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Or you just knock the house down and start again.
I wish the current fixation with preserving crumbling Victorian and Edwardian terraced housing would just end. People have to keep piling money into keeping outdated constructions inhabitable, for what, nostalgia’s sake?
Muc-ed-off-
fixation with preserving crumbling Victorian and Edwardian terraced housing
The energy performance might be shit but compared to most modern builds things like the room sizes, ceiling heights and window sizes are so much better. Add in the "it's a terrace so you have to do ~20 houses in one go or problems" and it's only the shitty mass builders that could do anything if they wanted to.
I sometimes wonder about knocking down and rebuilding my current house. It's detached so a much simpler project but still a massive amount of cash and disruption so I'm unlikely to ever do it.
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People have to keep piling money into keeping outdated constructions inhabitable, for what, nostalgia’s sake
I guess it would take a fuck-ton of carbon and labour to do anything else. The 150+ year design life of a simple pile of bricks makes up for a lot of energy inefficiency.
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Cos they're mostly fine, maybe a bit draughty or heat leaky or whatever but it's relatively small money to fix that. Sizes are often good, usually better than post-war buildings and they're often in nice places becaues they got built before the towns/cities got so big. If you look at a place like Japan they knock down and rebuild frequently but that's based on a very real issue that it may fall over if an earthquake hits. We don't have any threats like that here. Apart from multi million £ houses I'm yet to see anything build in the last 20 years that I'd regard as nice.
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Embodied carbon. Liveability. Thermal mass. (New bricks and new concrete are expensive for us and the environment.) We don't have the skills/labour or the materials to demolish and rebuild every home over 100 years old. We barely build any new homes as it is.
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I honestly have fantasies where a truck drives into our end-of-terrace victorian house, meaning we'd have to rebuild. Using the insurance to create a much more economic and ecological structure would be great.
jellybaby
NickCJ
Sumo
hoefla
beseku
Houses typically aren't of (mostly) brick construction. Much more like US stuff, timber frames sitting on top of a brick / concrete basement, lots of drywall etc. When you do external wall insulation it's (I'm mostly guessing here mind) like sticking stuff in a partition wall in the UK; if you want to take the insulation out, you can, by pulling the drywall down and taking it out.
Or you just knock the house down and start again.