Gus Potter

Hello Loz. Sorry to hear about you dilemma. Your starting point here is to take another step backwards and understand what the implications are in terms of what happens to the declared strength of the timber when you rip a bit off the top / bottom / sides along the length. Typical structural timber for extensions and the like comes in grades.. you'll often see it stamped C16 or C24. When it is produced each length is put through a stress grading machine which applies a force. Sensors measure how much the timber bends or if it just snaps. If it comes out the end of the machine with the correct reading it gets a stamp to say what grade it is. Now timber has knots / wane / the grain weaves about and so on. You could say have a piece of timber with two knots near the centre but good grain top and bottom which passes the grading. Cut 40mm off the top and now the knots are in the high stress zone for bending so the timber can fail. In summary if you rip a bit lengthways of a stamped piece of timber the grading is no longer valid. You can notch it but there are rules which apply to where and how much you can notch timbers. Point this out to the SE / BC officer and see if they will still pass the joists given that the stress grading is probably invalid.

Hello Pierrick. Welcome to Build Hub. Here are a few thoughts. Are you sure the walls you want to take away are "non load bearing". A key thing here is to recognise that although the walls you want to take away may not be carrying any direct vertical load from above they may be providing lateral stability to the walls that are carrying vertical load. For all. If you take a ruler, stand it up on and press down from the top then the ruler bends. Remember how hard you pressed down. Now get someone to hold it steady in the middle and press down again. You'll find that the ruler will take about four times the vertical load. The maths of this can be attributed to the mathematician..Euler.. a pretty famous guy if you are an SE. Now if you look at how many bits of wall are to be removed to form the open plan area you have to ask the question.. are any of these walls contributing to the stability of the vertical load bearing walls? The next thing to do is to look to see if the non load bearing walls are contributing to what we often call the sway stability of the building. When the wind blows for example it pushes the building sideways. This has to be resisted by the walls or structural frame which could be say a steel frame working alone, or a steel frame with stiffening panels between the columns or a brick building with internal stiffening walls. Pierrick I think you need to establish this first. If you don't at some point someone like me is going to ask the same questions. If it turns out that you can demonstrate that your proposals will be structurally safe then you have taken the high ground. This seems like a case where you are in dispute with say a home warranty provider. They partly rely on a war of attrition to grind folk down, hope they run out of money etc..if you get the structural side sorted then you can turn this around..run up their fees and this can concentrate their minds. Once you have the structural stability side sorted then you have the fire regs. Now an SE should be able to deal with this also. If they can show that structurally, even though the walls are "non loadbearing" that they have maintained/ remediated the fire protection between the floors for example.. by say producing drawings that show how they have maintained the fire protection where you have removed the non load bearing walls. In other words when a non load bearing wall is removed it can leave a gap in the ceiling which needs filled in properly. Make sure you can comply with the rest of the regs before paying for an SE. Once you have this SE support in place you can then press then for a proper response.

Hello saveasteading. That's interesting what you're doing so would like to hear more! I was wondering if that stone you have is Chert. Not sure though, but the way the face splits looks a bit conchoidal. If so it will be pretty hard as you know. Also, the surface is smoother so the lime mortar gets less of a grip thus although a hard stone each piece can come loose easily once you start say coring with the associated vibration. I've read a few of your posts (and responded after a fashion) and appreciate your knowledge. I wonder. If you have seven holes to do then it's sods law that some will locate under parts of the wall where you are changing the loading a bit and thus introducing more concentrated loads.. say by widening doors, near piers between windows and so on. "We will be protecting and filling that eroded edge." Have you worked out how you are going to protect the exposed edge of the wall? This could well be your starting point so if you nut that out a solution for the service penetrations may just offer it's self up. In an ideal world you want to leave the origonal stone in place.. maybe just because it's a good moral thing to do and keeps the ethos of saving a steading? Here is a few thoughts for all. Often on BH you hear much about clay soils which shrink and swell, they can be prone to long term settlement and so on. Trees for example can remove moisture from the ground causing the clay to shrink. When you cut down a big tree the moisture content of the soil can rise.. the clay swells up, often with great force which can lift things in an "undesirable" way. Sands and gravels are a different animal. Being simplistic (big subject) they are not generally prone to swelling and shrinkage. I'll leave frost action out as this is also an expansive subject but important if you have a BC officer who insists on a certain foundation depth to prevent frost heave.. So sand and gravels..can be good news but there is often no free lunch, well there can be but.. Sands and gravels derive much of their ability to bear load, say from a house foundation by the "friction" action between the particles. Each particle has a mass and this rests on the one below and presses / interlocks against the one each side so friction / interlock is generated. In the ground the stresses act in three dimensions, up.. down, left and right. If you fill a glass with sand and push down from the top it will bear weight. Take the glass away and the sand column will collapse. This is often called "confining" . In other words for a foundation the ability of the sand / gravel to bear load is partly determined by not just what is below but also to the sides and above. Importantly if you lower ground level you loose the dead weight of what is above (surcharge) and this can have a significant impact on how much load you can put on the soil. Now to generate friction between the particles we need mass and this comes from the density of each particle. But we know boats float..hopefully.. Archimedes. Now if you have a house and the water table is well down then you get the full mass of each partical of sand acting on it's neighbour. Raise the water table and now the relative density of each particle is roughly halved.. thus half the bearing capacity. SE's use this as a rule of thumb and it's one of the first questions asked.. where is the water table (and where could it be in the future) if building on sands and gravels. That's a bit of theory but applicable to say an old steading and also virgin ground. You also can get a bit of a "cementing effect". Here for example minerals will weave their way between the particles of sands and gravels and create more of a bonding effect so you get friction and bonding. It's very hard to test for this as testing is often intrusive and breaks the bonds and by the time it reaches the lab say it's lost it's mojo! We know these old buildings have stood for years but it's harder to prove why from basic tests. But we know they stand up. On a positive note.. a building will use every alternative load path to stay up before it falls down..but don't erode this factor of safety.. it's last resort stuff. Turning back to the practical side and in particular a typical Scottish steading construction. These were buildings to house animals / sometimes folk too and thus you can imagine that when they were build no one could forsee that they would have the value they now do. You have a "water proof" outer skin, random rubble interior and an inner leaf of stone that is less dressed and often less well bonded. The walls vary in thickness depending on their height and amount of buttressing from the interior walls. For these walls to work in simplistic terms they have to function in a number of dimensions. When you load the wall from above the load spreads out sideways. Often the vertical load is not central on the wall head so this causes a shearing effect between the layers as they work to share the load. When the wind blows the walls bend and this also causes a shearing effect between the layers in both a vertical and horizontal direction. For the keen this is sometimes called "complimentary shear". Remove material from one side of the wall and you loose the surcharge.. you invite movement between say the inside and outside of the wall. Vertical shear effects are introduced and the wall may protest. To quantify the above.. fairly recently a Black House fell down on one of the Islands. It was built on sand / gravel and lets face it although they sound great they were built with the few resources available at the time. They have an different way of dealing with driving rain permeating the walls but it's a good example of what you need to watch out for when doing up old steadings. Here apparently the builder had excavated out the inside down some 400mm, just to the level of the stone found. But removal of that small amount of surchage caused the sand to weaken on the inside, vertical shears built up in the wall, the layers delaminated and the thing fell down. Maybe the builder had a machine in, maybe there were some big boulders that were "eased" out when no one was looking" Who knows the whole storey. Luckily no one was hurt. If you've read this far then thanks and if you are thinking about doing up a steading in Scotland then I hope this helps. If you can grasp the basics it's a great journey and can give you confidence. Saveasteading.. sounds like you have a fairly robust structure so you may be fine. Would be interested to see how you are going to protect the exposed part of the wall and so on. Maybe as I said earlier it's a case of starting at the end, edge protection for frost / support and working back from there? Oh and do you know what stone it is and where it came from?

Hello offthepiste. That's a good size of a house! If you are inclined to take everthing with a pinch of salt then here is some fun stuff you can check out when taking on a renovation of a victorian house. Imagine you are a prosperous Victorian (or small developer).. you commision a house. The Contractor would often turn up with a pattern book with different designs; room sizes, roof shapes, ceiling heights, cornices etc. You would pick what you liked. The builder would then look up a book that told him that if he made the walls X inches thick, used floor joists Y inches thick and foundations Z inches wide it would all be ok... if the ground was suitable. The builder would then give you a cost for this. Now for the founds. These were hand dug down a bit until the soil looked about right. Then often a labourer would go round with a tamper and whack down the soft spots. But they drank a lot in those days and worked six days so if your founds were done on a Saturday or a Monday then maybe like a British Leyland car.. they used to say..avoid a Friday and Monday built car. The mason would then come along, slap down some mortar and often build a stepped foundation. The rest of the house would go on top. Remember though that the Victorains built some substancial structures and had some pretty nifty mathematical methods of structural analysis available to then .. it's just that from time to time the house building market lagged behind as it still does in some respects, particularly when considering the quality of workmanship. One key is to understand fully how the house is built and what materials have been used in it's construction. Also, what it rests on on ground wise, the slope of the ground round about how the drains work and other environmental factors such as big trees and if you neighbours have done something that may "upset" your house. Get to the bottom of this and you can you can move forward in an informed way. You know that as soon as you start introducing insulation into this old house you'll change the "moisture" regime.. and that has to be managed / designed to achieve the outcome you wish. From a SE point of view the Victorian builders used rules of thumb. One for example is take the span of a floor joist in feet. Say 14 feet. Divide 14 by 2 gives 7. Add 2 inches = 9 inches. Thus as a rough guide for a 14 foot span you'll need a 9 x 2 in joist at 18 in centres. At that joist spacing you can also add a bit of extra dead load. You can stretch them to 2 ft centres. For a rafter it's the same but you only add one inch to the depth rather than two. We still use many of the old rules of thumb when doing preliminary fag packet sizing. Now we use metric units in the UK so the preliminary sizing formula look a bit odd. If you can get a handle on how the house stays up then that will help you. Hopefully the above will give you an insight. This will then give you a feel for where you can add load, say heavy water tanks, where you maybe want to review and spend money to the best effect. There is also what we call building stability.. what stops the house from moving sideways but I'll leave that for now. Hopefully the above will give you an insight. Once you nut out the basics.. ground, super structure, insulation and moisture control you can then start to develop how you are going to mitigate the energy usage / "carbon foot print". Lastly, if you have been lurking on BH for "tooooo long" you'll know that it's time to step up to the plate and post some photos! All the best though.. sounds like a great adventure.

Spot on. One key is to make sure you enjoy the journey and have as much fun as you can. Learn as much as you can by doing your research. Post some photos and you'll get plenty input from BH members.. All the best.

Hello newby2. No it's understandable that you may have a touch of the "jitters" at first. The main thing is to do a bit of research before you jump to any conclusion. All buildings move about as they are "elastic structures".. they bend, shrink, foundations settle / move about and so on and this manifests often as cracks. This crops up very often when folk are in dispute with say a warrantly provider on a new house. One of my go to references is BRE Digest 251 Assessment of damage in low rise buildings. It's an older document but it's a great guide on cracks in houses. It's 8 pages long and written in plain English. You can buy it for £15.00 from the BRE bookshop, apparently it is also "google able"... For all.. this is a great document to have a read of, whether you are building a new house, extending or just curious. Have a read at this newby2 and it may fill in the missing piece of the jigsaw.

Peter.. your eye is remarcable! the cut ridge tile. Ryan. Technically you could get out all the standards, manufacture's info and see if it complies. That will take a lot of time an effort. Even if you do this you often come up against the phrase " visually acceptable" and that is an issue.. acceptable to whom? Just a question as the photo is not that high resolution. Are there some really narrow cuts in the roof? In other words are the side laps ok? In other words we know that up and down the roof the tiles / slates need to over lap the ones below by a certain amount. But they also need to overlap sideways.. parallel to the ridge by a certain amount. You can get this side lap size from the manufacture's data sheet. If all ok then once it's weathered a bit then it will mostly all blend in.

Sorry to hear that. Although they are both "technically " right it's a poor show. Assuming you are a domestic Client. Generally the expectation professionally, under the CDM regulations and the consumer protection act is that if you are a domestic client you are afforded some leaway compared with say a builder who is an experienced Client... They should be communicating (that is covered under the CDM regulations) with each other, that is part of their job. Even if they have gone in too low quote wise then as a Domestic Client how are you to know what is a fair rate. It's shoddy on both their parts and they are potentially leaving themselves open to trouble. If you want you can look up some of the things I mention above then.. drop them a pleasant but firm note. It's ok to say you don't understand some things.. but that you do understand that it is their job to make sure all is coordinated and safe. If no response then you may wish to consider binning them both as when it comes to the doing the work you'll probably get no support from them if the builder goes off track. If you do bin them then you'll be in a better position to ask for any monies to be refunded. Hope it all works out, it may just be a hiccup lost email or something else benign.

Hi Tom. Yes it could be something simple. Check the things you can, even just to know you have not missed something blindingly obvious, before you start spending on fees / further testing etc.

Hello Internet Known How. As a bit of background you probably know about the "45 degree rule" This is a kind of rule of thumb which assumes that any load from a party wall or foundation say spreads out at 45 degrees thus if you are 3.0m away from a party wall or neighbours found you can dig happily down 3.0m. But this is not always the case and this is where the issues arise. As a bit of background. If you tip out a load of broken jagged brick from a lorry it will form a pile. The sides may slope at some 40 degrees. Tip out a load of round gravel and the pile will spread further, the sides being less of a slope. Tip out a load of custard and the slope of the sides will be pretty shallow. This is called the "angle of repose" and it is roughly related to the shear strength of soils. Much will depend on the type of soil. You could have a stiff boulder clay / good chalk ( goodish shear strength) and this will allow you to dig deeper and closer so long as you don't leave the excavation open for too long. A soft / sensitive / high plasticity clay found often in the South East say can behave a bit like custard under certain conditions so the 45 degress rule can be no longer valid. The bearing capacity of a foundation changes depending on how much soil is above it. If the ground slips you can remove / change this extra weight on top which is confining the soil around the found. You also have to look at where the water table is for example..it can be quite complex as when you change this water level it can make the ground behave in a different way. It would be worthwhile having a chat with your SE and get them on board. They may not even charge you for this and give you good pointers. One aim here is to reign in the Surveyors, focus minds and hopefully speed up the process. Also, by doing so you can show you are acting in a responsible manner and this can carry some weight. On a light hearted note to finish.. if your SE mentions custard then ask if porrage behaves the same.

Hi Tom A few thoughts.. If you can taste and see the physical rusting you need to get to the root cause of it..on the upside you can be "Columbo" or Miss Marple.. Your starting point is often to look at the obvious and rule things out. Here are few: 1/ Have you done anything in the house that may have impacted on the internal plumbing..is your boiler leaking system water into the potable water?.. do you have modern or old pipework? 2/ Is pipe from the head of the bore to the house ok, is it leaking and syphoning back say and drawing surface ground water in? 3/ Is the cover to the borehole sealed ok. 4/ Is the bore cased at the top and is the casing falling apart. 5/ Is the bore hole pump falling to bits. 6/ How deep is the bore hole. Very deep and it could be in the lower aquifer, shallow maybe in a perched water table..the two behave differently as they can draw the water from far away or close by respectively. Worth a bit of time researching this. 7/ Have a walk about.. in your garden first.. have you been using any fertilisers or chemicals? next.. what have your neighbours been up to? Have any local farmers etc been "improving the soil" or using the likes of iron suplhates? 8/ Has there been development going on round about you that could have altered the ground water regime. 9/ Any factories shutting down (mines used to be an issue but not many of them left) that have been pumping the ground water. When they stop the ground water rises and can flush stuff out to your bore hole. 10/ Has anything been poured down drains you own and other folks too. Drains / soakaways leak so consider this. I'll stop at ten things but if you can rule these out and think of a few more yourself then you could save yourself a bit of cash on professional fees. Just put together a small package of info you have and this will often serve you well. All the best and stick to the bottled water until you get to the bottom of it.

CPD makes some good points and gives good advice here. Slating turrets is an art. If you want to have a word with the Slater then be familiar as to what is underneath.. maybe the first thing the Slater will do is to blame the joiner! The turret is a key feature and it needs to be right, often they are right over the front door.. not a good first impression. Ask the Slater if it would be ok on their own house? There are full turrets, half turrets and others and each needs a slightly different approach. If you have a full turret and are in a bind then sort out the bit you can see along the lines of what CPD is suggesting. As a fudge.. and only when you have little other options. On the back where it may be hidden you can sometimes get out of a hole if the side lap on the slates is too small by using a thinner slate with a code 3 lead soaker underneath.

Hello MonkeyTom. Good options above. Post what width of wall you need to build and the depth from finished ground level to top of found and you should get some more detailed suggestions. Oz07. Don't know if long terms studies have been done but I don't think it's a gimmick as the blocks should have been subject to a freeze thaw test to determine durability before being approved to sell. Aside..if anyone is tempted to buy "seconds" i.e ones going cheep make sure you know why they are cheep and that they are still ok! Fine maybe for a garden shed / green house base but your house? We know for example that air entrained concrete is more resistant to freezing effects as simplistically the air bubbles give space for the ice crystals to grow into. Aircrete block have plenty "bubbles"

Saveasteading. Thanks for posting that and your other info, enjoyable and informative reading for me. Keep going if you can as this type of info, presented in an easy to read format as you have done really adds to the quality of this forum. You give some great practical tips too! Interesting that Steamy Tea mentions carbon fibre and it's behavoir. There are few few posts on BH about folk using bassalt type meshes for crack control in slabs but as it's more elastic " stretchy" athough with a high ultimate strength then many of the old rules of thumb need careful appraisal before swapping say a traditional A142 / 193 mesh out for a carbon derived mesh. You also mentioned slab "curling". I've got a bit of this on my own house. I have a quasie "structural" ground bearing slab.. I'll leave it at that as I was experimenting. I put the day job hat on so cured it properly but I hand batched it so less quality control over the water cement ratio etc..but you have touched on this already. The slab is thin ~ 100mm with A142 mesh and the UF heating pipes are attached to this. It curled before the UF heating went on though. If you give the corners of the slab a "dunt" you can feel it's not fully resting on the perimeter supports at the corners but only by one or two mm so when it cracks the crack width should not be enough to cause a problem for my application. It's not called for example "concrete technology" for a laugh! There is a fair bit to this remarkable mixture as you say. kxi. The joint locations look respectable, the aspect ratio (length of each panel / width of panel < 2.0) looks ok too. I would imagine you have some extra loose rebar diagonally at the corners of the manhole covers as if not you could expect some cracking springing from the corner points of the manholes due to the stress concentration.

Hello TANK. A few thoughts, some explanation which may give you some pointers and another few for all who may be considering knocking down a wall say between their kitchen and dining room in a modern house to form an open plan space. "I'm wanting to install wall piers on my outbuilding as the length is 6m. Asked about this in my original thread but had no response. I wouldn't ask without first doing my own research, but I can't seem to find a definitive answer (maybe 'coz there isn't one!) either by Google or with the likes of you tube. You probably won't as there is a fair bit to it.. "My footings lie around 750mm below where the screed flooring will be. Do the piers always rise with the rest of the wall at the footings, or can they start from the screed (which will be 50mm on top of 50mm insulation atop hardcore.)? The first 5 courses are eng brick which then gives way to thermalite." Normally they rise from the footings. "Im hoping it's the latter as I have overlooked them and will need to do a little remedial work if I'm to go back to the footings... " Yes in the spirit of BH there is always hope and mostly a solution..only available on BH of course.. this can take a leap of faith but here goes with some technical stuff first then a possible solution TANK depending on what other factors come into play on your particular job. The first thing to recognise is that often a wall needs to resist both vertical (from say the weight of a roof or floor) and lateral wind loading.. even internal walls from time to time as you get different wind pressures occurring inside a building. A big set of bifolds accidently left open say on a windy day. Yes folks, we need to "have a look" at this possibility "just in case" to make sure the design is safe. In general terms if you take a brick wall (no big windows!) of say 3.0m long with a good return corner of masonry at each end, built off something solid on the bottom, say a foundation and held in place by a stiff roof at the top then the masonry will "span" in two directions.. a bit like a concrete floor slab that is supported on all four sides, you often see these descibed as a "two way spanning concrete slab". However, partly due to the way the bricks / blocks are shaped/ laid a standard UK masonry wall is stronger in the horizontal spanning direction than the vertical direction. Now at 6.0m horizontally that is a long way for a thin wall to span horizontally so it can resist particularly the wind loading.. you don't get much if any help here in terms of horizontal spanning resistance when you come to check the wall is ok. Also, you need to have a look at how the roof is supported on the wall head as sometimes this can cause an unwanted bending effect just to add to your problems. Very simplistically and just to make a corollary. Think of the wall as a series of two beams.. one goes horizontally, one vertically and they both interact and share some of the load. We "know" that a deep steel beam is often "stronger" than a shallow beam, for example a deep floor joist will often carry more load than a shallow one of the same thickness. The same applies to a masonry wall, the thicker it is then generally the more load it can carry. TANK. At the moment you have a wall with no piers so it's effective thickness is the thickness of the wall assuming it is a single skin. At 6.0m long it's strength is going to come mostly due to it's capacity to span vertically. I think you have recognised that it is probably not quite going to "cut the mustard" especially if you live in a windy area? As a starting point we often say lets put in some piers at 8ft centres ~ 2.4m and see if we can get this to fly. I use imperial units as some of the modern codes still use empirical design to some extent... we know it works! When you put in a pier it often has the effect of increasing the effective thickness of the wall..so in other words you are making the "wall beams" a bit deeper. Now it will carry more load, and this is how you get it all to work as we have made the wall " effectively thicker" by introducing piers. That's the end of the general theory bit! Turning back to TANK's issue. It look like there is no enthusiasm for digging up the floor and building up a pier off the founds. Anyway for a retro fitted pier to properly work it needs to be fully bonded into the wall. Ideally, fully bonded also means that both the pier and the wall should be build at the same time. This is because when you lay mortar you need to "tamp it down" so that the bed is evenly compressed for example and bonded to the masonry above and below the bonded in brick/ block. The bricks, blocks of the pier need really to physically interlock. Some may say.. well use a wall starter kit. Fix it to the wall that is built already and build the pier. This does not work as many starter kits have small coach screws with plugs. The ties also can slip vertically so they do not properly bond a remedial pier to the existing wall.. you may as well use wall paper paste. The reason they don't work is that you get an effect called "complimentary shear" this is a vertical force that occurs between the remedial pier and the existing wall. Wall starter kits typically can't resist this force as the ties move up and down within the profile of the wall starter kit. TANK. What about this? Rather than piers go for some wind posts. These could maybe be timbers (or steels) running vertically from the "structural slab" up to the wall head. What you are doing here is splitting the wall up into small panels.. the lateral wind loading is resisted by the timbers and the timbers also stiffen the wall so it can carry more vertical load. Sounds bizarre but.. timbers are cheep. They will stick out from the wall a bit more than steel but you can use them to support the ends of small shelves? Your floor buildup just says "50mm on top of 50mm insulation atop hardcore.)?" I'll assume you have say a 100 to 150 concrete slab under.. if not then.. ? you may have some serious issues with your floor cracking up and nothing to fix the base of the wind posts to. Assuming you do have a solid structural floor slab to connect into. Here is the lastish bits of the puzzle. The floor (structural slab) will go up and down as the moisture content of the ground changes and the loads on the floor vary (call this the "dumpling under the slab") , the walls hopefully will move not so much as the founds will be deeper. How do you connect a wind post to the slab / dumpling that could move up and down? you use a flexible bracket that is "bendy" https://www.strongtie.co.uk/products/detail/large-reinforced-angle-brackets/265 You can't use these brackets above as the the slotted hole (fixing) is too close to the bottom of the wind post if you go for timber, steel usually ok depending on what the profile is but I posted the link to give you an idea as to what might be a "bendy" type bracket! In the world of design it's ok to sometimes let things bend and recover as steel is elastic..your toilet bowl / floor tiles less so!. So long as you don't go over the score! Now that is a potential solution that will avoid you having to dig a few big holes in the floor to retrofit the piers all the way to the founds. Even if you do you can see that you will have to find a way of properly bonding the pier to the Thermalite. This Thermalite is last elephant in the room.. What you need to do is to find a fixing that will transfer the wind lateral load in the wall to the wind posts. You can often fix brackets to the sides of the timber wind post with square twist nails. You fix the bracket to the Thermalite with an under reamed resin anchor. Attached is the Fischer test report which gives you some pointers as to what fixings can be used in Thermalite blocks, the under reaming drill bits and so on. You can find the drill bits and installation instructions on the web. TANK.. hope this helps. You will probably need an SE to prove this but hopefully it can be a simple process, not too costly compared with BC knocking you back and / or digging up a big bit of the floor in two or three places then making good the DPM and so on. Even if you do this you'll struggle to bond the new pier in effectively and make a good looking job of it. Even if you don't need this retro work for BC then please be safe and get it (the wall) checked out. For all. The above issues often crop up when you want to knock down a wall along say the back of your house to form an open plan room right along the back of the house. Often you end up with a pier / column of masonry sitting in the middle of the external elevation wall . In the old day windows and doors were made of good solid wood / or metal framed and they stabalised the masonry. Now windows are plastic / aluminium framed with "rubbish" brackets that just don't stabalise the masonry up the sides of the window / door opening. Thus often you need some kind of wind post. Normally this is ok and easyish to do but when you encounter Aerated blocks (Thermalite say) or bricks with holes in them the fixings become an issue. That said often there is a solution. All the best TANK. Fischer Test Report for Thermalite_Report(1).pdf

Hello Babak. Please be very careful here. Unfortunately I have seen cases where folk have been a bit too hasty with the demolition and one case where the planners prevented them from rebuilding. There was some other history but it can be that serious! It looks like you have a fair idea of what you want and have a "design" in mind. Also, it looks like you have already put a fair amount of thought into build method, servicing it and so on. What about contacting some SE's? As you are proposing ICF for part of it there are a good few that have a grasp of the fundamentals of this and from their point of view it's often more interesting than just doing the day to day stuff, so they may think.. yes that looks like a project I would like to do. I'll also do the "Architectural side2 and building approval side" as the Client already has a good grasp of what they want and, as I'm drawing it up I'll do the structural calcs as I go along.. it's a very efficient way of doing it! In summary there are a few SE's who also do the whole package, calcs, drawings, a bit of the Architectural design and building approval so don't rule this option out. Even if you don't go this full route there are SE's who will give you a good few pointers and offer their contact base to you. There is a perception that for design you have to first get an Architect.. then an SE.. then a contractor. But all these folk often work and collaborate, learn from each other anyway. So don't rule out approaching an SE, explain what you need. You may get a pleasant surprise as they may say.. well I can do most of it but I know an Architect that can say deal with the parts that are outwith my expertise.

Jilly, thanks for the kind words. much appreciated. The main thing is that it seems like you are marching on now and hey, you probably got a load of stuff done before the material prices went daft due to covid.. so extra bonus to offset the stress. If you look at the cost of doing it now in this climate.. well you may well be in profit already! Jilly makes a good point here for all. If your designer turns round and says this is going to break the budget ask them why. You need to cut them a bit of slack but they should be able to explain to some extent and identify what parts of the job are causing the budget problem. If you just want a house too big for your budget then they should just tell you.. take the rose tinted glasses off folks and here is why.. On refurbs / conversions it's a different ball game and this is where a good designer should be able to identify the areas that are contributing to breaking the budget. Once you know this you can then look at finding a solution. Sometimes it's just not possible to convert say with the money you have, but at least you know why and be in a position to judge if the compromises you need to make may outweigh the benefits.

Hi MdeB I think you're taking a risk. As new build the substrate, founds, what is under the slab ect will still be settling in, adjusting to the ambient moisture regime and possible curing if you have masonry. There will be quite a lot going on under the screed and the supporting structure that you can't predict. The aspect ratio of the screed looks borderline. For a simple concrete ground bearing slab in an extension we consider amongst other things the aspect ratio. Here you have 5.8 / 2.8 = 2.07.. for unreinforced concrete slabs in say an extension once the aspect ratio goes over 2 then it is a flag. For a thin screed.. potential trouble. for slabs we often locate saw joints to control the location of the cracking. I would screed it, saw cut it into three sections 5.8 /3 = 1.93m x 2.8m as soon as it has hardened enough (24 hours) and leave it for as long as you can. Keep the screed covered and wet for at least 7days (preferrably a month!) so it cures, then slowly dry it out. It's a conservatory.. it could be pretty hot.. misstreat the scread and it will return the favour later! Even at these saw cut panel sizes you may still get some hairline cracking unless you are using a screed with polymer / steel fibres in it. Be safe and use a decoupling mat. You don't have to saw it all the way through. If the screed is 60mm thick then saw it to a depth of 40mm. You promote the cracking here as you have weakend the screed. What your are doing is allowing it to crack where you want it to and trying as best you can to limit the size and orientation of each crack. It's important to put a sheet of plastic under the screed so it can slip over the substructure easily as it cures. Get the screed right and the laying of the tiles should be the worry free part. All the best.

Good point here from the_r_sole. It's hard to compare designers prices. You can get a set of BR regs set of drawings and calcs cheeply, but that is all you will get. Just enough to get your approval. You can get them really cheep if you are happy with saying say.. ,x ,y and z will comply with clause x, y and z in the regs.. very few drawings or supporting info required. You'll have your approval but the info you have will be very limited..trouble ahead if you don't have significant experience of building and dealing with individual contractors. It will then be up to you to develop and communicate the detailed design information to the contractors ect who are pricing unless you are really doing it all yourself. The less info you give them generally the more heavy they will be with the pricing pencil or build in caveats to allow them to charge you for "extra work". It will also fall to you to take on the liability / responsibility if you get it wrong, BC come to inspect and say. NO! Put it this way. A good skilled trades person who will also keep you right on a DIY build (maybe by saying.. are you sure you want to do this?) may cost £250 - 300 / day as an average UK price. £31.5 - 37.50 / hour. Now chuck in some plant / van tool costs and so on. Just say 40 quid per hour = £ 1600 per week. That is just for one person. For two.. £ 3200 per week. Now an experienced Architect or designer can easily save you this and more. Go cheep and you risk getting bogged down trying to resolve buildability issues that crop up because you are just relying on the drawings you have use for regs approval, trying to source different materials that will still comply with say the U value requirements and so on. The test when comparing fees is to ask this of the designers. 1/ Your fee is this. It is higher than the others so can you convince me that this extra fee will result in an overall saving..mitigate the fee? Tell me how you are going to do this. Explain to me how say you have thought through the buildability aspects so it's easy for local trades persons to build and thus they will be less heavy with the pricing. Are you sure that the materials can be easily sourced and on time to avoid delay on site? Where is the risk in this project to me, can you tell me where the risk lies so I can make an informed descision? A good designer will think about all these things but that "thinking time" and experience comes at an upfront cost. 2/ Your fee is this. It is the lowest! Can you convince me that I'm still going to get the same service and effort of design thought on my build/ project? Can you assure me that you are giving me enough information so that a contractor is not going to get free access to my bank account while at the same time my job is not going to go off progamme, I'm not going to get into trouble by inadvertantly by doing something that may breach the regs.. go for the completion certificate and get knocked back.. ? If your designers don't like these types of questions then.. keep looking. As a last thought.. a washing machine repair "Engineer" may cost £ 60 per hour.. this is your home. While the professional fees may seem a bit steep initially, once you look at this in the round and if you don't have significant experience then a responsive and supportive designer can be a good route to follow.

Ah! Preparation is the key in my view. Clean off all loose debris, loose mortar at the wall heads and so on, even give it a hoover. This way you'll be less tempted to over spray. You save on fluid and this will maybe tempt you to spend more on the chemical spray. Long lances? well you'll get the easy to reach bits that are drafty but the worms etc will seek out the parts your "Heinekin" delivered "blind" from below has not reached. If you want to do a good job and are just not looking for the paperwork then set up some proper access and do it thoroughly. Not sure on costs but you could sequence the works so that you can use the access platform for something else at the same time, say if you need to cut out and splice the badly wrotten rafters?

Yes, you're right James. Some deflection takes place as you add say masonry which is a constant load, call this a dead load. The rest comes from say floor / roof loading which is variable load, call this a live load. Thus you have the "intial" deflection from the dead load. Then a variable deflection from the live load. Generally we assume for most domestic applications say using steel lintels that the deflection response is linear up to a point. Thus your total deflection is the sum of the dead + live load deflections. Precambering is an option but for the self builder just needing the odd beam it can be a bit costly. Best if you can to just make the beam/ lintel say a bit bigger. As Peter says (I think) if you have too much deflection, intial or otherwise you can just create something that does not look good. Too much and even the best door mastic operative will not be able to hide a significant downwards bow! Spot on Mike..go for bottom supported as the doors (glass mainly) are heavy and introduce a fair bit of variable load to a lintel as they open and shut.

Good point Peter. SillyBilly looks like there is more to this than meets the eye. If the wall is going to be an internal wall at the end of the day then why lightweight insulating blocks? Is there an issue with the founds say and you are trying to reduce the loading? The wall looks like it is 6.3m long , usually after about 6.0m you start to worry about significant shrinkage cracking in cement based blocks (as opposed to clay), assuming the materials have been looked after and the mortar mix is not too strong. Even with walls shorter than this you get some shrinkage cracks around the opening depending on the surrounding wall geometry. Much also depends on the wall height, geometry and how the SE say has designed it. Vertically spanning, two way spanning and so on. To give you relevant pointers then a drawing or two would help. If you are just worried about the wind loading in the temporary condition then your starting point is this. If you look at the probability of the wall being loaded by the wind over a two year period then the wind loading is reduced (by some 35 to 40 %) as the normally calculated wind loading is usually based on a 50 year return period. But the wall may have been designed with a certain amount of compression, say from the upper floors / roof. Often if you have a good weight on a wall then compression is beneficial as it counteracts the tension stress developed on one face of the wall by the sideways wind loading. On the practical side you could consider introducing a couple of temporary wind posts on the outside of the wall, you may have the space to do this. We know that aerated type blocks are hard to get a good fixing to so when you are building the wall introduce some bent leg tie straps with a twist. The bent leg would turn down the inside face of the wall and where the strap comes out the outside face you have the twist. Now screw fix the strap to the side of your wind post, go for timber posts. Fix the posts top and bottom. When ready remove the temporary timber wind posts and recycle. The bed reinforcement looks great on paper but for a brickie it's another hassle and makes it harder to keep the coursing level. If you really need it SE wise then fine but the brickie will charge you more to bed it and for the extra time they will have to take to get everything level. You also have the cost of the bed reinforcement and time to procure. If you're laying the blocks your self then make sure you have a practice with bed reinforcement as although the flattened type S/steal stuff looks great it still makes it harder to maintain level coursing if you are working on a 10.0 mm mortar bed and standard units sizes. If you deviate from this then you'll often find that you can't marry up the wall coursing where it ties into other walls. Hope this gives you a few ideas.

Hello Moggaman. Working on the basis that your purlins are supported somewhere along the span? maybe a splice? below is part of a steel spec. "All steelwork is to be fabricated by a CE approved fabricator and comply with the BS EN 1090 series requirements. Site welding is not permitted. It is the Contractor's responsibility to check all steelwork dimensions prior to manufacture." "Shot blast to grade SA2.5 and painted with a zinc rich primer. Nominal DFT 80 microns." Shot blasting comes in varying degrees of "cleaning", SA2.5 is a common one for domestic applications. The primer spec gives your local fabricator a bit of play as to what they can use.. the tins of paint are actually drums of paint so they can "use up a drum" on your job. DFT means nominal dry film thickness.. in other words it looks like paint not just a sniff. It's worth doing as a matter of good practice and can help protect vulnerable parts like the welds and bolts / fixings. In summary, if your steel is in an indoor, heated and fully protected and non aggresive environment then strictly speaking no need for painting / treatments. If it is running over a bathroom and you may have moisture? Would I leave the steel raw on my own house? No. The primer can get rubbed a bit as it's quite soft so don't panic if you see a few bits scuffed off. Last thought, it often comes in two colours, red or grey if that matters?

Hello flanagai. It may be that an SE say or an Architect that has a good SE background is best placed to help here. At some point some calculations may be required for BC purposes if you encounter the unexpected. If you think about it this way. You'll be doing the rest from underbuilding up. The groundworks could be considered as a stand alone package. You are already "project managing" it. You can do a lot to help yourself and keep the cost down. Let's say you engage a local contractor to lay the founds and take the underbuilding up to wall plate level. To price this they will take your drawings, work out the amount of dig and muck away, the volume of concrete, amount of say blocks, wall ties and the amount of say lean mix cavity fill you need. Somewhere they often say.. "based on the drawings" Now for the self builder one problem that arises is if you need to make the founds deeper, say you hit a soft spot. In some case the founds need to be shallow if you encounter rock. Let's take the deeper as more common. Here you have many options; use say trench fill, just make the founds thicker using higher grade concrete if not that much, lay the foundations deeper and make the under building higher. However, there comes a point where your masonry wall thickness needs to be increased if it gets too deep, this is partly to do with the soil pressure on the side of the walls under the ground. All of a sudden things can grow arms and legs. Here an SE type person is often best placed to advise on the most economic option. What you can do is ask the contractor to give you a price based on the drawings but also give you rates for say extra dig, cost per square metre of each masonry leaf. Break this down into a cost say for up to 900mm below working site ground level and up to 1500mm below ground level. Also ask for rates to support the ground if you need to go deeper. Basically ask for rates for extra work. Now, if it turns out once you have excavated the ground that you need to do more work then you have a set of agreed rates. This can transfer more risk to you but you have more control. On the other hand you can just say to the contractor.. you take all the risk.. but you will pay for this.. very rarely will the contractor be the looser here. This is where an SE can really help. Get them in early and they will help you identify what rates you need to get in terms of extra work. Once you have set this up you should often be able to measure up your self and agree the payments. Now let's say you do need to do extra work. The SE will have a discussion with you and the builder and say here is the most economic way of overcoming the unforseen. In summary doing it this way will result in you paying for what you get.. often no more and if you all get on ok and you pay your bills on time you may get a bit extra for free as you'll know. For all, many contractors like working for good reasonable and fair clients so will occasionally go a bit less heavy on the invoicing.

Hi Jack. If fixing to a slab then "underhanging" removes issues of the reduced edge fixing distance, that being the distance from the fixing into the concrete to the edge of the concrete. If over hanging then this problem arises. At 10mm variation between the high point and low point you are in the ball park regarding mortar bedding thickness. If you have 5.0mm mortar bed at the high point then you'll end up with 15mm thickness of bed at the low point.. all within acceptable limits. The following is based on the assumption that you have not cast the slab to high! If you have then that is for another day. Enough of the theory! ..some practical stuff. Here is a method of bedding a wall plate to get a quality job. The first thing is that timber is not straight when you lay it down on site.. it may have been when it left the merchants! Lay your wall plate down on plan and it will often have a bow, look at it sideways on elevation and it will be bowed that way too. And just to add to the dilemma it will also often be twisted. Usually you have a DPC between the timber and the slab. Staple the DPC to the bottom of the soleplate. Next get some wet timber, say 100 x 22 mm soft wood. Rip this down lengthways so you have little strips of different thicknesses, say 4 x 22 , 6 x 22 , 8 x 22 and so on. Cut these into 150mm lengths.. like kindeling for the fire. Put the sole plate on the slab, pilot drill it so the screw can slip freely and part fix it down to the slab with say 120 mm x 5mm screws and plugs. As you do this get the sole plate as straight as you can on plan. Often you only need screws at 900 to 1200 mm centres so it's not to onerous to do. Also, you can use the screws to take the twist out as you can either put them close to the edge of the slab or more inboard. Fine to do as they are just temporary fixings and non structural. Now work your way along it putting in the timber packers to get the top level. Try as best you can to keep the packers away from the stud positions. You'll not always get this bang on so don't worry. Just don't put them where you have a cluster of studs say taking high loads from lintels etc above or too close to the corners. You need to slacken and retighten the screws as you go to get the packers in. You'll not get it perfect but do the best you can. Once you have got it all as straight as you can unscrew the sole plate, put down the mortar bed and reposition the screws. Slowly tighten the screws while giving the top of the timber a tap down with a hammer. Leave it all to set. After a few days of dry weather the packers will shrink and you can wiggle them out easily. Point up the small holes they leave. Don't use dry timber for the packers as it will swell and lift the sole plate.. and you won't get them out later. Leave the screws in place as this helps keep the sole plate in place while you are putting up the kit. Once the kit is up follow the SE's instructions for permanant holding down fixings and so on. For all. The above is a bit lengthy but if you are self building and ordering a kit (TF) the manufacturer will often have a clause in their spec about how level the sole plate has to be. Deviate from this and it can let them shift the blame to you if something is not quite right with the kit. If you are going traditional masonry construction then you may have a trussed rafter roof. Again, the wall plate tolerances are covered in the manufacture's clauses. Traditionally, less so now we used to make the bedding of the wall plate part of the brickies work package, particularly in Scotland when doing TF. This gives a clear line of demarcation. Brickies are not so keen on this now as.. All the best Jack and hope this helps, or you can adapt the above principles to suit your slab.