Real Life Stories: Weight
Lawyer's Home, San Diego, California
Dana Dunwoody
Cynthia Thornton
Dunwoody and his wife Cynthia Thornton bought their house, a beautiful secluded home with a garden and pool in April 1998. The Eagle concrete tile roof was then just a year old. Then they began to notice cracking in the exterior walls, especially over windows and sliding doors. Between doors, solid two-by wall columns began to sink. Inside, large cracks began to appear in the ceiling and walls. Travertine tile floors cracked and sank.
Sliding doors jammed shut, their aluminum frames pushed into the sill plate by the enormous forces pushing down.
A structural engineer confirmed Dunwoody's fears:
The roof was
much too heavy. Designed to carry a shake roof,
around 400 lbs, the concrete tile—Eagle weighed almost twice as much.
It was
crushing the wood-framed house into its concrete footings below.
A trial attorney who has worked through the construction problems of clients, Dunwoody is familiar with the consequences of construction defects. He recognized that he was the victim of a bad construction decision.
Because of the weight of the concrete tile roof, the house required extensive repairs to interior and exterior walls, ceilings and floor. Sections of a beautiful travertine floor needed to be reset. New stucco was needed on much of the outside walls.
Post Script:
As soon as weight
of the concrete tile roof was removed and the Gerard Stone Coated Steel Roof
installed, the sliding doors in the Dunwoody home could be opened again. It
was the first time they'd moved in several months.
