As the title, this will be our first time buying a house. We toured a townhouse today, and near the rear of the house (on ground floor – basement) there is a steel I-beam that seems to not go all the way through the house’s side wall. It seems like one end of the beam was resting on a bunch of loose stone tiles (thin stone flakes that you put outside of houses for decoration). I couldn’t and didn’t want to remove anything for further inspection, but it seems odd that the beem just “rests” on a bunch of stone flakes. I assume a cantilever beam should have been physically fixed by both ends to a house’s walls to cary the load efficiently. We could not inspect the other end of said beam, as it is covered. Another issue is once we went upstair and inspected the other side of the house, also near the rear, we saw a crack on the wall that runs from the ceiling to the floor, and translate to adjacent floor molding. The crack is wide enough to fit a quarter coin through its thickness. Would anyone be able to tell if this crack is related to the I-beam issue that I mentioned previously? I think it is hard to be a coincident that these 2 issues arrise at generally the same rear area of the house, on the opposite sides of each other. Thank you for your time. Please see the album below for a few images I took https://imgur.com/a/ado9Gth
