"Cellarfield"

[dingbat]

My brother is a builder. He was recently telephoned by a woman asking him to quote for a job at her daughter's house. When he arrived a man answered the door before my brother had managed to knock and said there'd been a mistake. Suddenly, a ferocious woman appeared and told the man, in no uncertain terms, to get back inside, which he meekly did.

At this stage my brother was, understandably, nervous about what was to come. The woman explained that this man was her daughter's boyfriend and that he'd decided to do some DIY on her daughter's house, a nice turn-of-the-century terrace.

Now these houses are invariably built on a foundation of tamped earth and a couple of courses of blue brick. This wazzock had decided he wanted a cellar, so he'd started to dig. It had never occurred to him that what he was removing was the very thing that supported the house and those flanking it. It also never occurred to him to check whether any other houses had cellars nearby and if not, why not. (The floods of 1998 should have given him a clue). As for planning permission...

My brother spent a matter of seconds down in the hole, which was eight feet deep and almost the width of the house before pronouncing it beyond his areas of expertise. He did, however, point out a few alarming structural cracks as he bolted for the street. The house is now shored up and effectively worthless and the chance of the neighbours selling their own homes is practically zero. Not a bad disaster for a few weekends digging.

 

[breezer]

you saying about the house being built on bricks (no foundations) there was a prog on TV (yesterday i think) that showed exactly that, old that the house was, it had NO foundations.

also i recall a thing about a couple of blokes who built there own cellar only for the house to collapse

 

[AdamW]

He must have had a really, really leggy mother to have dropped that far onto his head when he was born.

Are you sure he wasn't digging a tunnel to try and escape his g/f's mother?

Of course they have shown something similar on a couple of property developer programmes, aka "bodger's brainfood". Where you can pay tens of thousands of pounds to have a foot or two added to the height of your cellar/basement (not sure what the difference is). No doubt someone has missed the point of the structural engineers who calculate it all, the surveyors who check to see how deep the bricks go and the experienced builders who very carefully do the job with a hundred tons of house over their heads. And skipped straight to the digging part.

 

[plugwash]

i guess the house could be repaired but it would be *extremely* expensive possiblly more than the value of the house

and if the neighbours find out i can see them sueing