brickwalls
I'm looking into buying an apartment and I'm visiting some locations. During one of my visits I saw this exterior wall of a future apartment building:
I'm not an expert but it does not look good to me.
I have two questions:
Are those walls badly built?
What guidelines must be followed when building brick walls?
Here are some more photos of this work (click through for a larger version):
A better question would be, why is my sheathing getting wet?
The grain of the sheathing suggests to me it is Homosote Homasote. It should not be squishy, rather firm and resilent.
Something is allowing water past your brick barrier, and then, past what was vapor barrier (for the time, 15-30# tar embedded felt paper. I would look up, overflowing gutters can get behind fascia boards and run down the inside of the bricks, soaking the sheathing if the vapor barrier was broken during the bricking (as sometimes happened, also mortar bridging can cause this). In no case is it normal for the sheathing to be wet. Poor tuck pointing (especially around windows) can also allow water intrusion.
Once the water intrusion is corrected, all stud bays in the affected areas should be opened and the sheathing evaluated for viability. Also, opening the cavity will allow faster drying out and possibly see where the intrusion is starting.
As an aside, my 1941 house used a gypsum lath board for plaster.
This Old House's website advises getting a sample of the current plaster and mortar to s lab so you can get them accurately matched, if I remember correctly. They seemed to be saying that it was important that the brick and mortar be matched to each other, tho I'm not sure why..
Best Answer
In the aeronautical industry, we have this saying "If it looks ugly, it flies ugly" which has proven out in that aerodynamic design needs certain sleek lines and cobbled together garbage just doesn't have what it takes.
Same goes for the building industry. Despite the cosmetics of Stucco and the willingness to absolve the builder because it "doesn't look pretty", if a non-load-bearing wall is this foul, you can be certain that little or even less care was taken on the structural elements of the building.
This is why a 6.5 earthquake in a country with strict building standards can be fairly annoying but in another with unreinforced masonry and no standards, ends up killing 30,000-40,000 people, both areas having the same population density.
Poorly designed, non-loadbearing walls will just shear off the building and fall into the street in a quake.