Is the bottom row of the wall poorly built?

Hello,

we are building a single-family house and have decided on a general contractor. Unfortunately, we have had major problems with them from the beginning.

Our basement is now finished and the masons have laid the first row. Now there is a standstill because the area had to be filled first due to the fall protection.

We have taken a look at the first row laid and as laymen find it very poorly built. Is there anyone from the trade who can help?
Are there guidelines on how large mortar joints may be or similar?
Some stones are broken and there are offsets of about 1 cm in the vertical.
We are concerned that this will affect the following rows.

I am attaching pictures.

Best regards
Nasentier

Phew, I’m not an expert, but if you’ve had major problems from the start, wouldn’t it be about time to organize professional construction supervision??? What good are the saved 3000€ if the house might be faulty? I would strongly advise you to do so…..

Hello Nasentier

the basement ceiling seems to be significantly out of plumb at the top. Of course, the lowest layer must be leveled. But something already went wrong during the pouring.
And what does the 2nd picture show? Is the stone shorter than the others and therefore placed higher?
The work looks like it was done by Albanian subsubsubcontractors.

Steven

We took a look at the first row of masonry and as laymen find it very poorly built. [...] We are concerned that this will affect the following rows of masonry.

I would say: call a lawyer immediately and make an emergency appointment. Construction must be stopped. Apparently, you have dealt with a contractor who takes the term shell construction (in the sense of rough construction) extremely literally. In this case, you don't have to be an expert to clearly see that the bricklayers are obviously even bigger laymen than you. This cannot be explained by strong beer, a bad night, or wrong glasses alone (and even combined). Obviously, only "willing" but not even semi-skilled workers have been involved here, who certainly have less training than watching at least a You**** video about correct masonry. You can find a fellow sufferer here in and

but if you have had big problems from the very beginning, wouldn’t it be about time to organize expert construction supervision???

Yes, for further construction – in my opinion better not with the current contractor – I would also recommend a supervising expert.

Despite the comments already made, I would like to request the submission of more meaningful images (high-resolution overall view) and not just detail images taken out of context. This may allow further errors to be detected early and assessed better.

Hello,

we are building a single-family house and have decided on a general contractor. Unfortunately, we have had big problems with them from the beginning.

Our basement is now finished and the masons have laid the first row. Now there is a standstill because the fall protection had to be backfilled first.

We took a look at the first row of bricks and as laymen find it very poorly laid. Is there anyone specialized here who can help?
Are there guidelines on how big mortar joints are allowed to be or similar?
Some stones are also broken and there are offsets of about 1 cm in the vertical.
We are concerned that this will affect the following rows of masonry.

I am attaching pictures.

Best regards
Nasentier

And probably again a layman building without external construction supervision. A tip. Pay the 3-4 thousand euros for external construction supervision and you can build more calmly because all questions will then be answered professionally. That’s how it is with us. I am in almost constant contact with the construction supervisor couple (female architect, male construction engineer) and ask all questions. Some later turn out to be silly. But as a layman, I don’t know that :) The advantage is that you don’t annoy the tradespeople with that :cool: