My Bungalow Bliss

Just to clarify re the foundations.

It is quite common what they found.

I only scanned through that program but I believe it was a house with external wall build off a footing and internals built off the subfloor.

This is very common for 70s and 80s builds and is a recipe for disaster.

This wouldn't be referred to as a raft in the industry.

What they did was take everything inside the external walls out and re did the floor and internal walls from new footings upwards.

What surprised me most was the house appeared to be build from single leaf hollow blockwork. Considering that walltype, the need to remove all floors and the structural work they did to carry roof, I would tend to suggest demolition day one might have been just as cost efficient. Looking at the roof they left behind, I'd be very disappointed and the polished conc looked all over the shop considering gaps under skirting.

Must rewatch to look at the detail.

One thing I never like in a house is having the front door opening directly into a room, in this case into the main living/kitchen/dining room. Basically everyone coming into the house has to come into this room which isn't great.

A lot of the architects would be on a percentage of the building costs, what's not to like if it goes over budget!

They would have been miles better off knocking it. Nice views from the site, you don't get that in a new 3 bed estate.

I don't want to derail this thread, but i would love to know what you did.

Any chance you would start another thread and detail the work you had done, choices you made, starting and finishing BER etc.?

Well I've dealt with a few of these from that era. It's a recipe for disaster as the very bad ones where poor underfloor fill was used have resulted in floor and internal walls sinking in use.

The better ones where the floor is somewhat suitable to build off can fair ok but even so, additional loads from roof etc at certain positions can again lead to heavy cracking and failures.

Even where all has faired ok for 40 years, when you go to open up these houses, you can run into bother as I certainly cannot sign off on building load bearing walls off an unknown slab. If you then cut the slab to install footing under new wall positions, you will have totally broken any load bearing capacity of the slab and may even cause structural failure at nearby walls that were built off it.

You can walk yourself into a situation you have to either carry whole roof from external walls with only stud work inside or alternatively dig out everything inside of external walls and start again.

Houses built with all walls brought up from footings give lots more options re alterations as steel beams can be run from most walls and in general you have multiple options to get to end result.

There are 2 traditional types of foundation.

Raft or strip footings.

Raft is basically where the clay is dug out, stone fill brought in and design concrete slab poured in top. All walls are built off this. Floor insulation plumbing and floor screed later installed inside.

Strip footings are basically where the ground is dug out down to solid under each wall. Concrete foundation poured at solid. Blockwork built up to floor level, concrete sub floor poured and house build up from there with similar insulation' plumbing etc installed later.

These 70s houses had a halfway house type setup. Just the outer rectangle of the house would be dug down to solid. Foundation under outer walls, Floor poured over varying standard of fill material then all internal walls built off floor. This would be an excellent system if the floor slab was supported on outer walls and slab designed to carry all loads from structure over. This was not the case. The floor typically buts up to external walls and is not supported off wall and these slabs were never designed and we're intended to be ground supported. If fill material is sub standard, the whole system falls down.

Hardcore build up topped off with a smaller compacting stone. Sand blinding, radon barrier, concrete raft which is structural slab and subfloor. On top of that you would have insulation and concrete screed.

Insulation could be 150mm or so. Plumbing can be hidden in insulation with under floor heating pipes on top of insulation within the floor screed.

There are alot of newer construction methods now but of the traditional builds, this is how it is.

What are you talking about! They have a Bath. Photo here:

https://amp.rte.ie/amp/1264206/

Leave it with me & I'll see if I can get something going!