# Forum Home Renovation Structural Renovation  Converting from brick veneer to weatherboard

## miss_bug

Just wondering if anyone has any experience with converting from BV to weatherboard?? And if so, what sort of cost is involved? 
Here's the background - I purchased a 3BR painted BV house built sometime during the 1950s early last year. I had a building inspection done before purchase and the report came back that although there were some minor problems as you'd normally find in an old house it was structurally sound.  
I painted all of the inside of the house and didn't have any issues until last summer when it poured rain and the drought broke. I started to notice cracking in the paintwork and on further inspection cracking in the brickwork outside. Suddenly cracks started appearing everywhere and windows started to pull away from brickwork, doors started jamming, floors started to lean, etc. Doesn't seem to be getting any worse at the moment, but certainly not getting any better. 
I've had a house re-blocker/leveller come around to give me a quote (I thought perhaps it just needed some re-levelling work done) and he was not impressed with what he found. He pointed out all the spots where the brickwork had cracked in the past and had been filled and painted over and wanted to know why the building report didn't mention this. Apparently there are stumps along the inside of the brickwork which makes him think that perhaps it was once a weatherboard house that has been bricked over (I tend to disagree, I believe it's always been brick). He said that with the soil type (black pug) and having a channel in the near vicinity that there has been too much movement and the footings have cracked. I'd need an engineer to fix the problem and he reckoned I was looking at $30-40k just to get the footings fixed up.  
The re-blocker's advice was to rip the concrete tiles off and replace with tin to lighten the load and then rip all the brickwork off and replace with weatherboards. He thought that it would probably work out cheaper than having the footings replaced. Either that or just keep patching things up and painting over them and pretend its not happening. But being a novice to all this and not really understanding it all, well it sounds like a pretty massive and expensive job. So if anyone can give me advice on this it would be much appreciated!

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## r3nov8or

Have you seen this thread yet ? http://www.renovateforum.com/f76/rep...erboard-74917/

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