Articles published in 2005

Last month I was encouraging readers to leap up the selfbuild learning curve by buying – and reading – some books. But there is another approach and that is to leave every stage of your project in the hands of the professionals. It will cost you more, of course, but at least you will be able to sleep well each night knowing that your project is in good hands – or is it? 

A couple of years ago, I wrote an article for this magazine entitled The Planning Register – a valuable resource. The article described the many uses that a potential selfbuilder could make of the wealth of information held in the local Planning Register. Likewise, there is much that any would-be selfbuilder – or, indeed, any house-owner – can glean from the land registers. And it is very easy to do that, now that the land registers (about 20 million of them) are available online.

The land of the selfbuilt house where I now live was sold to me as a building plot in 1998 by a Mr Lines. The plot had been the lawn of a cottage called Greystone, on the Isle of Wight. During the conveyancing process my solicitor told me that there was some doubt about the western boundary of the plot – the Ordnance Survey plan indicated two possible boundaries, one representing a hedge and the other a post-and-wire fence.

In the last two issues I’ve been recounting the saga of my attempts to get the Land Registry to amend the western boundary of my land. I claimed that what is now my garden should include a strip of land which was adjacent to the unregistered land that I had purchased as a building plot. The seller had told me that the strip of land was not owned by him and was not part of the plot, and so the plot was registered with the land excluded. But investigations later led me to believe that the strip should have been included. 

Wherever two or three selfbuilders are gathered together, sooner or later the discussion turns to the rival merits of timber frame and blockwork, and that is what we are looking at this month. To be more precise, by ‘timber frame’ we are referring in this article to the method using open panels. And by ‘blockwork construction’ we are limiting ourselves to the standard method of masonry construction: cavity walls with an inner leaf of blockwork, an outer leaf of brickwork, and insulation in the cavity.

Latham, Egan, Barker – I suspect that these names don’t mean much to most selfbuilders, though they are well known in the construction industry. They are all authors of Government-sponsored reports about some aspect of the construction industry. (I mentioned the Barker report in passing last month.) What the reports have in common is that they are attempts by the government of the day to modernise the industry by exhortation. They don’t have any direct effects on the world of selfbuild – indeed, they all ignore it – but since the reports are helping to shape the culture of the building industry, I think brief reviews of them might be of interest.

A good deal more wariness is required in the purchase of a building plot than in the purchase of an existing house. Some of that wariness should be about the ground conditions, in particular how easy or how difficult it will be to put down good foundations (or looking at it in another way: how cheap or costly). Even more wariness should be about the legal status of the land. Just because a seller describes a piece of land as a ‘building plot’ doesn’t mean that you can actually build on it – and I’m talking about more than just whether or not it has planning permission. 

The saying “Possession is nine-tenths of the law” particularly applies to land. Under traditional English and Welsh law, if a person occupies a piece of land – including any building on it – then that person has a right to the land. But so, too, does an earlier occupier, and the right of the earlier occupier is stronger.

Last month, I started the saga of my attempts to gain a strip of land beyond the registered, western boundary of my garden. In brief, when I purchased a building plot – the garden of a cottage called Greystone on the Isle of Wight – there were some doubts about which was the western boundary: a fence, or a hedge some 14' beyond it. The seller of the plot told me the fence was the boundary, and so that it what was registered.

When I meet novice selfbuilders and they mention timber frame, I ask them what sort of timber frame they are talking about. Their eyes usually glaze over with unknowingness. So let’s look at the history of timber framing to see if it can shed some light on the matter.

Last month, I started comparing the pros and cons of the two main methods of house building: brick-and-block and timber frame. The main difference between the two methods is the inner leaf of the exterior walls: blockwork in one case and timber panels in the other. The comparisons last month were focussed on energy and environmental factors, and there was no decisive advantage to either method. Let’s continue with the comparisons to see what conclusions we can reach.

Since the end of World War 2, successive governments have produced more than 15 reports about the construction industry, and that seems to indicate some dissatisfaction with the performance of this huge industry – it accounts for about 10% of GPD. Except for very large projects, construction companies do not have the spur of foreign competition to make them strive harder.