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June 2017

What can I do with a Topographical survey?

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Introduction

There are a few misunderstanding on the importance and use of a Topographical Survey.

Like many homeowners, you might not see the importance of undertaking the topographical survey. You may think this is just:

  • another piece of paper to get your project going,
  • get approval or
  • just more money being spent on bureaucracy.

However, the topographical survey is used in a couple of ways:

  1. For planning application
  2. For your architect to produce plans
  3. To help in the construction phase of your project

For Planning Application

Most councils will require an accurate and scaled topographical survey. A Topographical Survey is not a site plan or location plan. This is completely different.

The topographical survey will need to have the ridge height and outline of the neighbouring properties. Sometimes additional details such as window/sill height of your neighbours can be requested.

Here is how a topographical plan looks like:

An Example of a Topographical Plan

and this is a site plan:

Example of a Site Plan

and this is a location plan:

An Example of a Location Plan

For your Architect

To enable your architect, builder or designer to produce proposed plans they need to have the dimensions, measurement and position of the current features of your land before they can do anything.

With the existing plans of your land, they will be able to draw up the proposals to fit within your land without affecting your neighbours.

This also informs them what features will conflict with your proposal as well as buildability issues such as working space, access, drains, etc…

For your Builders

Lastly, the topographical survey will be used for your builder’s quote for the job and to know where to position the works on your property.

Without the topographical survey, they wouldn’t know where the extent of the works is or where to start digging.

You would not want to start getting into a land dispute at an early phase of your project.

The Topographical survey would include a survey grid or control points. These enable a land surveyor or a setting-out engineer to help your builders position the works in the future.

You’ll notice that the land surveyor works in two ways; they help your team to give them information about what is on your land and as well as take the information from the drawings your architect produce to position it on the land.

It might sound easy, but it is not.

As the original topographical survey is usually produced 6-24 months before the construction works; The features and information on the land might have changed.

Hopefully, with some of the permanent features on your land, it will help your builders build. This is why your land surveyor must be skilled enough to survey the right information from land to drawing and extrapolate the right information from drawing to land.

 

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Why we accept all Major Credit Cards, Apple Pay and Android Pay

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At Icelabz we like talking to our customers and one of the pain points that we see our customers face every day is financing their project and paying for them.

Especially at the early stage of your projects; where you are still trying to get your architect to complete their proposed drawings for planning applications and get tenders in from contractors.

So we’ve made it easier for you to pay on credit.

How we’ve done it

Stripe Payment

 

We have teamed up with Stripe so that we can provide you with the best rates without charging you transaction fees. (We don’t pass on the charges to you)

Stripe allows our customers to use their credit card which includes American Express and other major credit cards that offer cash back incentives.

This is great for our customers as this can potentially save them cost and manage their cash flow at early stages of their project.

List of ways you can pay

In addition to paying with your credit card you can also pay using:

  • Apple Pay
  • Android Pay
  • Direct Debit

This helps you transact with us faster, get things done on the go without logging into your bank account and setting up a new recipient – which can take 10-15min

Design and Build Risk I’ve found as a Quantity Surveyor

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Some of you may have noticed that my background is in Quantity Surveying and specialized in commercial issues and disputes.

Even though I don’t provide this service, I still have discussions with architects and friends in the industry regarding their projects.

One story ticked me off as to how a contractor was swindling a poor homeowner.

Some background on the project

The project is based in Central London, and it is for the renovation of a £5million 2 storey flat. I wasn’t given the address, but I was given a brief of the issue and had to review the proposal from the contractor.

Some high-level details:

 

  • The main architect had a good relationship with the contractor
  • My friend was working with a different interior designer for the design
  • The price came around £1.9m for the renovation
  • The procurement route was traditional as some of the works had specialist (I’ll explain this in a future post)
  • Some of the M&E design was not done yet so it was passed on to the contractor as a contractor’s design portion which they put in as a provisional sum.

Issues I found when looking at the price

  • The price was hard to understand as it was not using any standard method of measurement. That to me is a big red flag.
  • As some of the design for the Mechanical and & Electrical was not complete, you would expect some provisional sum for it. However, it was not defined. Another red flag.
  • The listed 10% of the contract value as a Provisional sum but when I totaled up the additional comments throughout their pricing sheet, it came up to 45%. All of which were not defined. Another red flag. Most of the comments were related to structural design not complete. I was a bit confused as the structural engineer already provided the drawings for all of the necessary items.

I flagged these to my mate.

Why it was a problem

 

As a homeowner, you won’t be aware what a provisional sum is, and you could expect a reasonable amount on certain projects but! not 45% of the contract value.

You can learn more about the provisional sum on this post. But in brief…

having a provisional sum in the contract means that

  1. It’s not part of the contract to be delivered by the contractor, and you need to formerly instruct them
  2. the price will definitely change because the provisional sum has not been defined. Even the NEC contract
  3. As the client, you are taking the risk of the provisional sum activity
  4. You will need to pay more if the provisional sum is instructed as it will delay the program of works. This goes back to point 1. As the item of work is not part of your contract.

Need more information about provisional sum? Read this

… or still confused?

think of provisional sum as an item on a quote that is just a really rough estimate as the person who gave you the quote doesn’t know how much it will cost because he doesn’t enough information. So he took an educated (not really) guess of how much it costs.

Problem is that you’ll be taking a lot of risk on the item he couldn’t quote properly.

A good way to avoid this is to get

  • a complete design of the property
  • a Quantity Surveyor to create a bill of quantity for you
  • to instruct the contractor to price it against a standard method of measurement such as the NRM 2 (New Rules of Measurement 2). This can potentially help consultants later in your project understand what has been priced exactly.
  • or get the contractor to go on a design and build contract where they take the risk of the incomplete design.

Spam blocking for our enquiry page

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We have recently been swamped with SPAM bots on our website and specifically our client’s measured survey portal.

We have now included reCaptcha from Google and we have added additional checks which will force certain user submission to be parked until they pass through the recaptcha checks. Our mail system and database was overwhelmed with the number of SPAM.

Since we’ve implemented the update we’ve seen an immediate stop to the SPAM submissions.

I will continue to monitor the submissions and add additional rules to block these submissions.

http://gty.im/538806241