Pile Foundations

Tallulah-32

Hi
Any guidance would be much appreciated please. Looking at a house where builder went into liquidation before house finished. House is a shell. No completion certificate for building works. If purchased house we'd be looking at working towards getting completion certificate.

House has pile foundations which we aren't concerned about but this type of foundation is difficult to retrospectively survey. We're looking for the 'pile log' but need to get in contact with the builder to find out who carried out the pile foundations. Council said if we submit pile log and all fine then they'll tick foundations off. A lot has changed since house built in 2008.

We're going to contact all companies which carry out pile foundations in Northern Ireland to see if they built our house - long shot.

However someone told us that all tests on pile foundations are sent to test centres therefore an easier way of finding out if pile foundations passed test is to contact test centre who should still have results. Anyone know if this is correct please? Apparently there are only 2 test centres in northern ireland so should be easy enough....

Thanks any guidance would be much appreciated.

jjd

I would have thought the local council building control office could help you with this.
When the piling is getting done the machine pushing the pile 'should' produce a print out of the pressure the pile has been put in to and building control 'should' retain a copy of this.
I would contact building control and ask to speak to someone senior who may be able to assist you.
I would seriously doubt a builder would continue to build without the initial ok. The builder probably didn't anticipate they would be out of business so would probably been doing everything correctly for their own sale of the property.
Things may have changed but this is how it was done a while ago. And to add concrete samples are taken by building control from time to time, so if sampling is an issue they may be able to help there too.

If you have already explored this I've no other suggestions!