovated, hence the giant hole in our party wall foundation (we know it was him because the bricks were all on our side and his new joist was sitting on dirt on our side of the property line). We fixed it but it required underpinning.

ps158 | 6 years and 9 months ago

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Oh my that’s terrible. Thanks for sharing this. Sounds like we’ll be having a conversation w/ our neighbor / contractor.

shahnandersen

in General Discussion 6 years and 9 months ago

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There is a good chance that the contractor has no idea how those houses are built. For example, in our case, a contractor removed a joist and the bricks behind it in the cellar and ended up with a hole clear to our cellar. When we called him on it, he said the had thought that we had separate walls and he had just broken through to the space between them. On the other side there have been numerous times when electrical contractors have chipped out walls to install new outlets and have broken through our upstairs walls. So absolutely talk to you neighbors and their contractor. It could save you and them a lot of grief. Note in our case the party wall was only two bricks wide and only one frame for the shared wall.

ps158 | 6 years and 9 months ago

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Thank you everyone for your insight. It puts me more at ease knowing there are likely 2 rows of brick in the frame (theirs and ours). I figured it was the plaster being removed from the brick…But all the hammering and vibrations from doing that were causing the brick / mortar on OUR row of bricks behind our walls to crumble. I just wish we could see behind our walls to see how the brick / mortar is holding up since we didn’t do any repointing when we did our reno several years ago. (Now I’m wondering if we should have done that!!) I forgot to mention earlier the metallic sound I heard is the crumbling hitting the piping behind our drywall and not just the metal framing, which is why I’m pretty certain the crumbling is happening on our side and not theirs. My takeaway here is perhaps it’s okay and I shouldn’t stress too much about it.

I don’t see the party wall anywhere in our house, but I’ll check the basement later again, just to be sure. A lot of dirt (or perhaps dusty mortar?) and crumbs of stone have fallen out of our party stone wall in the basement – just notic ed it this morning on the stairs into the basement and along the perimeter of the party wall. We didn’t repoint anything in the basement either. Not sure how much that matters structurally…Seems like it would matter a lot more than the filled-in brick!

This should probably be a separate post, which I may do, but I can hear EVERYTHING from our kitchen into their kitchen. It was like that before the renovation started, but was never a problem because the owners were elderly and hardly made any noise. But for example, I heard the entire conversation of one of the worker’s on his phone AND the other person he was talking to on the other end of the line since he was on speaker phone – through our kitchen wall / cabinetry. They have a fireplace on the other side of our kitchen wall, so maybe that has something to do w/ the sound traveling more at that part of the house. But anyway, any suggestions of how to make it more soundproof? Since they are doing renovations, I’d be happy to pitch in a little $ if they could do that on their side while the walls are down.

yudashasom | 6 years and 9 months ago

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I agree w/ Carmen 100%

AFAIK, the brick filled frame houses were for fire code.

CarmenR | 6 years and 9 months ago

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We have a woodframe house that has a party wall that is two bricks thick, but they’re bricks that are smaller than today’s construction bricks. When we removed our walls, we saw that all the mortar was gone from all the brick infill between the framing. We did not remove the brick, but did repoint all of it and then framed on top of it, insulated and put up drywall. It would be very surprising to me if they were removing the brick- while I don’t know that it was initially for structural purposes, it certainly must provide some stability now that your framing is probably quite old.

All that said, if you’re really in a one-brick party-wall situation, I believe they are legally supposed to get a waiver from you to do any work. We did not initially do this because we were only working on “our” side of the wall (our bricks) but when we discovered a 2 foot hole in the party wall foundation, we did inform our neighbor about it so we could fix it.

Is there any part of your house where you can see your party wall? Maybe in the attic/crawlspace or in the cellar? If they’re rea lly removing shared bricks, I’d bet you’ll start to see some cracking in your drywall pretty quickly.

If I were to bet, though, you’re probably hearing plaster or whatever other garbage is in the walls and not the brick specifically. We had literal garbage from the 1850s in our walls (clothes, marbles, chalk) so its totally possible there’s just a bunch of stuff in there moving around. As long as you’re not seeing changes on your side, I wouldn’t be *too* worried about it.

GreenThinker | 6 years and 9 months ago

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I’ve heard the brick wasn’t put in there for structural purposes, but for insulation. The proper term for it is Brick Nogging. The crumbling sounds you hear could be this brick being removed, it can also be the sound of lath and plaster being taken down. If it’s truly a shared party wall, if they removed the bricks, they should be seeing your drywall. Typically, each home will have there own wood frame with brick infill. The best way to approach it would be to talk directly with your neighbor and share your concerns, they may be hesitant to show a stranger just the extent of the work they are doing, but hopefully you can reason with them that you simply want to see how your wall looks like from their side.

ps158 | 6 years and 9 months ago

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Thanks for replying. How would you handle this – would you ask to see the inside to see what they’re doing? Just ask what they’re doing and take their word for it? I really don’t know how best to approach this…

resident2 | 6 years and 9 months ago

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You should be very concerned because if they are taking out the brick between the frame, you will have structural issues.
There are many contractors that do not understand the engineering of a Brick Filled Frame. You cannot just hammer it like a brick wall.