Omnibuswoman

I agree! I certainly have no plans to fund any remediation to correct errors his team made when they built it.

Ps These photos are from Nov 2022 when the structure was going up. The house is now at first fix with all floors complete, roof and windows in place, and eggerboard flooring glued and nailed to the top of the joists, so remediation of some of these issues going to be challenging.

There are about 14 of those joists that have been cut. In the photo below you can see the ones that go across the whole length of the house - those are the ones that were cut. You can also see in these pictures the make up of the ground floor supporting walls with only one top plate, and then the joists resting on scraps of OSB because the walls were built short. The sole plates are sat on the load bearing confrere slab. I agree that these don’t look like load bearing walls, but I can’t find any mention in the structural engineering drawings or building regs plans about having a double top plate. i will send the email I’ve written to the builder, and will request a site visit with him and the architect. We may well bring along an independent SE at that point. Sadly we have no financial hold on the builder as we settled the withheld final payment several months ago after the snagging list was complete. These issues have only come to light in the last couple of weeks.

This is our biggest concern - what can we not see that might have been botched… we’ve pored over the photos we took as the build progressed, just to check that the images match the plans. It has severely knocked our confidence in the builder’s skill and attention to detail (which was the key factor in choosing him!), and his general *sucks teeth* “maaah, should be alright” manner when things are pointed out is even more worrying and annoying. I’m sure many of you will have now read the Grenfell report which is a very good illustration of how badly things can go wrong, in ways people cannot imagine, when there is a lack of attention to getting things right. I am sure that the temptation is to think “it couldn’t happen” when something like joist failure is mentioned, but it could happen, if the right set of failures occur. This is why we pay structural engineers to design things!!

@ProDave ours were meant to be continuous, but somewhere along the way someone decided to cut them and then stick them back together…!! The solution to the twisting issue is what you have - I-joist pieces or solid LVL plates between each joist. That’s the design detail that should have been built in from the start.

Most definitely!!

Thanks Steamy. This is just what the technical manager explained yesterday - about the risk of failure by the joists not bearing the forces in the correct plane, and because of the supporting walls not sitting directly atop each other. The joists simply won’t function as they should and this could cause catastrophic joist failure. I’ve drafted and polished the email to the builder. Will see what he has to say in response….

I’ve checked the structural engineer’s drawings and the building control drawings, and while both show a cross section of the wall build-up neither shows the top or sole plate. So I can’t say if they should have a double top plate or not. What I can say is that my workshop, which I built, has a double top plate at one side, and a quadruple one at the other side. My (former builder) uncle reckoned I could have built a second storey on top if I wanted to 😂

Well, the design is to have a continuous joist run the whole length of the house, and not be cut in two and stuck back together… but stiffening plates or joints should be fixed from each side equally, in a staggered formation - top right and bottom left from one side, and the same in reverse from the other. They haven’t done that, but the I-joist technician felt that was the least of our concerns 🤦‍♀️ He said I-joists are not meant to be cut and “scabbed” together, but it’s would be ok if there was a blocking plate in place between the joists (perpendicular to the direction they run) holding the joists straight.

I haven’t approached BC as yet, but will do so if the builder kicks up a stink about rectifying the issues.

Thanks Joe. We are anticipating a degree of resistance from the builder, and he has already popped round to have a look at some of the concerns (he’s not aware of all of them yet). He mostly wandered around explaining how these things “should be alright” (I.e. he doesn’t need to remediate them), while HWMBO wandered after him pointing out that we would let the I-joist engineer be the judge of that! The builder seems to be a decent chap, but this is shoddy stuff - not following the plans correctly and not appreciating the significance of getting the structural elements right in order for them to work properly. Best case scenario is a bit of a creaky floor, but worst case is joist failure. I’m sure most builders would tell themselves that it couldn’t happen, and most likely it wouldn’t, but the risk isn’t zero, and I’m not willing to accept living with the uncertainty just because it’s a ball ache to put things right. I’ll draft a polite but firm email and see what comes back…

This joist has been rested on a scrap bit of OSB because the wall was built too short… Not all hangers have been nailed to the joists.

Following some enquiries with the joist manufacturer, a number of issues have been identified with the fitting of the I-joists and build that are going to require remediation. These include a failure to place blocking plates between joists as they sail across the supporting walls, meaning that the joists are beginning to twist (see photos below). The joists are glued to the eggerboard above, so making the joists straight again to fit the blocking plates is going to be extremely tricky. If they are not straightened, they won’t perform the function they are designed for. In addition, the supporting walls that sit above each other are not, in fact, sat above each other. There is approx 50mm between the face of the wall on the first floor and the face of the wall on the second floor (we discovered this when trying to send a pipe up from one to the next, and realised that it emerges in a different place than expected). The technical manager at the I-joist company is “very concerned” about this, as the joists are not designed to carry the second floor load - it should be transferred down via the walls sitting atop each other. We now need to explain these issues to our builder and ask him to undertake the difficult job of remediating these issues. Has anyone experienced anything similar? And does anyone have any advice about how to go about this? Should we consider getting an independent structural survey done, or involve Building Control to strengthen our position? cheers Omnibuswoman

One important factor was not increasing the ‘mass’ of the house. We actually very slightly reduced it by removing a winter garden, so the footprint was a tiny bit smaller. This was actually commented on by the planning officer in a positive way. The loss of the winter garden still left us with a 200m2 house, as we changed the second floor from a mezzanine to a full floor.

Yes, a S73 is a minor amendment - in our case we just moved and re-sized a few windows to match the significant internal re-design, and changed a velux window to a dormer. The internal changes were not of any interest to the planning dept, and as the outside looked very similar to the original consented design they were happy to wave it through. It is simply a case of replacing the original design drawings with the new drawings on the consent. All of the other original conditions remained unchanged.

As a starting point, it may be worth taking the existing design footprint and seeing whether it could work for you with some changes. This is the route we took - we based the house on the footprint of the plan that had won planning, then amended the room layout and windows to suit our needs (like yours, ground floor wholly disabled accessible, TF, passive or near passive house for heating load, triple glazed windows, solar panels, etc). We got this through planning under a S73 amendment application and it was easily waved through. However I recognize that that only works if your needs can easily be met by something similar to the existing design, and if it looks like a house you could live in. We used a passive house specialist builder, and an architect he had a business relationship with to draw up the plans and get us through building control. We didn’t want the full architect’s works, just drawing stuff, and his fees packages were flexible enough to accommodate that. Happy to send a recommendation.

You guys 🤪… Back to the balustrade: It does have a handrail around the top, and this bolts into the wall of the house. The upright posts will be bolted into the Balcony floor with three bolts in each foot. I did have a look at Gus’s comments on the indoor balustrade and its fixings previously, but will go back and have another look. I’ll also speak with the SE about whether she did any calculations for the balcony in the first place (which I can’t see on her drawings) and if not whether we now need to pay her to do that. The building control drawings have a wooden balustrade so we will def need to communicate the change to the BC officer and understand his expectations. Cleaning: probably a very long brush with integral hose (which we will need for some of our first floor windows as well!) photo of the balustrade in its original home below:

We have been planning to have a balcony at first floor level, with a wooden balustrade. However I recently found a great glass balustrade on FB market which I have now bought. Do I need to revisit the structure/design of the balcony to accommodate the extra weight of the balustrade, which must weigh around 400kg (approx 7 metres of 10mm toughened glass panels, plus 5 metal posts and handrails). image of original design below…

Thanks all! Sanity has been restored. Plumbing first fix is all done already - DHW tank is in, and all rooms have both waste pipes and hot and cold supplies, all closed off with a valve in the plant area. So it’s only electric that I would be staging. @BotusBuild you’re right about the sparky - he came in last week and did three rooms in a couple of hours. We are getting a good rate from him, and in return I’m happy to have him use our project as the place he goes when his other work is quiet or something has been cancelled. All things being equal I can see him getting it all done by the end of August if he pops in once or twice a week. I’m about to have the main bathroom plastered as I’ve been working to get it useable. I’ll call the BC and see if he’s happy to accept one self-report of the cabling and pipe-work that’s been put in, and then get him to visit six weeks’ time when the sparky has finished the cabling.

Due to the amount of work needed to complete the house, and our limited funds, I have been toying with the idea of completing the project one or two rooms at a time. Psychologically it feels more achievable to complete a room, before moving on to the next. We are at a point of having the plumbing infrastructure in place, and the electrician is happy to work on the house in sections. However, this doesn’t sit with the BC inspection schedule to see all first fix done prior to plasterboarding (unless we pay them to keep coming back for each room!!). I am minded to try to speak to our building control officer about whether they would be able to review a video or photographic record of each room (taken prior to plasterboarding) for the purposes of assurance. Any thoughts about this? Has anyone gone this route for the sake of their sanity?!

I have got a pile of door linings of 32mm depth, with the words “nom 27mm” on them. Are these suitable for hanging FD30 fire doors/meeting building regs? I know that I should be fitting 32mm linings, but not sure if that is 32mm nom or 27mm nom. Thanks!

Good point @Russell griffiths I had entirely followed the existing spaces made by the wall frame and didn’t think about the possibility of adjusting that to suit the tiling pattern. Hmmm, fortunately I’ve put up the PB in three sections so I can easily remove the middle section and redo it with a different niche location. Any suggestions as to where it would better go? I’m using standard metro tiles (100mm x 200mm) in a brick pattern.

I have been working on the bathroom carpentry stuff recently, and yesterday fitted the plasterboard to the shower cubicle walls. Having decided to create a niche, I cut out the plasterboard flush to the edges of the battens. However I now think I should have allowed a 12mm lip all the way around the niche so that the cut edge of the plasterboard lining butts up against it. It’s not too late to take the PB off and redo it, but is there an alternative? Is it a fatal error, or will tanking the wall (which I plan to do in any case) seal the cut edge and mitigate the error?? itself)

Helpful for me as I am at the exact same point - caberdeck 22mm flooring, shower tray and floor tiles going down in the next few weeks. I have been wondering whether or not to lay something on the caberdeck prior to laying the tile adhesive for the shower tray...