What hurts often instructs

In the second of a two-part tale, Simon Tolson continues his tale of the pitfalls that befell him when he undertook a building project in a Georgian end of terrace house in West London and discovered that cowboys and fraudulent concealment are not a new phenomena.

Last week I whet your appetites with my building woes and engendered no doubt sympathy with a few and schadenfreude amongst others. Hay ho. But my story continues.

I talked last time from the cost and stress point of view of the six factors that have the propensity to turn a project from a dream to a nightmare. I dealt with unneighbourly relations and the cost uncertainty that tends to go hand in glove with an inadequate design brief and poor contract documentation. In my case I had those issues largely button-holed.

This time I take you to the subject of our discoveries, not the type you find behind locked doors at the Christmas party but of an even more worrying kind. The unknown, butchered, blundered building. This is not unique to “World in Action” or BBC2 but to be found in an old house near you. Cowboys and fraudulent concealment are not a new phenomena and I suspect even the pharaohs sealed in one or two who got the plans wrong or stones juxtaposed!

However I thought that in the era of the Georgian townhouse that sense of style perhaps pervaded a craft approach with the men, the artisans, like the great Barrie, Nash, Hawksmoor and Wood. Wrong.

I was in for a sharp shock. Yes, properties of this period and type were usually built without a damp-proof course, and relied upon lath and plaster, or timber panel linings on battens, to cover the brickwork and provide a dry surface. The walls are normally of solid construction, thicker than modern brickwork but the bonding often suspect, and contain timber wall plates and fixing grounds and timber lintels over door and window openings.

Oh yes, I knew too that commonly roofs are covered with slates or tiles laid on a close-boarded timber lining over the rafters, with brick parapets at the edges, and box or valley gutters formed with lead on a timber boarded framework.
I knew that it is usual for the rainwater goods to have large hoppers and down pipes built into the wall structure, so defects were often not visible until significant escaping water has caused damage to the surrounding masonry and adjacent timbers. I kind of accepted that my predecessor owners kept that lot in check.

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. My undefined provisional sums were now to take a serous pounding.
Our allegedly solid basement floor, yes it had 150mm of concrete atop it, was in fact a suspended flagstone floor, under which it seemed ‘drainage’ and foul water had passed freely until we moved out. That explained why our flooding problems left a dead mouse smell that lingered far too long. Yes, there was concrete, but what my engineers had not anticipated earlier when opening up above was that the load temporarily transferred down to that very ‘slab’ was now imperilled.
Cracks appeared in the flank wall then they migrated. Emergency temporary propping had to be introduced to overcome these discoveries. In came shims, chocks and braces. Much additional digging became necessary. In went the ubiquitous Acrows. Lots of them. Soon to be a veritable forest. An old vaulted structure was found near the underpinning works to a party wall. The District Surveyor had to come out, hand digging was the order of the day 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.

Even without the rot we found lintels that did not bear into the brickwork. Indeed an internal window in the centre of the basement in the spine wall was found to be supporting much of the house above. It was held in place by a few nails and this was discovered only upon its removal when groans were uttered from the structure. Before long nearly every wall needed stitching, and dry packing. Then elbows to tie flank walls to front and rear, which had become ‘live’. Further delay ensued, additional visits by the engineers, another visit by Lottie.

However 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. A gain to us.

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.

The moral of my little story, despite all the media encouragement, is don’t! Build, that is at least without a good sense of humour, a strong marriage and a friendly bank manager.