QUICK GUIDE COMMON FOUNDATION TYPES
BASEMENTS VALUE-ADDED SPACE
There’s one thing you can guarantee when building your own home: you won’t know what it’s actually going to cost to build until you are out of the ground. A perfectly innocuous-looking plot can hide all sorts of surprises underneath. So, before you buy a site, it’s vital to do some research to ensure you’re not confronted with mains sewer pipes, buried high-voltage cables or soil contamination – all of which can add significant cost and complexity to your build or even preclude development in some extreme cases. Here’s how to approach the groundworks and foundations stage of your project.
STRIP Cheap to build, but only suitable in good ground conditions. Comprises a strip of concrete at least 225mm deep and reinforced with steel mesh or bars. Trenches will be around 1m deep and 600mm wide. Footings up to DPC will be built off the concrete strip.