Structural EngineersThe number one secret volume housebuilders don’t want you to know is that you are entitled to a certain standard of construction and finish in your home.
So picture this. You design and build your dream house with a volume builder. It all goes fairly smoothly. You move in. Three months later you see a crack or two in the walls.
“How bad does a crack have to be before it is a problem?”, you wonder.
Polished concrete floors look great.
They are a hard-wearing, durable and attractive floor finish that can add value to your finished home.
But not every concrete floor is suitable for polishing because cracks in polished concrete floors are hard to hide.
If you’re building or extending your home and you’d like to use polished concrete, then this is something your engineer needs to know during the design process so that the appropriate precautions can be built into the structural engineering drawings.
What do structural engineers do? Structural engineers are civil engineers that specialise in the design, documentation, maintenance and repair of structures. They design, check and certify structures such as buildings, bridges and tunnels.
Residential structural engineers specialise in the design, documentation and maintenance of residential structures such as houses, units, granny flats, motels, hostels and hotels.
I have employed and worked with some amazing young graduate engineers. When we look for graduate structural engineers to employ at Cornell Engineers we use the standard job search pages that you already know about, ie Seek and Indeed.
So if you’re in the building industry in Australia you’ve probably noticed by now that the sizing and spacing of structural members aren’t exactly metric. I mean, we’re working in millimetres and all but have you noticed we still bow to imperial measurements in nearly all structural framing?
Here is how pervasive the imperial system is in our construction industry:
The list goes on.
Why are we hanging on to these old imperial dimensions when we turned metric many, many years ago? Wouldn’t it be easier for set out, planning and ordering to be working in metric?
Our materials are made better and are stronger and more consistently than ‘the old days’ when these systems were first put in place.
So I’m calling out to industry, to suppliers, to product technical advisors and other structural engineers. Let’s make the move to metric in the construction industry. It doesn’t have to be overnight, but when we learn to work in metric numbers, in easy multiples of 10, 50 and 100 I think we’ll make it easier for ourselves, use our modern materials more efficiently and finally close the door on outdated imperial standards.