Allyzap

Wow, thanks for all of those things to consider and I'll take a read through the attachment 🙂 I'm feeling much more confident now, from everyones responses, that just living with the movement of the extension over the seasonal variations and keeping the tree (which really is beautiful) is viable, as it does not necessarily follow that the building is at risk of falling down!!

Thank you so much 🙂

Thanks for these tips; I like the idea of redirecting rain water etc - will look into this! Yes, I really want to keep the tree if possible (in fact it was me that instigated the tree preservation order when the first set of cracks appeared in 2019 - my worry even then was that the quickest/cheapest option suggetsed by the insurers would be to fell the tree.) The TPO might of course now be coming back to bite me....

Had to laugh at the bit about seeing the neighbours eating their dinner through the cracks 🙂 What you say is true of course; the tree was there long before any of the housing went up, let alone our garage extension 12 years later. The reason for the engineer and arborist report was all driven by our insurer to be fair. They have been very thorough, but their conclusion still comes down to the tree, which I am loath to see come down. Our fear comes from lack of experience of building construction and subsidence issues and a very real worry that this will become a bigger problem just as we are getting too old to be able to deal with it.

Hmmm, will need to go back to documents to check but certainly what ever the building regs requirements were in 2005.

Not really much change although we did lose an area of lawn to parking immediately in front of our house... The only other change is the physical growth of the tree itself. I guess we maybe panicked when we first spotted cracking in 2019 and reported straight to our insurer at that point. They have been monitoring the ground level since early 2021 and movement is slight, hence they are not suggesting any preventative work, other than tree removal. What do others do if they get regular cracking with seasonal movement? Self repair in some way?

The cracks are minor, less than 3mm. I guess it is more the fear of future ground movement and the best way to protect against that.

Hi, Just looking for alternative view points with regards to minor (at the moment) ground movement of a single garage extension. Original house and extended garage are built of the common South East region high plasticity clay and we're at the top of a slight slope/small hill. We had minor cracking appear in 2019, at the point of the extension. Repaired with Helical bars but cracks reoccured in different palces after the hot summer in 2022. We have a 250 yrs old oak tree about 10 metres away, falling in the boundary of our neighbour. The tree has a protection order on it. The engineering report and arborist report have both suggetsed the tree takes too much water from the ground during those drought times and should be felled. They don't seem to think heave will be an issue. I guess I'm just looking for anyone who might have experience in doing something other than remove a beautiful old tree? I do accept that we need to do something as repair works done so far are just to repair the minor cracks and not fix the route cause, and we ceratinly don't want to face a worsening situation as we get older. But is it always the case that the tree is the cause? Thanks A tree lover

Hello New to the forum and have no prior experience of building projects of any kind! I'm hoping to find advice on subsidence repair somewhere within the forum. Any signposting is most gratefully received.