Epic Fail

I'm talking about a failure of such massive proportions that even the word 'epic' doesn't even cover it. We've actually known about this for a few weeks now, but have been so devastated / in denial / frantically searching for ways to fix it that I couldn't bring myself to talk about it until now.

You know how we raised our house? Over the course of a few weeks, it went from this:

To this (which prompted the nickname 'the flamingo'):

Well the whole point in doing that was to be able to build this underneath it:

The idea is to eventually be able to rent out the area downstairs (once we scrape together enough cash to build it - har har) as a little apartment / granny flat, which would help pay the mortgage! Sounds good, right?

Long story short, we had to consult with about seven different professionals to get the necessary bits and pieces together to know what height everything had to be, and what steel we needed to use, etc etc etc. Our biggest issues to cater for were:
1) We have a designated 'overland flow' (i.e. water flow) path along the front left corner of our block (the driveway), so the council insists that any liveable area floor height be at least 0.5m higher than the 100-year-flood-height.
2) The council rules state that a house can't be more than 8.75m (I think that's the right figure) above the surveyed 'ground' height.

So, our plans took both of these things into account, leaving us with just enough height to have 2.4m ceilings downstairs (which is the minimum legal height). We hired the house lifters, ordered the steel, and hung and concreted the posts in.

And then we stood back and looked at the posts.

 

Definitely enough space under there, isn't there?

Yup.

But then we looked at the mark the surveyor had made on the only remaining concrete post from the old house, that told us where our bottom floor height had to be (to be far enough above the overland flow height).

Pretty high up, huh?

Tom then went to the effort of using the dumpy level to mark on each of our posts where our ground floor height would be.

And then we looked up.

 

You can see Tom's red mark on the post near the bottom of the picture. We whipped out the tape measure, and measured from that red mark up to the top of the post. Guess what?

2.05m

Not. Happy. Jan. We re-measured. And re-measured. And got the same result. Remember that the legal height of the ceiling has to be 2.4m? We were 400mm off. Somehow. We'd spent all this money to raise the house, and it still wasn't frickin' high enough????

sourced from Cheri Pryor

So we all immediately descended into the depths of despair, and began the ever-so-joyful task of trying to figure out where it had gone wrong. The building designer? The hydraulic engineer? The surveyor? Many phone calls, more money down the drain to commission another study of ground level of the block, and we finally got our answer this week.

It's too long a story to go into what actually went wrong, and why the error wasn't picked up earlier. Let's just say that there were too many people involved, others got confused, the height on our plans was wrong, and measured in a different kind of measurement (go figure, ordinary millimetres aren't good enough), and so the height we relied on to lift the house was wrong. Awesome.

We got our surveyor to come out again and re-assess exactly how high the ground was, and to tell us whether we could go any higher while still staying within the 8.75m overall height restriction. We can! Thank goodness. Only by 300mm though, so we're still going to have to work out some kind of arrangement with our structural engineer to see if we can reduce the depth of the steel beams that run across where the downstairs living areas will go to get us that extra 100mm in height that we need.

This is not going to be cheap or easy or quick, and is pretty much the worst thing that could have happened (other than if we couldn't actually go any higher at all, meaning we would have totally wasted all of the time, money and effort we've spent getting the house raised to its current position). And I really don't know what we could have done differently to have prevented it! We just didn't know! We were relying on professionals to give each other the right numbers (who knew it was so hard), and then relied on the plans that came out of it! Much as I'd like to say "we'll be more careful next time" (if we can bear to do this again), there really wasn't any way we were to know there'd been a mistake.

So now we get to deal with the fallout. And the extra expense. And time. And delay in being able to build our decent bathroom because we can't lay any tiles if we're raising the house again for fear of them cracking with the movement. But at least we have a way of dealing with it and can still build under the house, right? Silver lining? Yeah maybe.

Epic epic epic fail. Let's hope that's it for the bad news, eh? What with this, plus power companies, plus possessed machinery, I think this house may just be the death of me. Or perhaps just the death of nice Bec. Anyone else messes with me, this is what they'll get.

sourced from CFO America