It ain’t half what you think

In the first of a two-part tale, Simon Tolson explains the pitfalls that befell him - despite the best intentions and being the recipient of highly competent advice - when he undertook a building project in a Georgian end of terrace house in West London.

My tale is one about water, the wrong kind of water, building work, the expensive kind, money, too much of it and last but not least the sins of the past. It starts in about 1830 and runs right up to today.

In 1996 my wife and I purchased a little Georgian end of terrace house in West London. As a prudent person I had a full structural survey undertaken. It recorded a clean bill of health and only contained the usual caveats where the surveyor was not able to carry out a destructive survey or test the drainage etc. Even so, pre-purchase, my late father, who was an architect, and I did what limited poking about we could, we found nothing of import. Ditto the damp man. So we purchased.

A happy year passed by then, in July 1997, the heavens opened. I received a call from my distraught wife to say that she was up to her knees in sewage in our basement. Fun and games with Thames Water then followed, but that is a matter for another day, suffice to say that I designed and constructed some devices to prevent such a problem occurring again. They were not pretty, but they worked.

Then came two children and the need for more suitable space. We engaged an architect, plans were prepared, schemes were drawn up and planning permission procured for the extension and engineering works associated with improving the drainage arrangements.
I thought that I might be able to avoid the woes of many a dilettante to this building game. I had after all been there vicariously many times before for my clients and felt I would not suffer the sins of being compromised by ignorance or lack of understanding.

I assembled my team, all competent folk: besides my chartered architect I had not one but two chartered engineers, one for the substructures and one for the superstructure and a chartered quantity surveyor and a renowned party wall surveyor.

I knew from experience that the biggest cost uncertainties with any refurbishment work tends to fall under the gang of six:

• an inadequate design brief
• a poor contract document insufficiently setting out the design requirements and a paucity of detail on the finishes
• cost vulnerability caused by the failure to properly specify mechanical and electrical elements leading to clashes
• ‘discoveries’ in the existing structure which derail the programme and put the budget at risk
• a client in residence
• problems with neighbourly relations

I addressed each of these and with my professional team we produced a pukka set of documents. We found an excellent contractor familiar and caring with this type of work with a proven track record. Before the contract was let preparatory opening up works were undertaken to discover the make-up of given walls, timbers, floors and a survey made to plot the line and position of the party structures. Party wall notices were served in advance. My full story on the party wall process is a matter for another day - it has proved a nightmare by reason of ‘personalities’ – my neighbours’! It is with the building work I am concerned in this column.

Perhaps naively I had thought compliance with the aforesaid steps would hold us in good stead and prove uneventful. I was in for a rude shock. I thought there might be some unknown peculiarities with the house – that was to be expected. However, we soon discovered that things were not as they seemed.

Our allegedly solid basement floor was in fact a combination of suspended flagstone floor, under which it seemed ‘drainage’ and foul water passed until recently. Yes, there was concrete, but what my engineers had not anticipated was that the load temporarily transferred to that ‘slab’ due to opening up was imperilled. Emergency temporary propping had to be introduced to overcome these discoveries. Much additional digging became necessary. An old vaulted structure was found near the underpinning works to a party wall. The District Surveyor had to come out, digging had to take place and more time was lost.

Come on Lottie, the dry rot dog. Lottie is a specialist in sniffing out the mycelia associated with dry rot. She found dry rot, lots of it. It was historically old but the damage that it had done to nearly all the lintels, joists and wall plates in the house only became apparent once uncovered. Before long nearly every wall needed stitching, and dry packing. Further delay ensued, additional visits by the engineers, another visit by Lottie.

There is some good news, we discovered to the back of our kitchen that we had a secret room complete with a little row of shelves and jars with decayed fruit of some sort, locked up like an Egyptian tomb. It was probably a pantry but earlier remodelling of the house had lost it.

Which brings me back to the whole point of this article. Despite the best intentions, and the recipient of highly competent advice, one cannot in old houses guarantee with any certainty what building activity will cost and how long it will take. Indeed cowboy builders are not a new phenomenon, for only yesterday I found that one internal partition wall at basement level, supporting tons of masonry above, was held in place by an old internal window and a few nails.

The moral of my little story, despite all the media encouragement, is don’t! Build, that is!