What a crack is telling you

So with every building, right, it cracks. And the question really is, what is your building trying to tell you? Is it trying to tell you that you actually have a structural issue or an underlying settlement issue? So every building moves a little bit in its first year or two, but then it should stop. You're, the cracking that's going on should not be active. So it's really important that you find out whether or not the cracking is still moving. So what you want to do is you want to do this. You want to either put some tape or a marker and measure your crack and photograph it. And the key here is that cracks don't move very fast. They move really, really slow. So you're going to have to wait months in order to see whether or not that crack is going to continue. And then once we know if you have an active crack, we know if your building is actually moving, then an engineer can give you an idea of whether or not this is just cosmetic because all concrete cracks and your building just moved a little bit in the very beginning or whether or not you need to do some repair. So yeah, just make sure that you write down your date, which doors stick and mark it. And then you have to mark it and leave it. But, you know, we can't go back in time. So we can't really tell you on the spot whether or not you have an active crack. It is something that's going to take a few months to determine. So for the board, what you want is you want a manager who can have a dated record of the cracks, the length of the cracks, and whether or not those cracks are active. That turns a guess into a real decision. So you want to move forward and solve the problem. If you own the building, same thing with an apartment building. If you're a lender and you're a carrier, they're both going to ask you when this crack started, how long it's been going. That's always the first thing that I ask somebody is have you noticed this crack grow at all recently? But memory fails us. So it's better to have it documented. So if it's your house and you're just now noticing maybe the molding that's cracked, make note of it because you're not going to remember in a few months from now whether or not there are two cracks in that molding or one or how deep that crack was if it was one inch or two inch. So it's going to help if you call an engineer and then we can get you the right solution. And it may be a paint and patch situation, but you need to know that. Otherwise, you're covering up what it is your building is telling you and could be a problem. It could lead to a larger repair in the future.