Welcome to Skill Builder, the resource for everyone involved in a building or renovation project. We provide practical guidance for all aspects of building renovation. We aim to give you plenty of hard information, as well as a good deal of inspiration. We recognise that the learning curve in building can be steep and relentless.

As regular viewers of programmes such as Grand Designs will know, when it comes to cutting edge technology there is a lot that can go wrong. In the building industry, Murphy’s Law (if it can go wrong, it will go wrong) sometimes seems endemic, but often it is self inflicted and unnecessary. In many aspects the novice is better equipped than the professional to succeed because they tend to seek help at every turn. To use a navigation analogy, it is usually when you think you know where you are going that you get lost. If you know that you don’t know, you are more likely to look at a map.

Do we have all the answers? Certainly not but we aim to provide some of them, and to draw on the experience of industry experts to help you. We also provide product evaluations, practical demonstrations and case histories that will help you source the right products and materials for your project, and more importantly avoid some of the common pitfalls encountered in applying them to your projects.

Skill Builder’s reviews and video content are produced and edited by Roger Bisby. Roger entered the building industry as an apprentice plumber. In those days they still wiped lead joints with a blow lamp and moleskin so you can tell he is no spring chicken. He went on to train as a college lecturer and has also run his own building company for nearly 30 years. He specialises in trouble shooting and has a dogged determination to get to the bottom of difficult problems. He put these talents to good use as the regular expert on London Broadcasting Company’s (LBC) Fix It Phone In which remained one of their most popular shows throughout its 15 year run. His television work includes appearances as the resident expert on The Terrace (BBC) Watchdog Home Improvement Series (BBC) Rogue Traders (BBC) and House of Horrors (ITV). He currently works for trade publications including Professional Builder, Professional Electrician, Professional Heating and Plumbing Installer, and Professional Housebuilder and Property Developer.

Skill Builder’s industry and product news is edited by Georgina Bisby. Georgina has a wealth of experience in b2b publishing. In her previous role as Group Editor for Western Business Publishing Georgina oversaw a number of market leading titles and wesbites. Georgina also edited Health & Safety Matters for eight years and was previously Deputy Editor for Water, Energy & Environment (now The Energyst).

Skill Builder’s video production is headed up by Dylan Garton, a video editor and producer with over fifteen years experience of creating video content for the building industry. Dylan has also travelled the world filming some of the highest profile international sporting events and is at the cutting edge of the latest video technology. Dylan understands the importance of balancing television production qualities with YouTube accessibility.

I have just returned from a one week holiday in Cyprus. It was a cheap break and we weren’t expecting fantastic weather at that time of year but we stayed in a 5-star hotel with plenty of facilities and a good sea view.

We would both have been quite happy to sit and read a few books but as it turned out the weather was really good and we were out walking and cycling along the coast and up into the hills.

That left us thinking that we weren’t really taking full advantage of the two swimming pools, spa sauna, steam room and gym at the hotel.

So on the third day, we decided to remain at the hotel and have a lazy day on the sun loungers. It was all going well until the chop saw and impact drivers started.

Over in one area of the vast grounds the guys had started laying new hardwood decking. I ignored it as long as I could but in the end I had to go and have a nose. 

I then discovered they were also tiling a new pool for children.

Then by the end of the day, they started laying large steel trays ready to mesh and concrete.

I told my wife that they would soon be pouring concrete into that tray and vibrating it into place. 

I wasn’t entirely sure how they would get the ready mix lorry in.  It turned out they didn’t. It was done by five guys with five barrows.

It wasn’t so much that all this activity disturbed us rather that I felt decidedly lazy lying there while others were working. That urge to get up and lend a hand was too much.

We decided to move to the indoor pool area. It was then that we saw the notice. As from the following morning, the indoor pool was going to be closed for maintenance.

When they said ‘maintenance’  they meant it.  In one day the pool was drained and scaffolded out. The next day they took the glazed roof off and attacked the perimeter with 10 kg jackhammers.

Thoughtfully the hammers were shrouded in sound -deadening jackets.

In a strange sort of way I felt quite at home there on the lounger reading my book surrounded by this cacophony and  It didn’t seem to be bothering my wife that much either.

That is possibly the only compensation of having spent the last 30 years living in houses that are constantly being knocked about or ‘improved’ as I like to call it.

That said it felt like masochism, so the next day we put on our walking boots and headed for the hills.

My heart goes out to the people who bought homes in Oxley Woods. These modern style houses on the outskirt of Milton Keynes started life with such promise. For a start they were designed by a partnership that included Richard Rogers. They were bold, bright and beautiful, built from prefabricated panels with sleek lines and maintenance free exteriors. No more boring old brick. The people who managed to snap up these iconic homes could rightly have felt pleased with themselves, but all that changed when the rain came in. At first the builders tried to fix the problems with mastic. It is a standard approach for many leaks. ‘Squirt a bit more gunk in there’ but it soon became clear that there was a deeper flaw.

they got a bit too cocky and ignored time honoured practices that have served us well…

The case has now gone legal with the usual finger pointing and buck passing that leaves the home owners feeling abandoned and trapped in homes that, for the foreseeable future, they have no way of recovering their investment on.

I won’t be so bold as to prejudge the outcome but I would say that, as much as I love modern architecture and particularly the work of Rogers, and those other great British architects in his group who have built some of the most iconic buildings of our times, I would have been very wary of buying one of these homes.

To my mind they got a bit too cocky and ignored time honoured practices that have served us well. The best thing you can do with rainwater is to get rid of it as quickly as possible. That means pitched rather than flat roofs, big overhangs as seen in Alpine chalets and gutters with downpipes on the outside of the buildings.

The designers of the Oxley Woods homes presumably considered these highly functional features to be ugly or boring because their designs have none of these things. That only becomes a problem when it rains.

Well, we can’t say they didn’t warn us about climate change; more rain, rising seas, extreme weather. The television is full of images of flooding homes and the miserable aftermath. People being interviewed say that they have never known it this bad. Houses that were once considered above the flood plain, are now being deluged and everyone is looking for someone to blame for the flooding. Try Jeremy Clarkson.

Flooding needs to be tackled long before the water reaches town…

A week before the flooding I was down in Kent, with a company that was installing Smart Air Bricks, backflow prevention devices, and Flood Gates in a vulnerable cottage near the river Medway. It was just in time for the latest deluge, but did those preventative measures work? To some extent yes, in that they kept the water out to the specified height, but the water was higher than it had ever been; there comes a point (around 750mm) where it is better to let the water into the house, in order to equalize the water pressure on both sides. If this is not done then there is a risk of the walls being pushed in.

An interesting thing about water pressure is that it’s directly proportional to the height of water (static head) and is not affected by the amount of water that lies behind it. So a two foot wall at the end of Lake Windermere will have the same pressure on it as a two foot wall around a swimming pool. This allows us to calculate the forces precisely. However this doesn’t allow for surges. If the water is travelling towards you in a wave, that energy has nothing to do with static head.

Water will also find its own level so what you have on the inside you have on the outside, which is useful because it stops the walls being pushed in. In the case of a cellar flooding, it’s unwise to pump it out if the water table on the outside is too high. It may also be futile.

That said, it’s heartbreaking to stand and watch your home being flooded and any small thing you can do to reduce the impact of flooding must be better than simply sitting there watching nature take its course.

There is a great deal that can be done to reduce risk of minor flooding starting with the use of basic sandbags, and then moving up the scale in terms of expense, but not necessarily effectiveness. In particular you should not neglect the loo. You can sandbag all around the house but if the water level rises it has a route in through the drains and can pour out through the loo.

Leaving aside DIY flooding solutions, lots of people are now asking what more the Department of the Environment can do. One thing is certain, the problem needs to be tackled long before the water reaches town. In some cases this might mean diverting rivers and water courses or building sea defences. It might also mean building homes higher out of the ground. There is no reason why this can’t be done; it’s done all over the world. Houses on stilts! The technology has been there for centuries we have just been too complacent.

Flooding aside, there are also people who are finding water coming into their house through the roof and walls where it has never appeared before. If you get enough rain, it will drive through brickwork and mortar courses, which is why some of those DIY flood prevention devices are dubious.

In the normal course of events with heavy rain you wouldn’t necessarily know it’s happening, because the water runs down the inside of the outer skin, and is drained through weep holes in the mortar courses. However, problems often occur where the house has been extended on the ground floor, and a wall which was previously on the outside now finishes on top of a steel beam. Where then, is that water which runs down between the inner and outer wall going to go when it hits the beam?

The answer for many is into their nice new extension. If the builder has been diligent, this won’t happen because he/she will have put in cavity trays above the newly formed opening. The trays need to be above the roof line so the water can be drained out onto the extension roof, but I know many builders who simply don’t bother doing this, because it involves chopping out mortar courses and inserting the trays one by one to form a cascade. In most cases they get away with it because the rain never normally manages to drive that far through the brickwork, but we live in extraordinary times.

People are talking about ‘freak’ weather conditions. I love the use of the word ‘freak’ it’s applied to all sorts of things that really don’t warrant it. Admittedly the weather is unusual but storms are not freaks of nature. The British Building Regulations recognise this, and makes provision for unusual weather. That is why the regulations specify cavity trays. So the builder who glibly says to the client, “yeah we are dealing with freak weather conditions here”, is looking to blame something other than his/her negligence.

The opposite to negligence is zealousness or over-zealousness. I often see instances where home owners have spotted those weep holes above the window lintels, or on the cavity trays and filled them up, believing them to be holes that were overlooked during the construction process. This for me is the easiest kind of problem to put right. It takes ten minutes with a masonry drill to clear them out. Sometimes you are treated to a nice little jet of water coming out of the hole. It is as satisfying as lancing a boil.

Why are we building new homes on flood plains?

How To Protect Your Property From Flooding

The Apollo Theatre ceiling collapse

The recent incident of The Apollo Theatre ceiling collapse – on to the audience – thankfully resulted in no deaths, though it appears there are some very serious injuries. No doubt even many of those lucky enough to have escaped unscathed will have nightmares and may hesitate to enter old buildings for a while. At the very least they will become habitual ceiling watchers from now on.

As is so often the case there was a knee jerk reaction as inspectors scurried around in ceiling voids checking the ceilings of other London theatres but why stop at theatres? There are plenty of other old buildings with high ceilings and it’s quite possible that they too are within a whisker of dropping, but it isn’t always easy to tell.

Such a tale is likely to induce paranoia in those living in old houses but how do you know if your ceiling is safe?…

I have some experience of this from carrying out loft conversions in old houses. There is a stage of the job when you are obliged to walk across the ceiling joists in the loft to install steel beams before you can build the new floor. This flexes the ceiling and loosens the bond between the lath and the plaster. Nowadays I make sure that the ceilings are propped from below during this stage to eliminate deflection in the joists but I wasn’t always so diligent. It took a ceiling collapse to wake me up to the dangers.

The piece of ceiling collapsed into the hallway of a Victorian house, crashing down through the stairwell and landing in the front hall. It filled, and almost demolished, a pram where minutes earlier a baby had been asleep. It was only sheer luck that the baby woke up hungry after its outing and her mother took her through to the kitchen to feed her. The weight of the chunks that were fished out of the pram would surely have killed it or given it life changing injuries. I still see that child from time to time.

Such a tale is likely to induce paranoia in those living in old houses but how do you know if you’re at risk of ceiling collapse, and what do you do about it if you suspect it?

If you have a lath and plaster ceiling with lots of cracks in it that looks even slightly lively, you can have it replaced but often the quicker and cleaner option is to board it over. This of course is not an option on a ceiling with ornate plaster. Another good cure is to pour a few buckets of diluted PVA across the laths from above. This has the miraculous effect of soaking into the plaster and sticking it to the laths, binding the whole thing together.

Undoubtedly the cause of the Apollo theatre ceiling collapse will be discovered soon, and there’s no point speculating but I have seen plenty of ornate plaster ceilings that have been damaged by leaking roofs. Often the leak is not discovered for many years because the timber and plaster soaks up the water, and the heat from the building dries it out before a stain appears. This is the perfect recipe for rot.

The answer of course is rigorous maintenance. A thermal imaging camera will show up leaks in roofs, because damp is more conductive, and an inspection from above should establish the cause of the leak but all this costs money. Theatres, particularly those in listed buildings, are always walking the tightrope between getting bums on seats with high cost productions and saving enough money to look after the building.

Everyone hopes that a theatre will be fortunate enough to have a production that, using a critic’s cliché, ‘brings the house down’ but hopefully never literally.

More From Skillbuilder – How To Support A Load Bearing Wall

Prevent Ceiling Collapse – Common Causes Of Damage

It’s raining again and it looks set to carry on for days. My daughter phoned to say that the problem of damp around one of her windows has returned. She lives on top of a hill and the gable end of her house catches everything that nature can chuck at it. We have had all summer to fix the problem, but we left it. Somehow when the weather is topping 28 deg centigrade it is hard to think about damp.

In our defence, she is going to have the house extended next year, so she was hoping it might be OK until then. It isn’t, and if there’s a break in the weather I will be up there with some Dry Zone solution giving it a quick going over.

Those sticking doors lie between you and a lifetime of drudgery, it’s your finger in the dam…

Meanwhile back at my house, there are things that need doing. There are always things that need doing. My wife has a list as long as her arm and it never seems to get any shorter. A bloke I know told me a long time ago that you should never fix sticking doors, or whatever it is that your partner constantly complains about. His idea was that if you did that job, another one would be sitting in the holding bay ready to take its place. You would never be free, so the best strategy is to hold your ground against the onslaught.

“Never break ranks. Those sticking doors lie between you and a lifetime of drudgery, it’s your finger in the dam!” he said.

I liked him, he was completely un-reconstructed but amusing. He gave me lots of advice, most of which I failed to heed. I fixed the squeaky door and – he was right – I haven’t stopped since.

I bumped into him the other day – no not in the builders’ merchants – and he has retired. He has a nice new apartment with a balcony overlooking the golf course.

“Any sticking doors?” I asked.

He looked at me nonplussed, so I reminded him of his advice.

He laughed, “Ah that, no there are no sticking doors, not yet, but if one starts to play up my wife sorts it out – she has learned a lot over the years”.

“Oh has she taken up DIY?”

“Goodness no, she gets someone in”.

Does one have to be brain dead in order to enjoy pointing?

I have been re-pointing some brickwork this week. Despite having a shed full of various pointing guns I was doing it the old fashioned way with a hawk and a Marshalltown tuck pointer. The reason for using hand tools as opposed to the compressed air gun was simply to reduce noise. The customer has a one week old baby and I didn’t want the compressor kicking in and scaring the living daylights out of the poor mite.

So I had a very pleasant couple of days out on the scaffold tower watching the world go by and listening to the birds sing. My builder friend Steve dropped in to see me and made a comment about having to be brain dead in order to enjoy pointing. OK, I am brain dead but it is stress free and the repetitive nature of the work is strangely satisfying. This is probably because I don’t do it day after day for the rest of my working life. It is in effect a holiday.

…the big difference between what they were doing and what I was doing was the magic ingredient of being outdoors.

When I was a kid I used to see television footage of car workers on assembly lines. They were on the news because they were on strike. That happened a lot in the sixties and even at my young age I had a great deal of sympathy. Faced with the nature of their work, the noise and the grim prospect that they would be doing it day in day out until they won the football pools, I would have found any excuse to walk out into the sunshine.

The big difference between what they were doing and what I was doing – pointing brickwork – was the magic ingredient of being outdoors. A lot of building workers like being out in the open, it’s why they joined. Admittedly it isn’t much fun in January but there is still something appealing about it. Whenever some bright spark comes up with yet another system-built house put together in the factory and hails it as the end of site built housing I hang my head low.

Yes it is more efficient and probably cheaper, it may even have better quality control but it isn’t nearly as much fun. The measurement of job satisfaction isn’t something that economists think much about. The fun footprint is not measured in the way that carbon is. That is a shame because it figures large in people’s lives. It would be nice to have a little stamp on products saying that the maker enjoyed making it. I would put one on my brick pointing, a little smiley face hidden in the mortar lines. A little message for the future generations of builders.

More From Skillbuilder – Working Beyond Retirement, Preference Or Pressure?

Its A Wonderful Life – Working Outdoors