PRC Cornish unit

johndobey

Hi guys,

We have recently bought a Cornish type 1 PRC house and trying to find out more details about how we could get this repaired and if we can use family builders to do the work...
There seems to be companies around that are willing to do the work but not much information about what is required to get the so called PRC certificate and Building certificate, tried to contact some structural engineers as well but nobody is willing to help with this particular issues.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated, we're trying initially to establish whether we can do this work ourselves and have someone supervise the work to issue the PRC certificate and then what kind of planning needs to go into this..


Kind regards,
A

diamond_dave

Here in Cornwall there are a great number of these houses. In fact, my in-laws bought theirs from the council a number of years ago and luckily the council had all the concrete panel removed and replace with bricks/blocks and rendered. The cost then was about £15000 but I guess that would be less now with all the new information available.

stator

Do the work yourself? You are aware that you have to jack up the entire house and build new load baring walls?

diamond_dave

The houses still retained by council/housing auth. have all been faced with insulation and rendered using a special mix. Looks fine and I guess that they will still be around in another 50 years or so! Although these units are not mortgageable they are nothing compared to the problems with Mundic here in the SW.

johndobey

@diamond dave thanks, I'm not sure though the council will be willing to pay for anything in our case as it looks like the house has changed hands a couple of times since the council built them

@stator yes, that shouldn't be a problem however finding out how to this repair properly or to the supposed standards seems to be...

johndobey

... a few years have passed since my original post and we have repaired and fully refurbished (or I could say rebuilt?) the house to a nice standard, and we're quite happy with the results!

My question is, we've got our certificate of completion as well from a structural engineer that inspected the work, any idea how we could verify it is worth anything? It feels like we've paid quite a steep price for a piece of paper that doesn't seem to be registered with anyone or anything and I just want to be sure if it ever comes to selling the house it is the right thing.

Dogsuggs

Anyone know a builder in Exeter area that does this work