Planning a house build

Planning a house is the work that happens before anyone boasts about a foundation. In Lagos, Abuja, and Ibadan the order is the same shape and the local rules are not. This guide is that order. It assumes you have a plot, or you are about to commit to one, and you want a house a household can actually live in. It does not give you a drawing, and it does not give you a naira budget. Both of those depend on the site.

1. Walk the plot in the rain, or at least imagine the rain

Visit with someone who will say awkward things. Where does water stand an hour after a storm? Where is the neighbour’s soakaway? Can a truck reach the frontage, or will every bag of cement come in by hand? Is the “dry stream” at the back actually the edge of the Ogunpa, the Ona, a Lekki drainage reserve, or an Abuja setback? A plot that looks perfect in January harmattan can be a bowl in June.

In Lagos, published averages put the wettest weather in the early and late rainy season, with a lighter August between them, and the peninsula studies described earlier on the Lagos page are the reason a low sandy plot is not a mainland plot. In Abuja, the long rains run roughly April to October and the dry months are dusty. In Ibadan, onset is typically late March and the city has already proved, on 26 August 2011, that a single afternoon can drop close to 190 millimetres. If you only ever see the plot at noon in the dry season, you are buying a photograph.

Ask the seller what approval, if any, already exists, and whether the survey plan matches the pegs in the ground. A beautiful architectural idea on the wrong survey is a demolition.

2. Write the brief in rooms and in storeys

Say how many people will live there, whether a boys’ quarters or a gate house is part of this contract, and how many floors you truly intend. The expensive lie is a bungalow foundation under a house you mean to grow. Foundations and columns are cheap compared with underpinning a finished home, and they are expensive compared with a guess. If you might add a floor in five years, tell the engineer now.

Also say what can wait. Tiles can wait. A safe stair, a roof, and drains that leave the building cannot. The residential construction page is the longer version of that split.

3. Let the ground and the district shape the drawing

Commission a survey. Where the building will be tall, the soil looks soft, or the city asks for it, commission a ground investigation before the structural drawing is frozen. Lagos building-control regulations ask for a soil report above four floors and on low-bearing sites. FCT development control has described a soil report once a building passes two suspended floors, and it wants the design checked against the development-control manual for height, use, setback, and parking. Oyo State asks for a site analysis report with the permit set. Those are different documents in different offices. They share one idea: the drawing should be possible on that plot.

Choose professionals who can stamp what that office expects. A drawing “by a friend who is good at software” is not a structural design. The National Building Code’s block-strength figures, if you are building in sandcrete, belong in the specification now, not as a surprise when the blocks arrive soft.

4. Permit, then pegs, then concrete

The sequence is planning approval, then authority to start, then setting out, then the foundation. In Lagos the first stamp is LASPPPA and the second conversation is LASBCA, which wants notice, a site board, and stage inspections. In Abuja it is development control under the metropolitan council, with FCDA in the background of the master plan. In Ibadan it is the Oyo State process described on the state lands portal, with an office at Agodi. Do not pay a fee you cannot see on an official demand. This guide will not invent one.

Only after that is a “foundation ceremony” anything but theatre. Photograph the bottom of the trench. If the soil does not look like the report, stop and call the engineer. Pouring through the doubt is how settlement becomes a structural repair five years later.

5. Programme the shell around the season

Put excavation and foundations in a window when you can keep the trench dry. Get the roof on before the peak rains if you can, and never leave blockwork uncapped over a weekend in May or June in Lagos, or over a storm week in Ibadan. In Abuja, keep cement and wet finishes out of the worst harmattan dust. The rainy-season guide is the calendar version of this paragraph.

Agree who supervises on days you are not there. A residential site without a named supervisor becomes a different house from the one on the drawing, one window at a time.

6. What to send if you want a quote at this stage

You do not need every drawing. You do need the city and neighbourhood, the number of floors, whether a survey exists, and a photo of the plot and the access. Say if you are still choosing between a bungalow and a duplex. Micheletti Construction Limited reviews that kind of early request. The quote is a review of the building you described, not a rate per square metre, and not a permit.

If the house is already standing, stop using this guide. You are in a renovation, an extension, or a repair, and the planning task is to understand the structure you inherited before you add to it.