I don't think he is doing either. I remember my parents' house in Hastings in the 1950s. It was a three-storey Victorian/Edwardian town house. It's still there. We had no central heating (who did?) and yet we never saw cold as a problem. The walls were very thick, I seem to recall. A very solid house indeed.
MM
You obviously know nothing of construction.
You obviously know nothing of construction to come out with such an asinine comment. TJIs piss all over conventional joists.
insulation.
You mean blocks. Bkrick and bock houses rest on the blocks with the bricks being cladding, as in timber fromaed house. B&B is expensive and are too thick.
No, looks good.
Yes, many punter are silly.
Do you know what a SIP panels is?
Like in the USA, Scandinavia and Canada, where TIs are the norm
Not so. See above.
They are technically more advanced to give greater benefits to the customer and builder.
You obviously know nothing of construction.
You obviously know nothing of construction.
Quality and design are two separate issues. Pre-fabrication offers higher quality as a large part of the building is built in ideal conditions using state-of-the-art machine tools. Building as we do is a recipe for poor quality, and it shows in the housing stock of the UK. These new designs, although poor by state-of-the-art elsewhere, offer improvements all around.
You are making all this up too.
The Queen.
Doid youa ll wear parkas around the house?
Did the walls have special heat generating properties?
To Spain? We are better. To all others we are way behind in technology (one fool here was slagging an advanved design because it wasn't as they built it when the Crimea war was on), design and quality. The best designs and quality is the Canadian R200 standard, which is now available here, and backed by the Canadian government too.
The Germans have the Passiv Haus standard and the Scandinavians are famed for advanced high insulating designs and materials. The Germans think we are mad building cavity walls, saying why build two walls when one can do.
The UK government has laid down the gauntlet and ordered house builders to get into the 20th century in design, technology, quality and construction speed, it is too much to get them into the 21st. If the builders do not deliver the government will legislate to get them in order.
Maybe I asked the wrong question? Maybe I should have asked how new houses in the UK compare with new houses built in places like the US, Oz, Spain, etc? Do we compare? Are we as good, better or worse?
John.
Broadsjidt?
What you get on the newspaper if you unfold it afterwards.
(Well some people are thrifty.)
(Others just don't know sjidt.)
Im sure you meant built like a brick shidt house. An outhouse is more like the hovels that were left over from another era. Fancy generations of people living like that?
And others in unapproachable luxury.
No change there then.
thats odd, I thought government aka planning was one of the big barriers to such progress.
Regards, NT
Every decade has had it's share of crap builders. I've ripped apart houses built around the 1900s and they are full of bodge jobs. The most impressive properties, IME, were built in the 50s - referring to quality of build only!
I wont mention that 10 years doesnt equal new, and isnt always enough time.
not many though. The average Vic builder looks like a master of taste compared to most stuff built now.
and inadequate
I dont know what that phrase is meant to mean, but it clearly is a problem with a number of new houses, much more so than with old. It probably was just as much a problem 100 years ago, but after 100 years the soil either has given up its toxins or else isnt going to - either way a non risk.
like what, repointing? Cracking? My own experiecne is that Vics take far more maintenance than modern.
oh yes. Some oldies are right rabbit runs. Some Vic builders seemed to have problems getting the floors level, and one had to go up and down steps just to cross the floor!
A small number didnt even bother with the steps: the floors occasionally just slope instead. (If both floors the same, more likely to be subsidence)
Regards, NT
I'm no construction expert so I cannot offer that sort of response. I can say, speaking as a (more or less) first time buyer from last summer that I looked at over 30 houses, old(ish), new and very new.
Generally speaking the houses from the 50s and 60s had a much more solid feel internally. However they mostly needed redecorating (unless aging wallpaper is your style), re-wiring (unless a single socket per room is adequate for you) and a host of other issues, such as patchy central heating (normally added later and not always even handedly) attached to a large, loud boiler, presumably not as efficient as modern ones (and certainly much bigger). We also had issues with the kitchens and bathrooms in these places - as a general rule. Most had been double glazed in the 80s.
In their favour, they were generally bigger inside and had much bigger gardens. The soundproofing was better and they felt more sturdy. You got more house for your money, but then you needed the money to spend putting in modern kitchens / bathrooms / boilers etc.
The houses from the early to mid 90s we visited were by far the worse. Shoddily built, shoddily finished, already looking tatty and in need of repair. Sound proofing was none existant - the walls might just as well have not been there. Double glazing all wood, and already in need of serious repainting, likewise sophets (sp?). Good use of space was about the only plus point.
Houses post 2000 or so came out top. Noticeable improvement in soundproofing (especially between floors), windows and sophets all UPVc, small, quiet boilers, high pressure hot water systems, excellent use of space, very good bathrooms and kitchens. In the end it was this that won it for us. Every room has bucket loads of power points, phone points, TV aerials, no-where is unheated.
The actual construction of the house is more difficult to comment on because I lack the expertise to do so, however I can say that there is much evidence it was finished in a big rush and with extreme carelessness. Whilst dodgy wiring, dodgy water sensors, dodgy taps, dodgy windows, abundent nail pops have all been fixed quickly by Persimmon, there are other things that they cannot "fix". These include the fact that there is a hardly a 90 angle in the house, all of the window reveals are crooked in some way or another, doors that don't fit the frames, or where the catch doesn't line up. How are you supposed to put up straight curtain poles when the windows and ceilings are both not straight, but to different degrees from one another? Then there's bits of trunking, made of dry wall, presumably to hide pipes, which are so crooked that even to the naked eye on the other side of the room you can see how out of alignment it is. I'd have kicked their arse if I was the original owner, but I got it when it was just shy of 2 yrs old. Compared to the benefits though, the annoyances are trivial.
Oh, I have also had to repaint the whole place from top to bottom because the quality of paint used originally was dire.
Must be in a bad way if youre not willing to sort the damp out.
Regards, NT
Thanks Simon,
Interestingly, on a slightly different issue, I was looking last night at a full page ad for a 4-bedroom 'executive' Barrett home being sold in Swansea for a few quid short of 400K.
At first glance it looks wonderful but, upon closer inspection, the bedroom photos only have single beds shown, the sofas in the living room is a small two seater and there is only one of these visible. The dining room has a wonderful dining table and six chairs in it but, looking closely, you realise that there is no room for anyone to pull out a chair to sit down, etc, etc.
In other words, size seems to be an issue with new house builds in the UK - tiny.
J.
Our 1920s house sounds very similar. I don't think it is shoddy workmanship per-se; just the way things were done. The concrete over mud (or in our case, ash) and no damp-proof in floor or walls is just the way they did things. It isn't damp. According to a building-inspector friend of ours this kind of construction was originally highly impervious to damp though of course over 70 years or so there are cracks in the floor which could (though they don't yet) cause problems.
The solid partition walls (as opposed to the loadbearing walls) are thin interlocking block (some kind of course concrete mix - not too heavy) and were built directly on the floorboards upstairs, not even necessarily over joists.
One part of the house had (basically) a 6m joist span with no real loadbearing wall in the middle - we have taken out the partition wall and added a concrete beam.
The joists in the attic are so thin and so far apart that they sagged under their own weight when we pulled the asbestos sheet ceiling down.
The original wiring (some of which was still in place, but which wasn't (thankfully) in use) was lead sheathed.
The outer walls are brick-gap-brick. Apart from the lower 8 or 10 courses the outside is rendered too. The bricks are appalling. Most of them look like fairly standard red brick and drill quite easily, but a fair proportion have an extremely hard, bluish core to them which isn't a problem for the SDS, but which brings an ordinary masonry/hammer drill to a complete standstill. Drilling cores is a dreadful process as different bits of the drill are trying to get through different hardnesses of brick.
At least the wall ties (some of which we could inspect when we removed a chimney) are in good nick, even if they are rather more widely-spaced than usual these days.
My personal opinion is that the basic building standards these days are vastly improved, and that there is more consistency, but that two things have slipped - design and detail.
Design is a problem mainly because of trying to squeeze too much house into too small a space. Four bedrooms with the fourth hardly big enough for a child's bed; two en-suites where leaving one out would make the second bedroom a more useful size; a "dining room" next to the kitchen big enough for a table but not the sideboard, when simply leaving out the partition wall would have made a huge and useful "dining kitchen" (or whatever); a so-called "garage" which isn't big enough both to park the car and to be able to get out of it.
On the whole I find older properties are more well-thought out. Their layout may not be exactly to our liking, but they generally work.
Detail is what most people notice, and where I think the idea of modern houses being badly built comes from. Main culprits are; the use of cheaply-built partition walls in metal frame and thin plasterboard which bend when you lean on them; show houses with doors missing because as soon as you mount one you lose half the useful space in a room; utility rooms which are corridoors; fireplaces where none is required; incredibly silly period-pastiche (fake timber beams etc.)...
And so on.
Actually, I think the plasterboard one is what most people notice. Whether or not you believe that timber-frame and plasterboard lined walls are as strong/soundproof/insulating as solid masonry and plaster, it certainly gives a less "solid" feel to the house. There are certainly ways around this - the use of heavy board such as Fermacell, and packing the wall with dampening material is easy to do and not (that) expensive but large builders tend not to do that.
Great argument for self-build then, eh?
(Cue SB enthusiasts)
Hwyl!
M.
If you're looking in the Swansea area and have anything like 400k to spend, get in touch with occasional contributor Rick Hughes who is just finishing his (second? third?) self-build in the area. He seems very keen to show it off, and land around Swansea is still (just) affordable...
Hwyl!
M.
I know, scared the cr@p out of me first time I spotted that!
I would agree with that- having built an all timber house, the whole house trembles slightly when you slam the heavy oak outer doors :)
However I LIKE it that way. You subliminally know you are in a timber house by the sound and feel of it.
Totally agree on the design thing tho: As long as houses are in short supply, then people are just going to buy whatever they can find in approximately the right area at a price they can afford.
Yuk! I wouldn't be able to sleep soundly with the house trembling around me!
It wouldn't have anything to do with that wolf outside, a-huffing and a-puffing...?
MM
I can only speak for Germany, since I have relatives there, know several people who have built their houses (still the norm in Germany to buy a plot and build a house), and have attended the topping-out ceremonies where the sheer solidity of the construction never ceases to impress.
MM
Oh, not MORE nanny statism, surely! Why can't clients just demand a higher standard of quality? Why are the British so willing to accept lower standards than just about any other nation? Why do we have to depend on a TV programme every now and again to expose the shoddy workmanship? What about brand-new houses in Australia, for example? They look absolutely fantastic.
MM
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