Just been busting a gut all week on a bit of a DIY project, starting the process of turning 8 metres of my garden into a brick built bike workshop (8m x 4m). After getting planning permission and getting the plans signed off my Building Control, the project started.
The base is a Float with the slab base and footings poured as one to use the concrete pump only once (as the site is 60m from a public road, although 2m from a Network Rail road which we couldn’t use).
To stop the footings collapse, we built the base first (15cm of hardcore).
In total, four 8 yard skips of earth were filled, 6 tonnes of hardcore and 14.5 cubic metres of concrete were put back in along with 18 sheets of steel mesh and 8m of DPM.
Back at work on Monday, but will take another week off soon to start laying bricks…..
Building control don’t distinguish between a single storey house and a workshop, so you end up with the same spec, so the whole thing is very much over the top for a bike shed.
Basically a dual pitch slate roof, with Victorian brick front, so as to match the house, then breezeblock for the other three sides (as they’re hidden by fences).
In all honesty who specced your found/floor design? 2 layers of a393? mesh is ridiculous in that scenario! And after all that you space the mesh on block pavers? and not circular spacers. Was it building controls spec??
A local engineer did the design and building control signed it off (inc approving using pavers to space the mesh). The mesh was beefed up as it’s a float so there is a risk the footings pull away from the slab AIUI. Building control did query the float design with the engineer as I changed in from a standard design (footings then slab) to a single pour option to save on pump hire costs.
My house is built on less ! i guess your in englandshire are you ?
Likewise, my house has stood on 9″ of rubble for the last 120 years, so this is completely OTT. However, quite fun to build and as it was DIY (with a neighbour and a friend helping with the digging) it didn’t cost much.
Interesting design, very rarely see mesh in the top portion of a slab. Locally poor ground conditions? Anyhoo looks like you did a proper job and for a “DIY” effort give us apparent pros a real run for our money. Good work!!
Nice!!
I especially like how, once the garden was cleared, you dump a whacking great ‘shed’ in the space!!
Completely quashes any dreams of decking or a nice water feature!
Man 1 – Woman 0
DrP
You did the right thing, get an engineer in, let him do the design, then do as he asks. All the blame therefore falls back at his door and the pics back it up. As I say, great effort for a DIY project as there’s many a “builder” who’d have winged it with a 300 strip footing and a 100mm slab. Good luck with the rest of the build.
Looking forward to seeing this progress. No ground anchor points in the slab??
Sort of ran out of time. I only had a week off work and ordered the concrete and pump for the Friday, then had to get everything ready by then. I was going to put a service tunnel in for water etc as well, but we just didn’t have a spare moment all week, turned out to be a lot more effort than I had expected. We only made it as a neighbour offered his services at the last minute and helped us dig for 4 days, otherwise Tom and I would never have managed it all!
I’ll add ground anchors using expansion bolts. I’ll put a steel cage on the inside of the breezeblocks to make it tough to cut through them and the glass doors will have steel shutters, so it should be pretty secure. Plus insurance is easy to get for a brick building, so that will be the final backstop.
Im hoping to fit a log burner at some point but I need to work out how to flue out through the Onduline roofing without it catching fire 🙂
There’s also no concrete involved.
But this is what I started with. (“after” pics to come sometime this week)
[img]https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-Vvu0UXs2Bqg/TgjoO5c-x5I/AAAAAAAAAB4/90f0BFZ9H6Q/s640/p1000369.jpg[/img]
Bit of a bonus getting £67 for all the steel sheeting down the metal yard. £145 a tonne at the moment…
Be careful to secure the roof – friends had the garage broken into by the thieves going in through the (tiled) roof. They were ostensibly after is Ducati, but they’ve got £10s-of-thousands of bikes as well.
Thieves were disturbed (leaving a neat hole in the roof), but something to think about..!