Do i have to retract the fact that i called him a W"%ker

[SteamyTea]

15 minutes ago, scottishjohn said:

why they so small  --plot prices?

No idea. It was built in 1987, so probably plot, an old scrap yard, was sold 3 years before that.

Really sad things they could have been built bigger if more imagination had been used.

Had a discussion with caliwag on his blog about it. 

[Moonshine]

On 16/11/2019 at 12:29, SteamyTea said:

No idea. It was built in 1987, so probably plot, an old scrap yard, was sold 3 years before that.

Really sad things they could have been built bigger if more imagination had been used.

Had a discussion with caliwag on his blog about it. 

 

If they are in Cornwall I doubt it would be a plot cost as a limit as in non blow in areas, plots are fairly reasonable.

Could they have been built as holiday accommodation, that didn't work so sold as individual dwellings.

[SteamyTea]

25 minutes ago, Moonshine said:

Could they have been built as holiday accommodation

Not in the ex industrial bit of Cornwall I am in.

There are two Cornwalls.  The picture postcard one and then the deprived area (one of the most deprived in Europe).

To the best of my knowledge, they were built as a test for a new construction method.  Then repeated a few thousand times across the county.

Thing is, they are not that small compared to some newer places, and quite large compared to some of the old housing (most of Cornwall has only been developed in the last 200 years).

I know my neighbour bought his place cheaper than it originally sold for, but that was the early 90's property slump that caused that.

I don't think plot prices are reasonably priced, or easy to get hold of, from what I have been told.  They are not Mayfair prices, but not giveaway either.

Edited November 17, 2019 by SteamyTea

[ProDave]

My very first house was tiny.  Way too small in my opinion, BUT because it was small, and not in a nice area, it was cheap, it was in fact the cheapest house in the county when I bought it, and because of that, the only one I could just afford.

 

It was small because the developers won their appeal.  The local council had refused the application as over development. The developer won the appeal and the houses were built.  Had the appeal been lost, they would have built fewer, larger houses which would have been more expensive and I might not have been able to afford a house for some time and things may have been very different for me.

[SteamyTea]

4 minutes ago, ProDave said:

they would have built fewer, larger houses which would have been more expensive

I am not 100% sold on that argument.

If there was no such thing as a small house, then the replacement would be larger.

The price points would be the same as that is what the consumer can afford.

The 'loss' would just be on the land value.

[Ed Davies]

It'd be interesting to calculate what the incremental cost of adding, say, a metre to the width of @SteamyTea's house would be: an extra 26 m² of external area (gf floor, walls and roof), 7 m² of internal floor area and maybe 5 m² of internal walls and maybe a bit more cable and pipe (though not much pipe with sensible layout). The thing which wouldn't scale would be the joists - presumably they go across the house and 4.5 m long is significantly more than 3.5 m in terms of beefiness required, I think. Maybe a bit more window area. A lot of the other costs would stay the same, e.g., for stairs, plumbing, electrics and so on and particular for the side/partition walls.

 

In exchange the floor area increases by 13 m² which is just short of a 30% increase. I really doubt it'd increase the cost of building the house by anything like that much (and why cost/m² can be so misleading for houses which are unusually large or small).

 

They wouldn't fit across the front of the plot like that but that layout wastes the area of the access to the back. Putting four houses across the N side of the plot and two across the S side might have been better.

[SteamyTea]

9 hours ago, Ed Davies said:

The thing which wouldn't scale would be the joists

Quick look at a joist calculator and it is the difference between a 2" by 8" and a 2" by 10"

But by having an extra meter on width, the stairs could be turned 90°, so shorter joists could be used, so probably not so different.

 

I seem to remember that during mathematics classes there was a problem about making the largest volume container with a fixed amount of material.  Was meant to show the power of calculus.

https://www.analyzemath.com/calculus/Problems/maximum_volume_problem.html