The failures we were aware of were:

    One building was uninhabitable because of high humidity, this was causing great puddles of water to form on the bottom rail of windows which spilled over onto the wooden sill inside and caused huge black mould patterns to appear on window reveals. The other building also had great condensation issues on windows but did not have the high humidity so the condensation wasn't as bad. The pattern of condensation on the window was indicative of something like a cold bridge, but the frames were all thermally broken, and the source of the damp humid air was not known. The conservatory roof had roof lights and glazing bars with no thermal break and this was causing huge condensation issues with water dripping off the roof onto the oak flooring, causing major discolouration and damage.

    External doors were beginning to grate and grind in their frames, so much so that some doors could not be used.

    Cracks appeared in the join between the building and a garden wall. Wooden horizontal plank cladding between the house and the garage became bent and twisted, the original metal balcony started pulling away from the building and the door onto it wouldn't open.

    The final straw came when wet rot fungus "mushrooms" appeared growing through the render cladding.

    At this point we took matters in hand and started to seriously investigate the building. This we had to do ourselves as the builder obviously believed that he had done what was asked of him, if there was a mistake where something was not built to drawing then I dare say he would have accepted responsibility, but if the mistake is in the drawing then that is the architect's responsibility. The architect has no resources to make ammends if there is a design failure and has to rely upon insurance, unfortunately architects do not have to insure themselves for the full value of the work they do.

    Upon tearing down a section of wall we found that the base of the timber frame was standing in water and rotting away.

    The house was in danger of collapse, and it was only 5 years old and we hadn't paid the "retention" of about £15K yet. It was obvious that it was going to take a masive ammount of time, money, effort to fix this problem if the rest of the building was like this, and these issues had all the hallmarks of design failure rather than the building not being built to drawing, so we decided to sue the architect.

    This required us to ascertain exactly what design failures had been made.

    A place to start was to investigate why the air inside was almost always at or above 90% RH, where was the damp coming from? Using humidity meters it was found that a raised floor which had all the services running beneath it was the most humid part of the building and by shining a torch into this area one could see drips of moisture inside. This area was inaccessible so a large hole was cut in the floor to create access and in we went, all the insulation and contents of this void were soaking wet, smelly, and had to be removed, this showed big holes in the beam and block floor where the builder had failed to lay the floor as drawn and the sub floor void was venting into this area and then into the house rather than outside, this was something which had been known about during build and had been the subject of a meeting between the builder and the architect, seemingly it had not been investigated and obviously not corrected. Why was the ground under the house so damp? A mini digger was hired and part of the perimeter of the house investigated, this exposed the drainage as fitted, this was a perforated pipe which was presumably intended to take excess water away from the building when once the water level rose to the level of the invert of the pipe. Unfortunately this was much higher than the invert of the foundation and the drain had been laid on broken free draining ground, no surface water had ever been seen running away in this drain so it was likely that the surface water was actually just soaking into the ground around and under the house. This suspicion was reinforced when a video was taken of water pouring out from the foundation of the building, filling an inspection trench, after heavy rain. It was also noticed that the services into the building had been laid in gravel filled trenches which were underneath the drainage, thus allowing any water which may have been in the perforated drainage, such as the roof and gutter run off, to access the service trench and travel under the building before any chance of it being carried away to a safe place. The humid air beneath the building should be ventilated to atmosphere using airbricks, the design didn't allow for conventional airbricks so perescope vents had been fitted which took warm moist air from beneath the building and rather than discharging it to atmosphere actually discharged it into the gap behind the render, on the face of the timber frame. It would condense here and slowly work its way down to the bottom of the timber frame where it sat because it couldn't escape. This was what was causing the frame to disintegrate and collapse causing door frames to bend and twist and interior plaster to crack.

The foundation of the building was piled to bedrock but various parts of the building had been built away from this foundation but tied back into the building on this foundation, wherever this existed we were seeing major problems, cracking, warping, twisting, it was obvious that there was significant relative movement between parts and these parts off the foundation had to be demolished or isolated before major damage was done.