"They just drywalled right over it. In the US. In 2018. In a luxury condo."

This happens regularly in the SFBA, in Marin County. Every rainy season I see at least one house being built through Nov-Dec-Jan that is in the bare studs stage and gets soaked with a week or so of constant rain.

And then the sun comes out and they immediately tyvek wrap and seal the whole house up. Sopping wet, soaked studs, entrapped on both sides. I would love to open up the drywall in one of those two years later and see what the inside of the walls look like...

These are very expensive homes ... the four I am thinking of over the past two years were all 2M+.

I'm designing a home fabrication system, so this stuff is very fresh on my mind right now.

This talk really gave me a foundation for understanding how moisture works in a building enclosure through seasons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ld8pzIu45F8

The speaker is a little hammy, but he's doing (more or less) legitimate science, and he laid out a bunch of principles I didn't understand before.

In particular, the different layers of the wall (ballistic, water, insulation, vapor, structure) really need to go in the right order, and at literally every exterior joint in the house you need to match up all five layers. There are also several layers that it is crucial to vent/drain.

It's extremely complicated, and for the most part just obeying code and convention will only get you 80% of the way there.

It seems to me there are also anti-patterns ensconced in code and convention. The idea that insulation goes inside the structural layer for example. You want your insulation layer to be unbroken.

This exact scenario is going to play out near my house over the next two weeks. SF Bay $2m houses. I should send pictures to the county building inspector.

My brother work in a construction business, mostly for flats. And with everything he's telling me, this does not surprise me

What do you mean "they drywalled right over it"? They installed the damaged drywall and then _another_ layer of drywall on top of it? Sorry if this is a stupid question.

Probably means they put drywall mud on top of the moldy drywall.

The only thing I can think of is possibly a firewall?

I know they're in the desert, but drywall really should happen after the building envelope is sealed.

Wow. I am pretty sure they can not only get sued for this but it may be criminal offence.

I'd imagine that's true on both counts, but with these things it's notoriously difficult to prove. You'd have to prove that the contractor knew about the damage, didn't do anything to mitigate it and then knowingly attempted to hide it. All of that is pretty tricky to pull off, given that a home damaged in this way might not show signs of the damage for a good while.

It's why bad actors (such as the ones described above) keep getting away with what they do.

Those are pretty easy to prove in this case. All you’d need to do is find, remove and test the bad dry wall. There’s no way someone installing it could reasonably claim ignorance of its condition.

how do you prove the timing? that it happened at the time of construction and not after?

You get one of the people who did the installation to admit to it. I'm sure you could find someone who has a conscience or doesn't think they are personally at fault who would be willing to own up to it.

Construction crews in Arizona? They aren’t going to own up to anything because a majority of those workers are in the country illegally. You aren’t going to find them going to depositions or signing affidavits any time soon. That isn’t mutually exclusive with “having a conscience” of course, but that does mean that you aren’t going to have much luck finding anyone who actually worked on that crew and if you did, they aren’t going to talk.

I can only speak for UK contractors/companies, but most of these guys will immediately close ranks on you if you try and pull this. The guys at the lower end of the chain won't want to say anything because it could affect their ability to get work at a later date. A lot of them are on temporary contracts, and these companies talk to each other. If they start making noise about these sorts of mistakes, they could well wind up on a blacklist.

With the chaining of subcontractors, I doubt you'd even find the company that did the work, let alone an employee.

Expert testimony.

Drywalling without a roof is just bad contracting.

Entering a rainy season without a roof being sheathed is also bad contracting.