Draw your own conclusions from the following:
Some years ago, in an attempt to improve our undistinguished street facade, I contracted a pair of maestros, a father and son, to install limestone cladding.
They were doing such a bad job that we received unsolicited suggestions from passers-by to run them off. It turned out that we were the innocent recipients of a grudge that one of the maestros held against a member of my wife’s family.
So I got rid of them, and paid another couple of decent masons to finish the job, but the original pair had their revenge much later, not sure if it was due to malice or incompetence.
Rather than attempt to cut round the angle of a rainwater downpipe at ground level to fit a limestone block they cut the pipe flush and blocked it off. When I had asked them if they had kept the drainpipe intact, they lied to me.
A year or so later, we had a rainstorm. The rainwater accumulated in the roof guttering, then having nowhere else to go, it overflowed and was absorbed by the adobe wall.
After 2 days continual rain, a section of the metre-thick wall collapsed into a huge pile of mud in our breakfast room.
Only the external cement rendering remained intact.
We fixed that with a welded heavy-duty metal box frame infilled with cement rendering. That still left a huge hole where 3 cubic metres of adobe wall used to be, so I lined it with melamine-faced
mdf, and converted it into a niche, complete with shelving and lighting.
Since then it has successfully resisted several earth movements. the last being a Mercalli VIII event.
The contratista who had hired these cowboys laughed the whole episode off, denying all responsibility. He’d been paid by then…
I had replaced the sabotaged in-wall drain pipe by an external PVC one. Within a couple of months, this had been ripped from the wall.