Foundations?

One of my neighbours has had some work done on their house in the form of a new porch and a small extension to the front of the garage; basically, the garage front was level with the front of the house (garage is attached to the house on the side), and their old porch stuck out on the front.

The new porch is slightly further out than the old one, and the frontage runs right across the front of the garage so that both the garage door and front door to the house are level.

The outer doors haven't yet been fitted, but I imagine that will happen in the next couple of days. Now, it looks good - definitely smarter than was there before, however I am perplexed as to how it has been built.

Work started on Tuesday past, and in the four days since it is nigh on fully complete. The drive/garden in front of the building is tarmac, and all they have done is to just build on top of it with no foundations at all. The brickwork of the new porch/extension looks to have been attached to the main building by fixing some sort of metal strip vertically up a couple of the walls, and then cementing on to that strip which I assume would hold some sort of wall ties.

Not that any of this is my business, but I am amazed that an extension has been made to a building, and there is no form of foundations or footings for the walls - - is this the norm?

 

I'm not wrong in thinking that it is really odd then?

 

I suppose it matters what's underneath, assuming it's not directly on the tarmac, I would hope they went down a little way? If it's directly on top of the tarmac then I would say it's a cowboy job, it might last long enough for the builders to get paid.

On my house we only have 2 or 3 inches of concrete for a foundation, we only discovered this when I built an extension and started digging down the specified 2 feet for the new foundations. We assumed the worst and thought the Building Inspector would insist on the old part being under-pinned. But luckily he saw sense, we are on solid chalk and in his words, if the house hasn't moved in 75 years it's never going to.

It would have been adequate just to have scraped off the soil and built straight on the chalk, but building regs said it had to be 2 foot deep so that's what we had to do for the new extension in order to get it signed off.

We used those metal strips to attach the extension to the existing house, these are a pretty standard method of tieing the two walls together. The alternative would have been to knock out bricks and 'tooth' in the new wall, only worth the effort if the joint is visible, and it means getting an exact match with the bricks (metric vs imperial - colours etc).

Interesting watching things being built though FC, I wonder if it's strong enough for a couple of hanging baskets?

 

Its definitely only built on top of the tarmac, with no dig-down at all. Its a single skin of red brick, with the top course of bricks laid vertically atop a thin lintel thing that holds the brick course above the hole for the doors. The roof is then pent back against the front of the house, and for the section above the garage roof (which is lower than the top edge of the pent roof) there is a vertical framework (2x2) coming up from the edge of the roof to the top edge of the pent roof, and then the outer side of that 2x2 framework is covered with a sheet of ply.

Visually, it looks quite good, or at least it will be once the doors are fitted and the soffits are completed, but I am completely unconvinced that it had been built right.

 

Suppose it depends on what's under the tarmac. If it's a driveway then several inches of compacted mot1 perhaps but as you describe it, the footings for the extension sound inadequate.
Wall tie fixing is now the normal way it seems but I've always thought it looks very flimsy!
Couldn't set up a time lapse camera so we can all see it falling over could you?!