Two mistakes to avoid making when building a house for the first time

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Carrie's Construction Tips

Welcome to my blog. I'm Carrie and I would like to share some of the top tips I have learnt about construction and repair work in the home. My passion is for buying old property and carrying out work on them to bring them into the 21st century. I started out doing this a couple of years ago. I used some money I had inherited to buy a wreck of a place and if I am honest, I didn't have a clue what I was doing. I was really lucky to find some great contractors who helped me out a lot and taught me lots of very cool things.

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Two mistakes to avoid making when building a house for the first time

25 February 2019
 Categories: Construction & Contractors, Blog


If you will be building a house for the first time, here are some serious mistakes that you must try to avoid making during this process.

Laying the concrete foundation without professional assistance

With so much free information about house construction available online, it is now possible for most people to carry out a wide range of building work, without the need for a lot of professional help. However, there are still certain parts of the construction process that you should not try to undertake yourself. For example, it would be very unwise to lay the concrete foundation for your new home without the help of a tradesperson who specialises in providing concrete services.

If you fail to lay the foundation correctly, the end results of the building work you perform after this could sustain damage. For instance, if when mixing the concrete before pouring it, you use too much water, the foundation that you create with that mixture may not be robust enough to bear the load of the framework you build on top of it. This may result in parts of it cracking and caving in and then causing structural imbalances throughout the property at a later stage.

Fixing the damage caused by your DIY concreting could cost a great deal (far more than the cost of getting a tradesperson to do this work for you). As such, this particular part of the building process should be done by a company that offers concrete services.

Painting before the wall plaster has fully dried

In your eagerness to complete the project, you may be tempted to paint onto the wall plaster before it has fully dried. However, this could lead to several problems that could result in you having to postpone moving into your newly constructed home.

Firstly, paint that is applied to damp plaster will not adhere to it. In most cases, it will partially dry and then begin to flake off. Secondly, adding a layer of paint over the damp plaster will mean that the residual moisture in the plaster mixture won't be able to evaporate and will instead remain in the plaster. This moisture could result in the plaster becoming mouldy. If this happens, it will need to be torn down and replaced. As such, it is important to be patient and allow the plaster to dry out completely before you start applying paint to it.