I've just discovered a cellar. It's about 2.5m x 3.0m with a vaulted ceiling and a stone staircase leading up into the house. The ceiling height at present is over 2.0m, but I suspect if I dig down I will find a flagstone floor. It's still limewashed, and there are a few iron hooks on the ceiling.
I'd like to restore it, but I'm concerned that I'm breaking so many regulations renovating my house that reinstating a cellar might just get me into an altogether new realm of trouble if I get caught.
Any ideas what to do with it? I quite fancy a small area where the wife can practice the violin without me having to go outside!
Generally, restoration and repair isn't a planning or building control matter. Reinstatement may be - however bringing a cellar back into use as a cellar is probably ok - unless you were planning some very different use for it.
I was cleaning up out front and noticed a flagstone beneath the crumbling remains of a tarmac covering next to the house. I lifted it and found a hole, so I sent the wife down to take a look.
Before I started on my renovation I rang BC for some advice. I am replacing about half of my downstairs floor, which should be quarry tiles on earth, but is a patchwork of quarry tiles, concrete and nothing. I now know that one neat concrete rectangle is in fact the blocked up entrance to the cellar. I mentioned that my walls are 2ft thick random stone and mud, that there are no foundations (so I thought), no dpm or dpc and no damp. My plan to replace the floor with flagstones was unacceptable. I had to underpin the house, damp proof inject the walls, excavate the floor, put in a dpm, radon sump. I kid you not!
Since then I have had nothing to do with my local BC department, save submitting a building notice which neglects to mention about 3/4 of what I'm actually doing.
Hmmm - sounds a very unenlightened approach from BC in relation to an older building (how old?)
I don't blame you for going your own way in those circumstances.
Listed building status might do you some good (in that inappropriate building regs don't have to be followed) - have you considered getting a spot listing?
The BCO in ths case is doing his job to the correct degree. You cannot fault the BCO, but you might take issue with the regulations.
I have never heard that..in fact in one case I have heard a BCO and a listings officer each arguing with the other about a staircase.
The BCO insisting that it must be changed, as it was dangerous, and the listing officer stying that it could not, as it was part of the existing listed structure.
In the end it was 'repaired' and reinstalled thus avoiding the bulding regulations.
- have you considered getting
Never go for a listing if you can avoid it. It devalues the house around
30% because it doubles repair costs every time.
Both the listings system and the building regulations are complete examples of the law of unintended consequences. Listing a building often sounds its death knell, as it is often far more cost effective to let it fall down than it is to restore it to the absurdly high standards required. And even if it is restored, the listing essentially turns a house from a a living developing thing into a museum piece, where nothing can be changed easily, and many things cannot be changed at all.
I applaud the spirit of the listing system,. but the practical reality is that it does very little of a positive nature to achieve its aims.
The building regulations I also applaud, they are there to prevent substandard housing being foisted on new buyers and to prevent severely compromised building work being carried out: However they go too far. Instead of 'what you do should be, if a mod or repair, no worse than existing, and if new or an extension, to current standards' it tends to be 'what you do shall always entail rendering anything you touch to full modern standards..
and as in this case, that can be frighteningly expensive.
One the TV renovation programmes found one once. The explanation given was that it was common practise to fill redundant cellars with demolition rubble from the next job (wells and air raid shelters likewise). Perhaps we should all look for them; not just those with old houses -- Grime Busters reported on a Council house with a substantial void underneath, filling with sewage (perhaps a reason for _not_ looking :).
Me too, in my own home. BCO wanted firecheck doors, LBO wanted to preserve the building. Argment never resolved and I just gave up any intent to do the work, or even to do repairs.
On 5 Aug, 10:36, snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote:
Dear Tom FWIIW I suggest you do the following: Accpet the manna (sp?) gratefully and put the cellar to the sort of use that was intended for it when it was first built. this is likely to be storage (wine or coal depending on its age) but if you want to upgrade to modern standards be very, very careful how you do it. I take it that the building is not listed from your reponses to comments - that is good. I share with Nat Phil the veiw that the last thing you do is to list it if you can avoid it. Listing is a good thing in general but is dependent on the whim of the local conservation officers who vary in competence and understanding from the plainly obsenely, incompentent purists with no practical understaning to the very good but in my experience there are more in practice who tend to the former than the latter description and it is quite common to find them disagreeing with each other let alone the BCO! Do not be tempted to try to make the cellar water proof by tanking - it will merely cause water to go different routes and maybe in walls that you do not want it to go! Do, however, introduce subfoor ventilation (if necesary by excavating a subfoor tube( to get through- ventilation. Do put in an ISOLATED timber (tanalised) floor if you want to store things ( or simply some sheet poly?) but bear in mind it will not be vented and thus is at risk if you have cut any ends of treated timber. It would be good to reinstate access from inside but if you do so make sure any staircase is also isolated. Seems to me the best use you could make of it is to store wine or any non-cellulosic material. Chris
I've just decided to "repair" the floor rather than "replace" a section of it. Unfortunately the replacement tiles will be a lot bigger and a different colour. Thanks for the tip!
Putting a dpm down is a guaranteed way of making the house uninhabitable. The idea that 2ft thick random stone and mud walls can be injected with a dpc is lunacy.
Thanks for the advice. I'm pretty sure the cellar was a pantry, there is no sign of coal dust. Piecing together bits of local history, I would guess that the cellar dates from the late C17. I doubt I will be hanging a pig from the hooks on the ceiling any time soon, but a wine cellar sounds a splendid idea.
I definitely will not be tanking the cellar. I'm trying to ensure the house stays damp-free by allowing it to breathe. The staircase is still there and it's made of stone.
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