Ease of maintenance is vital in home design

My guttering was in trouble. Whenever the heavens opened, rainwater spattered noisily on the living room window sill and turned the tiled roof outside my office window into a miniature white-water rafting course.

Clearly an inspection was required. Unfortunately, the guttering above the tiled roof was attached to a third storey – well above my vertigo limit. And the several minutes spent contemplating this dizzy height resulted in my vertigo limit sinking even lower than the height of the other guttering.

So I did what any ladder-phobic person would do and borrowed my daughter’s drone. Hovering low over the house, its on-board GoPro camera quickly revealed that both sets of black plastic guttering were – well – very dark. No obvious blockages. I called a roofer.

He quickly discovered that both gutters contained a thick layer of moss and leaf mould, though not enough to create a blockage. In the higher gutter, however, it hid a small chunk of mortar which had broken away from the roof valley above, creating a highly efficient spraying device.

Rather more embarrassingly the same roofer pointed out that a support bracket was missing from the other gutter, allowing it to sag just above the living room window. Just enough, in fact, to spill rainwater during a heavy downpour.

The lesson of this tale? Well, do check your guttering properly, especially at this time of year. But, more importantly, when you’re planning your dream design consider ease of maintenance. It may not be the most glamorous aspect of your new home, but it will make living in it easier, less stressful and significantly more economical.

1. Make your house exterior as accessible as possible, enabling professionals to both identify and reach trouble spots more quickly and safely, saving them time and you cash. This applies especially to those features most likely to need attention: guttering, downpipes, roof covering, areas of flat roof, chimneys, TV aerials, satellite dishes and solar thermal and photovoltaic panels. Single-storey properties, especially those with flat roofs, make this easier, but balconies can achieve a similar effect with two-storey properties, especially on rear elevations where planning departments tend to be more flexible. Top-hung roof windows in rooms in the roof, or loft conversions, also allow outside access to guttering and roofs. Velux’s ingenious Cabrio system is a roof window that transforms into a balcony when needed.

2. Ease access to pipework and wiring. The first step is to record where these lie. This isn’t always straightforward since the routes are often left to subcontractors that are unlikely to supply precise details. Running cabling through trunking, though adding to immediate expense, will greatly simplify later re-wiring. Trunking can also be incorporated into service cavities. These are common in timber-frame construction, where a secondary wall is created on the inside of an exterior wall by fitting battens, either vertically or horizontally, and then covering them with plasterboard.

Service cavities can also be made for internal walls, creating, for example, a central service core through which all the main cabling and pipework runs. This can make keeping track of them much easier, as well as later repair or extension. Flexible plastic pipework, which can be threaded, like electrical cabling, in long, continuous lengths, is particularly useful for this – the pipes can even be coloured coded for easy identification. Plastic also dramatically reduces the number of vulnerable joints needed in traditional copper piping.

3. Choose a low-maintenance material for the walls and roof. Brick is hard to beat in terms of cost, durability and maintenance. The same goes for clay and slate roof tiles, though they are more vulnerable. Zinc, lead, steel and copper roofing and cladding offer similar levels of durability and minimal maintenance but at a cost that confines them to high-budget projects or smaller areas such as flat roofs, loft conversions or extensions.

4. Rather than gas central heating serving radiators, consider fitting a ground source heat pump (GSHP) with underfloor heating. A GSHP system only has one moving part – a water pump – and is designed to last over 25 years with minimal maintenance. Underfloor heating consists of single, continuous loops of pipework, each of which has only two connections to a central manifold – unlike the multiple vulnerable connections in a radiator system. The main drawback with heat pumps is expense, though payments from the government’s Renewable Heat Incentive will ease the pain.

5. Consider tilt-and-turn or inward–opening – known as ‘inswing’ – windows. Cleaning, repair and re-painting, if needed, are easier, especially for upper floors. External shutters are also easily accessible, enabling them to reduce solar gain in our increasingly hot summers while allowing the window to remain open for ventilation.

6. Instead of tiling kitchens, bathrooms and shower rooms, use wall-height acrylic or uPVC panels. Mouldy or discoloured grouting will no longer be a problem, the surface will be warmer and installation will be easier and much speedier than conventional tiling.

Novemebr 2019