Every house starts the same way. A set of drawings, and a question.
Which way do the joists run? What is this wall carrying?
Then it stops being a drawing, and starts being a thing that has to stand up.
Find the route the load takes. Then design what the route can carry.
Houses, every day, from the first sketch to the thing that gets built. If that is your idea of a good day, read on.
Illustrative image
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The desk
Every house starts the same way. A set of drawings, and a question.
Which way do the joists run? What is this wall carrying?
Then it stops being a drawing, and starts being a thing that has to stand up.
Find the route the load takes. Then design what the route can carry.
Houses, every day, from the first sketch to the thing that gets built. If that is your idea of a good day, read on.
Illustrative image
Careers
If you design structures for houses, we would like to hear from you.
There is no vacancy to apply for and no process to go into. What there is, is the work, and this page shows you the range of it rather than describing it.
- One engineer. No team yet and no office to come into.
- Both ways in are open. Permanent, or freelance and project work.
- No terms written down. Nobody is attached to them yet.
The range
From the bottom of a pool to the ridge, on one section
This is the spread of the work, drawn on one continuous section through the ground and the house. Step up and down it: a pool, a basement, foundations, an opening, a loft, and a crack that wants reading before it wants filling.
Drawn for this demo. One section, six jobs, not one house and not a project.
01 of 06
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01
A pool in the ground
A pool is a tank. It holds water in and it holds the ground out, and those are two different problems standing on the same piece of concrete. Full, the water pushes out; empty, the ground and any water in it push in. The walls are designed for both, with nothing outside counted on when it is full, and an empty tank is checked against floating.
The pool tank in the ground, with the water pushing out on the walls from inside and the ground pushing in from outside.
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02
A basement, beside a house that is already standing
Digging is the easy half. The ground the house has been standing on comes out from under it, so new walls have to hold that ground back for good and carry the house down to a new foundation.
Holding the house up while the work happens is our design too: the temporary props, and the order the ground comes out in. The permanent walls must work at every stage of that order, so the two are designed together. The builder puts the props in.
The basement box under the standing house, the original footing shown dashed above the new wall carried down past it, the new slab at the bottom, a temporary prop across the top until the lining walls and the new floor slab on their heads, drawn dashed, are in, and the ground pushing in from outside, the footing beside it adding to the push.
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03
Foundations, and why depth is not width
How wide answers one question: what the ground underneath can take without squashing. How deep answers a different one: how far down you have to go before the ground’s movement stops mattering, with frost, with the seasons, and with clay that shrinks when a tree draws the water out of it and swells again when the rain comes back.
Same house, same street, different garden, different answer. The depth-and-width lesson is written up in the notes.
The strip foundation under the outer wall, its depth and its width marked as separate questions, and tree roots reaching under the ground beside it.
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04
An opening, or a wall coming out
Take a wall away and the load does not notice it has gone. Whatever the wall was carrying still has to reach the ground, so a beam takes the load across the opening and hands it to something at each end, and that something has to be able to take it and carry it down.
Half of this design is the bearing rather than the beam. The whole sequence is written up in the notes.
The wall shown as removed, a new beam within the depth of the floor over it on a bearing at each end, and the load path running down each support.
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05
A loft, from a roof that was never a room
A pitched roof of this age leans on its purlins, and the purlins stand on struts that come down to the walls below, exactly where you want the room to be. And a ceiling that was only ever holding plaster up now has to hold people.
So the roof gets its new support before a strut comes out. Here that is steel at the ridge and under each slope, which is one way of several: a stud wall off the new floor, or stronger rafters, can do the same job. New joists go in beside the old ones, and every steel still has to find a wall that can take it.
The struts and old purlins shown as taken out, new steel at the ridge and under each slope, and new floor joists running front to back beside the old ceiling joists, hung off a floor steel. Each steel runs into the page, to padstones in our half of the party wall and on the gable, and the load path runs down the outer walls.
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06
Damage, and reading what moved
A crack is information before it is a repair. Where it runs, whether it steps through the mortar or splits the brick, whether it is wider at the top or the bottom, and whether it is still opening at all: that is what tells you what the ground has been doing and which part of the house went with it.
Fill it first and the evidence has gone. This is the part of the work where you get to be wrong slowly rather than quickly.
A crack across the outer wall, wider at the top than the bottom, with monitoring markers set across it and the foundation and the tree roots in view beneath.
Key to the drawings
- Existing masonry A flat tone: everything already there, cut or seen.
- Concrete Aggregate triangles and fine dots, scattered at random: foundations, slabs, padstones, lean-mix cavity fill, encasement.
- Undisturbed ground Basket weave, as a band that follows the ground line and fades out.
- Hardcore Large open zigzag, the depth of its own layer.
- Timber, cut A box with a cross. Seen along its length, an outline only.
- Steel, cut Solid, at the section's true proportion.
- Reinforcement A line along the bar, a dot where a bar is cut.
- Pressed steel Lintels, hangers, straps: a line at the wide weight.
- DPC Heavy dashed line, as Approved Document C draws it.
- Load path Where the load goes, from the roof to the ground; dashed where it runs beyond the cut.
- Load marks Arrows at the symbol weight: loads down onto a member, bearing up under a foundation.
- Hidden, beyond or removed Out of the cut, beyond it, or taken out.
- Temporary works, our design Teal line work: needles, props, sole plates, runners, walings, linings. Boxed tags, TW1 and up. Packing is drawn in the dry pack stipple.
- Proposed Short dashes: work still to come.
- By others, beyond Faint: frames, coverings. Not our structure.
- Named dimension A quantity named, never numbered.
- Cloud Confirm on site. Never a revision mark.
- Break line The drawing stops; the building does not.
Illustrative. Not a calculation and not a design.
Trace the load
Where does the roof go?
The right-hand roof strut pushes down. Tap, in order, what carries its load to the ground.This is the route its load takes to the ground.
- 01Roof strut
- 02First-floor wall
- 03Ground-floor wall
- 04Foundation, then the ground
That is the whole job: find the route, then design what the route can carry.
Illustrative image
What would suit this
Who would this suit?
- 01Size it, then explain itto the person paying for it, without talking down.
- 02Work from what you are sentand know when somebody has to go and look.
- 03Overdesign is a costnot a free margin, and never a reason to fall short.
- 04Leave a trailso Building Control and the next person can follow it.
- 05You want to work on housesnot a stepping stone to bridges.
Which way in
Permanent, freelance, or not sure yet?
| Arrangement | What the work is | What is not decided |
|---|---|---|
| Permanent | Jobs end to end, from the email to the issued set. | No salary band, start date, benefits or headcount. |
| Freelance or project work | The same work, in pieces scoped at the start. | No day rate, minimum, hours or notice period. |
| Not sure yet | The same work. Say so, and we work it out together. | Very nearly everything. The person and the arrangement get decided together. |
How to get in touch
Send an email. There is no form.
A form would imply a process that does not exist yet.
Start this email- The houses you have worked on. Openings, extensions, lofts, foundations, surveys.
- How you work. What you size by hand, and what you model.
- Permanent, freelance, or undecided. Any is a fine answer.
- Where you are based. And how far you would travel.
- Something you are pleased with. A calculation, a sketch, a detail.
- What you would want back. Ask us questions.
Nothing here is an offer, and nothing here sets terms. There is no start date, no headcount, no hiring process and no promise of work. When any of that becomes real, this page gets rewritten to say so.
If this is the kind of work you want to be doing, write and say so.
We reply within one working day.