Musings on building a workshop and a new machine...

[irving2008]

I looked on the government planning portal under the new 'deregulated' permissions. Its possible that the local council are prepared to relax these as the location in question is already screened by matured hedges/trees on 3 sides so will only be visible from my garden anyway... I'll have to ask informally and see how far I can get... if not, its only £58 to get the drawings reviewed... so thats my next task, do some scale drawings... Sketchup should do the job nicely. Been playing with Draftsight, but either its not intuitive or I've missed the point somewhere....

I'm also wondering about how much of this I can do myself... laying bricks/block can't be too hard? Not sure I fancy digging out 3tonnes odd of soil/clay/crap for the base. Clay subsoil so need to go down 1m under the walls and the floor is 20cm of packed MOT type 1 hardcore and 30cm of concrete then a membrane then screed on top of that - or somehting of that nature, still reading up on the actual requirements...


@Jonathan - if I go below ground level inside I'm going to have a step down. Building regs don't seem to like this as far as I can see, also it could be a pain to lift things in and out, I wanted flat access for a number of reasons...

edit: It seems that the old requirement of being at least 1m from the boundary no longer aplies if the construction is largely or wholly of non-combustible materials and bricks are that last time I looked, so i can make the floor area bigger by up to maybe a metre in each direction. The downside being it'll cost more, 30% bigger base area adds nearly £300 more concrete let alone the digging out costs...

[m_c]

I'm also wondering about how much of this I can do myself... laying bricks/block can't be too hard? Not sure I fancy digging out 3tonnes odd of soil/clay/crap for the base. Clay subsoil so need to go down 1m under the walls and the floor is 20cm of packed MOT type 1 hardcore and 30cm of concrete then a membrane then screed on top of that - or somehting of that nature, still reading up on the actual requirements...

That sounds a bit excessive to me.
All our sheds with concrete floors are on 10-12" type 1, then 6inch of reinforced concrete, with the damproof membrane below the concrete and brought out and up over enough layers of bricks to ensure it's above ground level. And those floors have had a fair bit of abuse (3 tonne forklift running over them, jacking up various tractors)
Only place near us thats got a 12" float foundation is the neighbours newbuild, as the test bore revealed mine workings below. All the original houses are on strip founds and none of them have fallen down yet! And all his damproofing went below the concrete.


One thing I would say, plan for insulation in the walls, but make sure you build the roof with insulation (i.e. suitably vented with insulation below). The one regret I've got is not doing the workshop roof properly for insulation. I do plan on insulating it, however it's not feasible to vent it properly, so it will probably eventually rot the main beams :-/