Structural Curiosities...

One of the delights of self-building is that you are generally at the mercy of the expertise, or more worryingly, lack of expertise of your tradesmen. Normally this doesn't result in anything too serious as you can hear from the uncertainty in their voice that they don't know what you mean and you can head the potential disaster off.

However, every once in a while something gets through the net and, if you're unlucky, becomes a structural cock-up. This is my latest:

 

What you're looking at here is the soil pipe coming up through the concrete slab next to a block work pillar or pier. The reason its there is because the ground workers saw a shaded square on the plans and assumed it was marking the location of the soil stack.

Alas not.

It was where the pier was supposed to go. I guess it must have been the way that the square was shaded the same as all of the other block work on the plans that confused them...

But worry not! We can always bodge something.

 

What we have now is the pier next to the soil pipe, as you can see, with a steel lintel running across the top and acting as a short cantilever over the gap where the pipe is.

Lets just hope there's no other "structural curiosities" left to find!