What to do when you find damage in your building or home.
Normally, when someone feels unwell or ill, the first thing they do is complain. They grumble without knowing exactly what their illness is or might be, or whether it is serious or minor. Then they go to the doctor and tell them where it hurts and how much. If they do not tell the healthcare professional treating them how badly it hurts and where, it is practically impossible for the doctor to “guess”, without further information, what the ailment is and, consequently, how it can be treated. Then the doctor will most likely order or suggest some tests or X-rays to find out more about the patient’s body and confirm what they have diagnosed or suspected from the signs they have seen or that the patient has described.
This, which is self-evident, applies perfectly well to the damage or defects found in buildings, specifically in the communal areas or in the private areas of the homes where the occupants live, and to the regulations that apply when claiming for them.
The first thing to make clear is that the law wants people who buy or build a house to have guarantees that, if it is built badly, they can turn to the Technical Building Code (CTE), the LOE (Spanish Building Act, Ley de Ordenación de la Edificación) and the Civil Code, and use those laws to protect the buyers or consumers of those houses against those who sold them (the developer), those who built them (the building contractor) or those who designed them (the architect).
But owners or consumers do not need to know about the LOE or the Technical Building Code, let alone the technical documents that supplement them. The Technical Building Code is simply a kind of set of maximum or minimum values, like those shown in blood or urine test results, establishing the acceptable or unacceptable values that have been “analysed” or found in the patient (or building).
The sufferer does not need to know about architecture or construction. That will be the job of the expert specialising in building pathology, who will carry out the appropriate tests and exploratory openings to check compliance with the regulations.
You simply need to tell the expert what is happening in your flat or in the communal areas, show them all the symptoms or defects you are experiencing, and whether you know that other neighbouring homes suffer from the same problems; in short, find out whether it is an isolated case or an epidemic affecting all the homes. For example, find out whether many owners complain about noise, whether they have mentioned damp, whether there are cracks or hairline cracks in their homes, etc., or even whether people complain that the garage ramp is very steep and curved, or that the parking spaces are small and hard to park in, or that in many of them a column sits within the space, making it smaller.
That provides the first information: classifying the types of damage, checking the actual situation, proposing the appropriate way to repair it, valuing it, finding out how much time there is to sue and who may be responsible for the poor work.
In medical terms, this would be the equivalent of saying that the patient must be examined to determine where it hurts, how badly and since when, and how urgently treatment is needed. An expert report by an expert in building pathology is then commissioned, and a lawsuit should then be prepared as quickly as possible by a lawyer specialising in the field, as the time limit for claiming indicated by that professional may be about to run out.
What the doctor will not set out at that moment (nor will the architect who writes the report or the specialist lawyer) is all the knowledge they learnt at medical school, law school or the School of Architecture, nor the protocols needed to discover or confirm the illness, its intensity or its seriousness.
The protocols learnt in medical school to classify and define an illness are similar to those found in construction law, since these are set out in the basic documents, which provide definitions, categories and requirements for diagnosing the problem in technical language that consumers can understand (particularly in construction, a field mastered by architects and other professionals), defining the degrees of damage, the tests that materials must undergo to determine the extent of the damage, and what must be done to remedy it.
And these basic documents, which are included in the Technical Building Code, use criteria that are not easy to understand, formulas, equations and requirements that must be calculated so that one can speak, technically and scientifically, of “poor waterproofing”, or do the same to calculate damp, or whether there is deflection in the structure, or defects in the sound insulation or downpipes…, or even work out whether the structure was miscalculated and is at risk of collapse, and so on.
So what should you do?
1.- When you see any construction defect in your home or in your development, such as cracks or damp stains coming through the walls, or you feel excessive cold that seems to come through the walls, or perhaps you hear too much noise, report it to the property administrator.
2.- The administrator will call or will need to rely on two kinds of professionals: first, lawyers to advise whether they are still in time to make a claim and how; and second, expert architects to carry out an expert assessment and prepare a technical report stating whether the defects found cross the red line and can be claimed for. That is the only thing they can do, but not the best.
The best thing is to call DPcon Reclamación Daños Constructivos (a firm of architects and lawyers who work exclusively in this field). We will handle the entire assignment, preparing the report or tests and filing the lawsuit, provided everything meets the technical and legal requirements.
The advantage of having a single firm handle everything is easy to see because, as well as greatly simplifying matters, we lawyers and architects work together seamlessly in preparing the report, the prior claim, the lawsuit and the trials, coordinating witness evidence, reports and conclusions before the court, as both of us (lawyers and architects) are used to bringing this type of claim successfully before any court in Spain.
Any questions?