Avoiding project pitfalls
Architect Julian Owen looks back on some building mistakes he’s witnessed and advises how to prevent them during your project
Oakwrights (
www.oakwrights.co.uk) create oak frames offsite using precise measurements and expert craftsmanship, allowing the company to provide high quality homes with little risk of delay
To paraphrase the author Terry Pratchett, houses get built when a great number of things amazingly fail to go wrong. Aside from running my practice, I have had the privilege of meeting many people embarking on their self build journeys and hear of the problems they have encountered on the way. I adjudicate construction disputes, as well, and help the Architects Registration Board deal with complaints filed against architects, so I probably know more about projects failing than most. My conclusion from this experience is that the best way to approach any building scheme is to identify all the most likely and potentially disastrous risks right at the start and implement a strategy that will reduce or eliminate them. The alternative is to just avoid thinking about them altogether and hope everything will be okay, which places rather too much in the hands of lady luck. The list of perils you could encounter is a long one and would easily fill a book, so I have picked just a few to warn you against.
Inaccurate measurements
There is a basic responsibility laid on construction workers that is not often discussed unless something goes wrong. It’s to take precise measurements and then know what tolerances should be allowed during the works. For example, a skilled brickie can subtly vary the thickness of mortar and even course depths to hide a multitude of sins when building a cavity wall, but if the foundations and base are being laid for a prefabricated timber frame, they must be accurate to within a few millimetres otherwise the frame cannot be erected. And whoever is supposed to be building it will walk off the site until everything is level and square, which will delay the entire process.