Building Regulations

Building Regulations – A Legal Requirement

As you probably know, in the UK it is a legal requirement that Building reg approval is obtained for every permanent structure, if it is to be used as a habitable space, this includes things like home offices. The building regulations are a set of standards covering all aspects of building. They must be followed and a Building regs certificate obtained from an approved Building Inspector before the building is occupied.

Local Authority Regulation of Buildings

As LABC (Local Authority Building Control) Partners, TimberTecs are well versed in designing your buildings from start to finish so that they comply with the building regulation for whichever approval route you wish to follow.

Compliance with Building Regs

When we are instructed it also helps if we can specify LABC as the building inspectors. This is quite separate from any Warranty or Insurance building inspections that may be carried out during construction. Your appointed buildings inspector will monitor the progress of works and ensure that your project has proper regard for and reflects the proper interpretation of these national building regulations. While the new building regulations apply to both England and Wales, the approved building regulations

UK building Regs and Climate Change

With Government recognition that it has to do something about climate change, UK Building Regulations have been placing more and more demands on designers and builders to deliver higher and higher energy saving structures. This is a good thing for home owners as better building regs means more efficient houses, which will ultimately help to cut fuel bills.

Insulation building regs

House building regs in England & Wales now require insulation ‘U’ values for the floors of 0.25, for walls of 0.30, and for roofs of 0.20. These standards become even more demanding as designs seek to achieve the higher levels of the Code for Sustainable Homes, which will be progressively adopted into future revisions of the building regulations, the next of which is scheduled for 2010.

Because many builders and their architects recognise that beyond that date it may no longer be possible to achieve these levels with ‘wet’ (masonry) building methods, they are increasingly turning to other forms of construction, like timber frame. Indeed this is the most widely recognised system of building throughout the Western developed world, where on average over 70% of new homes are built using one or other methods of timber frame.

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These methods include Post & Beam, Free-form Glulam, Traditional Green Oak (and similar), Platform Frame (the most common), SIPS (Structurally Insulated Panels), and of course hybrids of all of these methods. Additionally, according to your building type and location it may have different requirements, for example for wall thickness, or type of insulation (Glass wool, Rockwool, Rigid foam, Recycled paper, Hemp fibre, Wood fibre, Multi layer foil, Spray foam, and so on). All of these require specialist knowledge of specifications and performance. Perhaps needless to say, TimberTecs brings such knowledge and experience to your design, linking this with the requirements of the New building regs to provide you with the most efficient, economical design for building regulations available in the country.

Regulation of Sound in Buildings

One of the key points of building regs is dealing with sound proofing. While the buildings regs allow post completion testing for sound transmission in residential buildings, there is provision in the new building regulations for the use of ‘Robust Details’. By using these builders, developers and their clients can avoid the extra cost, administration and time delays that individual testing requires. Robust detail design is ideal for multi occupying building such as flats or terraced houses.

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Stairways and the Buildings Regs

Another, and most important, example is the regulation of stairways, particularly in domestic buildings. The design of your house, for instance, must allow for 2 metres clear headroom throughout the rise of the stairs, which should be at an incline of no more than 42 degrees. Further parts of the regulations relate to the width (go) of each tread and its height (rise). Whoever designs your new home/s must take account of all of this, which can become particularly difficult if you have twists and turns to negotiate, quarter or half landings, winders, and so on, particularly – as so often happens – the space at the top and bottom of the stairs is taken up with door and access ways, and so on. It is not uncommon for TimberTecs to find that drawings prepared by someone else and for which planning approval has been obtained, have to be altered in order to make the stairs fit.

The Building Regulations

In the UK the building regs are not a minefield, as some people would have you believe. In fact they are pretty straightforward to apply if you know how to use them. But they are complicated and require a great deal of concentration and application of construction knowledge, techniques, materials performance and so on. This is why when architects, developers and builders have obtained their planning permission they often come to TimberTecs to carry out any redrafting and redrawing of plans, together with the checking of these and adding all necessary notes to ensure that the buildings they wish to develop will conform to the buildings regulations and, when built, be able to obtain the appropriate building certification.

This is also the reason why it costs more to prepare drawings for building regulation approval than it does to prepare them for submission for planning permission.

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Engineered Timber Structures and the National Building Regulations

While engineering calculations are required for most structures, each method has its particular characteristics, performance considerations, and methods of design and application. As the name suggests, TimberTecs is perhaps best suited than most professional design services to provide the level of knowledge necessary – and at a price you really can afford.

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