Making a house flood resistant

[Tim]

Kind of hard to retro-fit though.; -)

Tim

[TheOldFellow]

I was thinking: knock down the house and build an ark that sits on the same foundations. Tethers short enough to keep it in the plot, but long enough to rise, say 20ft - keep bolt croppers handy to cut loose if necessary. Gas water and electricity through self-sealing connectors. Probably avoids the Building Regs too.

Noah.

[Jules]

Well, aviation - at least powered - was pretty new back then I suppose.

[Andrew May]

Which would probably fall foul of the disabled access requirements in the building regulations.

[Fredxx]

What requirements? That we don't build "town house"s on 3 floors?

[Andrew May]

Isn't there a requirement that access to the front door cannot be via steps? Certainly all the new houses I have seen around here have that even if the resulting ramp takes up half of the front garden.

[Neil Williams]

Or a three-storey townhouse design with the garage and entrance the only things on the bottom floor. If floods are predicted, the car can be removed to higher ground, then everything else should be safe (so long as it isn't used for junk storage).

Neil

[Nightjar]

I've also seen it done in an expensive looking house beside the Thames.

Colin Bignell

[Fredxx]

That's easy. Front door at ground level, and behind the front door steps up to the living quaters. Where there's a will there's a way :-)

[Owain]

Why can't cars float? On second thoughts, thousands of cars floating out to sea might be a liability.

Decent attics, maybe mansard roof.

Owain

[Andrew May]

And therein lies the problem. Increasingly houses are three-storeys because that is the only way to get a big enough house and the density that the planners demand. Planners also specify a height limit so that these new three-storey houses are in keeping with their neighbours so that means that the top floor is in the attic which would otherwise be used for storage. So the only available storage is the garage which is probably too small for a car anyway but was built because it was a planning requirement with the aim of keeping cars off the road. The driveway is probably too short to park a car on.

Andrew

[soup]

We had exactly that problem we were offered a house (few years ago now)with a 'main door' at street level (son is disabled we needed the ground floor ) the door was on street level but just inside the door was a flight of steps up to any habitable areas, above shops. This was not counted as a serious offer as although advertised as a ground floor house we, successfully, argued that there was no ground floor and it should actually be listed as a 1st floor dwelling.

[Nightjar]

Bignell

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "Tim Downie" saying something like:

There's a house a few miles from me that's entirely up on stilts. Car parking and garage/storage underneath and a bungalow above with a really nice deck around it - long before they became common. In fact, the deck is a car ramp, iirc. It's miles from any likely source of flooding, though.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember [e-mail] saying something like:

Which struck me as the solution for future flood damage avoidance in areas likely to get it again. Problem with Cockermouth was the unexpectedness of it, but in many areas the above idea should be put into practice. Of course, as time passes and the memory recedes, folk would go back to having the expensive gear on the ground floor again.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "dennis@home" saying something like:

Nor did they drain huge acreages of land. The loss of much of the natural sponge of the countryside is a direct contributor to much of this trouble.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember TheOldFellow saying something like:

Sky News, November 2035 Lifeboat and tug crews have been out all day recovering the town of Cockermouth from the Irish Sea. "It's been a grand day out," said Ivy Till, as she steered her 3-bed apartment back to land.

[Nightjar]

I have actually toyed with the idea, even before the recent floods. The ground floor would have thick reinforced concrete walls, to give the strength to resist the pressure of the water. I did assume that 2 metres protection would be sufficient, although I'm not sure it would have been in Cockermouth, so the ground floor rooms would only have windows above that level. Obviously, that means the living quarters would need to be at first floor level. The entrance would be at ground floor level, with steps and an hydraulic lift to the first floor, and would be completely lined with impervious materials. There would be a standby generator and foul water would be pumped to a header tank, well above flood level, so nothing could come back up the drains. The garage I planned to build on a pontoon, which I intended to be guided and restrained by vertical posts, so it and anything in it would float. I did also consider fitting a waterproof door at ground level, which would make moving furniture in and out in normal times much easier.

Colin Bignell

[Owain]

It would be a bit unattractive though, everyone having to have old tyres round the circumference to stop the house bumping into the neighbours.

Owain

[Owain]

Big doors at first floor level and a Dutch style hoist

Owain