Gus Potter

Ah.. appreciate your frustration. That chimney cap leadwork is great.. lifts your spirits.. then.. next day your "baw is burst" You'll know that lot needs lifted, the battens and vapour barrier sorted etc. I get it too, one day great work from the builders.. next day they have put the wrong brain when going to work. But we all have "off" days!

Yes technically but I suspect that @Carrerahill will set your mind at rest. Don't want to say more as I probably know enough to be dangerous!

Thanks Mike. The law in Scotland is a little different but the same principles apply I think. Ta Dave.

Will defer but @Carrerahill will know / have the answer.

It's because I'm having discussion with BC about why they need a pile of trickle ventilation installed in an old Victorian house when I'm doing an internal slapping in a wall to make an open plan kitchen. My argument is.. the place is freezing and draughty already.. we don't want to make it worse. As loads of folk have said on BH.. and lot's know much more about it than I do.. it only takes a small hole to reduce air tightness. If that hole is next to a solum vent on an east facing elevation say then it's akin to leaving a window open on a night latch? Yes I'm being dramatic but I think I have a point?

Oh Nod I made a post about a bath trap.. any ideas?

Nod.. love your style, ta.

I don't think there is a cartel in the true sense.. deliberate and determined criminal activity. Yes you may get the odd few idiots that are at it but at some point they will get caught and I suspect they may be made an example of. The Polsen scandal springs to mind where some jail time was served. Depends on what you consider faking. In the past it was the BRE that did the fire tests (long ago they were a government body not an arms length organisation), laterally some of the big suppliers developed their own test facilities. Surprisingly we do quite well here in the UK and are I think are ahead of the game when compared to many other countries.. so take heart. The lay person may think that faking means that in the lab you just manipulated the figures to get the right answer, went for a cup of tea and just made all the results up. From my experience I doubt this happens. I have met some real fire experts that are involved in testing and can assure that the ones I have met are consumate professionals that really take public safety very seriously. However.. it can depend on the brief that you send to the lab! Here is a good example that can invite discussion. You have a block of luxury flats that are constructed with a cold formed steel structural frame. These flats tend to have one or two big principle rooms. The flat party walls / public hall ways / main doors to the flats are all well fire protected. But.. some of the internal walls in the lower flats particularly need to be load bearing both vertically and horizontally for economic purposes. But the doors between the rooms in the flat are not fire doors as big thick heavy internal doors are not a selling point for a developer. A big thick front door is..folk feel that they won't get burgled and feel safe! Now a good few fire details are tested for one sided fire exposure (a fire in one room) but if you don't separate the room the same way as you would flat to flat then you have two sided exposure and that is a different animal. If that wall happens to be load bearing wall that is holding up the flats above then you have a problem. Now if you ask the lab to test from one side you'll get one answer.. from two sides another.. the later will be less favourable if you are a developer seeking to make profit. So you go to the Building regs and try and interpret them to suit you, put pressure on BC and so on. You phone your big supplier and say.. BC are giving us hassle can you help?.. Help could come by way of a barrage of overwhelming technical info. When I was much younger I had heard stories about folk from BC getting a free holiday but these days are past. Now BC don't have the resources to argue the case, there is political pressure from above. This does not bode well for public safety. Unless we address this then I feel Grenfell won't be the last, may not be a fire..but lives will be lost. Now I have owned a flat that had fire doors to every room. But as we know folk remove the self closers, jamb them open and so on. In terms of fire risk management you are now placing all you eggs in one basket to some extent in that the behavoir of one occupant can compromise the whole fire design of a building. To put this another way. When we as SE's design a building we calculate the loads, factor them up an design for that. These are safety factors that cover everything from us making a calculation error / small loading misjudgement that will not be spotted ( SE's are human too).. say a dodgy batch of concrete that slips through the net, a bit of timber that has too many knots in it, a builder that is having a bad day and so on. Looking at this in the round.. for something to go badly wrong you very often need a number of events to occur at one time. The Grenfell tragety happend because our system of checks and balances has broken down. If only one person had made a stand and importantly been listened to then these lives could have been saved. We are seeing a lot of changes in the insulation market. Up in Scotland there is a big review going on in a lot of councils relating to fire performance of materials. Insulation is a big part of that. The insulation manufactures' are having to spend a fortune reviewing and in cases recertifying / reviewing their design guidance. Some big well known names have withdrawn products, some have so many caveats that it puts designers off going any where near their products as the designer carries a big liability. Everyone is trying to shed risk. All of the above is limiting the choice of materials and thus I can see why you may think there is a Cartel. Hopefully in a few months time I will be able to comment in a more upbeat way. I know I sound like a gloom and doom merchant!

Have seen an ovalish stone resin bath that we quite like, one of the ones that goes all the way to the floor so no bath panel you can take off to get to the trap or to inspect. The edge will be left clear of the wall. The bathroom is on the ground floor. If the first floor then any leaks would manifest in the ceiling giving you a chance to fix it before you wreck the timber floor etc. Minded to do floor mounted taps.. look like a street stand pipe.. just a tad more expensive. Also may do wall mounted taps. Problem is that the waste pipe needs to run in a 150mm deep solum space so can't get under the floor if it later leaks.. plan for the worst.. hope for the best. Also have under floor heating (wet) and all tiled.. any bath waste leaks are thus not easily found and access is a problem. Was thinking.. can you get a flexible pipe you connect to the bath outlet and run that to the trap. The idea is that you would be able to tip the bath up to have a look underneath where there are no tiles.. don't think the bath will move as it is pretty heavy so won't be tipping it up weekly. Not sure if this is daft or not?

Have you timber suspended floors? If so have you popped off any plinths in the utility room and looked behind the appliances. You may find unsealed service penetrations allowing the cold air in from the solum. Utility rooms and kitchens are always tricky on new builds. While the rest or the floor insulation may have had a cursory quality control glance, quite often the plumbers / sparks mess about with the floor insulation when there is a "miss interpretation" of the drawings. It nearly never gets put back properly. I know someone who knows someone who is a site manager for one of the big house builders. They get a heads up from BC on which houses are to be air tested! For all... if you are going to buy a new build ask at the show home loudly if the one you want to buy was air tested.. just for a laugh you understand..

Tell us he did coat the underside with patination oil as well as on the top.. pleeeese!

Plus 1!

The things we know and the things we don't know we don't know.. or something like that. We have an induction hob in a silstone type worktop, the ones you need to get made. Can't really do it DIY unless you have all the kit. Anyway.. although the hole was cut right in the worktop the hob clips are really tight. I thought.. when the hob breaks down how am going to get it out? With hind sight I would be minded to leave the clips off and just stick it down with a bead of silicon around the edge.. but it was too late by then as we had given it a shove! I sealed it with just the tape that was provided and was thinking about running a bead of silicon round the edge.. Yes on a buy to let I can see how you would like to seal the rim. Not much help but that is where we are at the moment and hoping the hob does not break down.

No but you have you have what you have. Do you know why this is the case? Try and figure out just for your own piece of mind if this is an indicator of a bigger problem. Maybe post some more info if you are worried. If you can set you mind at ease then this is a good way to go. Don't forget the noggings / dwangs! On something like this you would be looking at (from memory) a level tolerance of 10mm when it was built . But it depends on age as timber creeps over time so it's not an exact science.

Very much agree with George's take on this. You could get a beam calc done online for say £150 quid. But the vast majority of the responsibility / liability will fall on you as the home owner to provide all the right information.. and if you are able to do that then you would be able to do the calculations yourself anyway. It's not just the "beam calculation" its how that the beam interacts with the rest of the building and making sure the remaining structure remains stable. This chimney and gallows brackets.. it's not something I would entertain for the following reasons: 1/ Gallows brackets introduce a bending effect into the old walls. Walls in and around chimneys can look ok on the outside but the flue gasses often rot away the inside badly. Thus you have no idea as to how strong the masonry may be near chimneys. Often you can add extra true vertical load down the centre line of the wall to old wall and it is fine but as soon as you add a bending effect it will protest big style. 2/ You don't know what someone will do next door in the future.. they may have already done so and your gallows brackets will over stress the masonry locally as the flues are often offset. 3/ The chimneys act like piers / butresses to stop the party wall from buckling sideways. 4/ In a terrace of houses all these "extra" bits of masonry (chimney breasts, old cupboard walls / coal stores etc) add what we call " robustness" that contribute to stopping the whole terrace from moving sideways. If everyone chips away at this then the stability of the whole terrace can be called into question as this can lead to what we call disproportionate collapse. That is one reason why the councils have clamped down on gallows brackets and types of alteration that compromise the whole row of houses. If it was me then I would first want to be clear what you want to do and then look next door. There are are a couple of possible easy options here using some smallish steels. The steels don't need to be big as they don't carry a large amount of vertical load. But that small amount of "off centre" vertical load is enough to make the party wall very unstable as it introduces a bending force as well as ondinary vertical load. One option is along the lines of this. Run a beam from the front to rear elevation just inboard of the brick flue inside face. Then run a short stub back to the centreline of the party wall. You then build up over the stub and pack to support the bit of the flue above. Here you have the practicable problem of how do we get a long beam into the roof space! You can split it into two or three bits and join it together when you get it into the loft. The other is to run a beam from the party wall back to an load bearing internal wall if you have one. Then you need to work a bit of magic where you know you have spliced beams and that the joints will move when you load up the beam. There are a few easy tricks of the trade you can deploy here at low cost. In summary I would say.. 1/ Avoid gallows brackets. 2/ Talk to an SE. Once you get your head around it you may find that you can do more for no /little extra cost? That could offset the SE fee? 3/ Make sure you get access to next door and take photos in case you get the blame for cracks that are not your fault! 4/ If in England etc read up on the party wall act. 5/ If in Scotland.. talk to an SE.. we don't have the party wall act.. good in some respects.. awful in others. Hope this helps

Yes keep us posted. The frost protection is an interesting one. For all. You'll often see BC / NHBC saying you need 450mm frost cover. But why? From memory if you go back to say 1936 the housing stock was pretty bad so the government set up the NHBC as a gov body. Their remit was to carry out research and develop better housing for us all. Some time later the BRE were formed as an off shoot, much later the NHBC became the insurance comapny that we all love. To deliver better housing we needed some standards that "worked in most cases for mass housing". We know that in a bad winter the frost will get into the ground some 9" -12", in a really bad one maybe a bit deeper, especially if you get a cold east wind blowing at the same time. Here is one theory.. we had concrete founds so we made them 6" thick ( 150mm = two courses of brick) then we wanted say a ventilated solum space and we needed to get some drains round the house but did not want the drains to be below the founds, or at least not below the underside of the founds. Folk also planted things round the outside of the house so they needed some soil depth here. In summary 18" (450mm) to the underside (formation level) of the found seems like a good number. Frost heave happens when the water in the soil forms ice crystals they expand with great force and can lift a found. For significant frost heave to occur you need the following to all happen / soil conditions. 1/ Sustained temperatures below zero deg C so the freezing gets deep enough... that is the obvious one. 2/ A continuous supply of unfrozen water to allow the ice crystals to keep growing... the water table usually. 3/ A medium that has small voids so that when the ice crystals expand they have something to push against to cause heave. One way of explaining this it to look at say a sandy / silty / CLAY. Here the clay is in captial letters indicating that the dominant component is clay. For all.. you'll see this capitalisation cropping up in your ground investigation reports. Excuse the spelling / grammer (I'm left handed) While a true clay is pretty water proof (we build dam cores with it) the above type of soil will probably have sand and silt lenses in it that provides the water path for the ice crystals to grow = frost heave. On the other hand you could have what is called a "well graded" sand or gravel. Well graded means that the soil particles are more single size.. open textured... like a French drain aggregate. If the water table is well below (say 800- 900mm) the underside of the founds then the water can't get anywhere near the underside of the founds to freeze. If so then no frost heave other than a tiny bit where the surface water on the soil particles freezes.. and that is not a lot. You'll get much more movement than this between the house heating and cooling between winter and summer. A big fall of snow ion the roof and so on. You could also technically have a house on large sized stones with big voids, if the water table is down a bit then any ice crystals will just grow into the voids and not cause significant heave.. point 3 in some ways. You could also have a found on fractured weathered rock. Here if the water table is say 600mm below the ground level all tends to be fine as the rock would normally have been there since the last ice age.. your house is just a "moment" in geological time so it ain't going to heave.. unless you are doing some big rescaping of the land and you have really soft rock.. chalks require some careful thought. Yes you might get the " rock flower on the very top" swelling a bit but just scape that off. I mention clay soils in terms of frost heave. Technically you could have say a really good pure clay.. say a cracking London Clay that can be used for dam cores. While it would swell a bit on freezing it would then stop as it is so waterproof that no new water can get in to make big ice crystals. Now that all sound great in terms of frost heave.. but it also shrinks like a "..." in the summer when it dries out and when there are trees and so on.. which is why we don't waste too much time on the technical argument about frost heave in most clay soils. However when it comes to other types of soil, insulated rafts , ICF it is worth having a look at all the design parameters. If you find that the frost cover is driving the design then you need to look at why and the above is a starting point on where to look. The last step is to gather enough site investigation info to make your case to BC and others.

Not at all. I like your approach and attitude to life. I did something similar a "while ago".. bought a field, build the garage and fitted a shower and second hand kitchen in it, bought a 14"caravan that we slept in so the planners could not kick us out. Then worked away building the house. Hope this helps. My thoughts from an SE point of view and looking at your photo are: Winter is coming so leave the soil dumplings between the strip founds where they are until you are ready. What we are trying to do here is not to let the frost into the ground and soften it. Let it flood as the water acts as an insulator. If a really hard winter is predicted (-18 C for two or more days) then chuck some stuff back over the strip founds say 200 -250 mm of soil.. this will give you a cover depth to the underside of the strip founds of about 450mm.. which is what BC recommend. Design wise I would say.. what is the finished floor level of the house to be then work down from there and see what solutions are viable. Ground bearing slabs are not that hard to design.. if you know what to look for and most folk don't so that is where the SE comes in. Why would they.. most folk have plenty other / better things to do. From an SE point of view most low rise (domestic structures) slabs (could be ICF) are designed on the basis that we have a number of elastic layers; the concrete slab, the insulation say and the ground below. Think of this as layers of a cake. Each layer working progressivly deeper has different properties. Now we also know that the ground is not uniform horizontally. In your case we have some strip founds (hard spots) intersperced with softer areas.. the dumplings. So now we have a 3D model! One design approach in your case is to ask.. what do we have under the strip found .. is there a uniform layer of say clay 3 -4 m down or do we have a number of different layers. We then look at for example how "elastic" and thick these layers under the founds you have are and how much they are likely to settle when we put a building on top. Next we look at what you are putting on top of the soil. Say some compacted hard core, then say EPS and a concrete slab. We then look at the most elastic layer.. which usually is the EPS and design for that. On a large project we may develop a more comprehensive model.. but that cost thousands as you need to use expensive software, have folk that know how to use it properly and a good comprehensive compatibale ground investigation that also cost a lot.. no point in trying to race an F1 car if the fuel is made by me in my garden shed. But we also look at the number of the soil layers and recognise that horizontally they will not be uniform so depending on the soil and number of layers we also design for the fact that there may be some soft spots under the EPS and we reinforce the concrete slab to span over these soft spots. That's a bit of one design approach. Your best bet here may to try and get your hands on some recycled aggregate.. some 6F2 lay that and roll it in with a 8 tonne roller. What you are looking to do here is pinch stuff from road design. Before you do that try and find a local SE that will come by the site and expand on what I have written. I'll not go into any great depth here but you can use a loaded concrete lorry to do a rolling proof test! Yes it's old school stuff but it works! Leave the strip found where they are as although they are a potential "hard spot" the EPS ect will easily mitigate. I would love to work with you but you need someone local who will be on tap you all the way through your journey. Hope this helps. Keep us posted as interested in your project. All the best.

Yes, a road kill rabbit apparently does the trick. Has loads of good bacterial in the gut.

Yes a well designed dormer can really compliment a roof.

Hiya. I'm assuming they are saying an "allowable bearing pressure" if so, that is a good value to have. 100 kN/m2 is usually used for initial design in say boulder clays. Often rafts are used where say the soil is not so good.. say 30 - 50 kN/m2 It boils down to cost. Strip founds tend to be cheepest, assuming you don't have a basement. SE's say always start with looking at strip founds, then if that does not work you progessivly work your way up through the increasingly expensive alternatives. If you have good ground then I would explore all the other options available before going for ICF even if just to rule them out for you.

That's a cracking looking project you have there. 1/ Remove the roof.. Yes probably the most practical. Keep that timber! 2/ Option 1. - raise front and back and reduce the roof angle. I would think carefully before you change the roof pitch drastically, you could easily change the character, apprearance.. planning issue? As a guess that looks like about 40 deg.. makes for an attractive, watertight roof.. easy on the eye (well mine anyway). Also in terms of structural design it's a nice and angle as it reduces the bending effects in the rafters as more is converted into an axial load. Option 2 - raise all walls and chimney and keep current roof angle. Now that is an option especially if you have enough matching stone to allow you to hide the fact that you have added say 300 to 450mm to the external wall height. Remember though that you just need the outside to match, you can use a cheeper material where hidden. I would try and keep the something akin to the current roof angle. 3 Install three dormer windows at the front and three skylights at the back (north facing) If you raise the walls then you may not need all three dormers. Remember they are a lot of work = cost. Can you get away with two and say put a feature window in the gable end? 4 New trusses either scissors or raised tie across 5m span of the house. On paper your approach is good.. but this is an old building and they don't take kindly to the horizontal forces that raised tie and scissor trusses can generate at the wall head. Yes you can get special slip shoes to mitigate.. but... then you don't get the wall head tying effect.. see later. Have you put a string line / plumb bob over the existing walls yet? You may find they have been enjoying life and are far from straight and plumb. Nothing wrong with that but it can be a challenge to marry up a modern manufactured truss with an old structure like that. I would have a look at traditional cut rafter roof but with say a steel, timber flitch beam or glulam a ridge beam with simple rafters down onto the wall head. The first floor can then be independant and all that leaves you with a big space and a vaulted roof to really play about with. The main thing here is that with a bit of care you can adjust the rafter lengths and so on to follow the shape of the old building to some extent. At the end of the day it depends on what floats your boat. For me.. if it was mine, (can you feel the jealousy creeping in?) I would want it not to look like I had put a modern square box roof on an old building.. I would want to keep the gutter detail looking "original" and so on... and a good joiner (chippy) can work wonders here. For all: I have copied a bit from and old Wolf Systems design guide which lets you see the typical types of prefabricated roof trusses. The raised tie and scissor trusses can add an outwards thrust onto the old wall heads. They are old walls so SE's are cautious and that can lead to an overly conservative design... underpinning, knocking down bits you don't really need to, replacing perfectly good old oak beams and so on. These "conservative SE add ons" can by far outweigh any savings you may make using prefabricated roof trusses. Over the years I have found on these conversions that the walls tend to lean out at the head. It's rare to find them leaning in. That said though, I did look at one that did but the Farmer had excavated out the inside to make a slatted slurry pit for his cattle. Somebody did buy it and turned it into a house! I suspect the pit was filled in before it went on the market. Let's assume you have some walls leaning out. You are adding a first habitable floor so you put some of the floor load onto the inside of the external walls. This tends to tilt them back the right way. At the same time by using a ridgebeam you take some of the rafter roof load and shed it to the inside walls.. this is load reduction on the external walls which is helpful. You also tie the cut rafter to the wall head.. so that if the wall wants to move further outwards the rafter holds it still as it's connected to the ridge beam.. the rafter acts like a tie. The load is tranferred back up into the ridge beam and taken out away from the external wall or in a place you know is good to go. At the end of the day you play about with the structural design so that you try not to add any more significant weight to the old foundations and that lets you say.. hey the old founds maybe good to go without any major interferance = cost. To make all this work and make the real savings at the end of the day I would always say.. let's look at what we have, how does it behave / work and let's design around that. Every old building is different and that is part of the fun / challenge.

That's great news. Life begins at 40!

From what you say I don't think you are being unreasonable. The following is based on the premis that you have contracted with the Architect to provide a design that meets your requirements and a design information package that is sufficient to enable BC to confirm that, after making reasonable enquiry, your proposals meet with the requirements of the building regulations. I agree. You could end up having to submit endless revisions.. who pays for that and who pays the Builder for the changes? Now that is a good idea. Find a friendly SE and they will easily be worth their fee. Remember that SE's also often know a lot about the Architectural side and so on. The professions cross fertilize. That I find odd as the Architect should at least be providing some guidance here. How on earth are all these different interfaces to be coodinated? What about condensation at the interfaces. Do you have a solum space that you need to infill to install the slab for the UFH? There are lots of things that fall into the Architectural remit. From what you say it raises an eyebrow. To get the best out of BH maybe post your design package after removing identifying info, you'll get plenty info here, as you know, which will put you in a better position to take an informed view. Just check.. the Architect may have copywrited it all so let common sense prevail.

I too have a 1960's house, want to insulate the living room floor. Good news for me is that it's not a kitchen or bathroom so moisture levels will be not too severe. Problem I have is that the joists are built into the inner leaf of masonry on a timber wall plate. Yes.. the inner skin is carrying all the roof load plus two stories of masonry above! I'm still trying to get my head around the best way of doing this. Big worry is that if I cause damp / condensation in the wall plate the whole house will drop! Will keep mulling it over. There must be a way! That is as far as I have got to date, like you that list is a journey.

Yes Nick good point. Below is a screenshot from a typical truss manufacture. The loadings they use have been in common use for a long time so you can take these as a guide to an old cut timber roof. For ease of reading 100 N (Newtons) = ~ 10 kg so 250N = ~ 25 kg. The load we are looking at here is in the second column in the ceiling tie loads.. called imposed load (loft storage) .. that also includes anything you put on top of the original timbers @Ferdinand.. any legs, secondary flooring and so on. Confusion often arises as there is a difference between long, medium and short term loads in timber design. A bit of wood will carry quite a bit more weight if it is just subject to a load (short term) like a person of "large stature" walking about in the loft checking the plumbing.. but like glass it is less able to carry long term loading such as storage and the bits and bobs ( eg, extra flooring and insulation) folk put up there long term. Loft storage is considered a long term load for design purposes. But if you put a 50 kg tent and can be sure that after you have put in a "secondary floor" that spreads the load about and it will not overload the roof structure then you are good to go. Roughly you often find that if you put in an extra layer of flooring you can add another 10kg per sq m of say xmas decorations. Now to be on the safe side you need a lot of secondary unloaded floor! What folk often do is to say, can I put the tent over a load bearing wall below? Now you need to use common sense and make sure that the wall is truly load bearing all the way down the building. If so then the tent will have little impact compared to the weight of say a load bearing masonry wall.