Aluminous cement

The beams in my flat are made of aluminous cement. This is bad news. When the building was put up in 1953 some aluminium compound was added to the cement to make it set faster; the result is that the beams are degrading with a condition called aluminosis, and they will eventually give way, though there is no imminent danger; a fair analogy is a wooden building infested with death watch beetle – something certainly has to be done to arrest the rot but it is not super-urgent. I have been told that this is a problem peculiar to Catalonia, at least in Spain, but the first case was reported in a school in Birmingham in the 1950s.

A number of cases have been reported in Catalonia and there is a mechanism for dealing with it. We were first informed of this problem four years ago and a meeting of the Owners’ Association was called; my building is rather large, with 36 flats. Even in smaller associations such meetings are rather more boisterous affairs than their British equivalents would be, and may well involve a number of people all talking at the same time in two languages, Catalan and Spanish. The upshot was that a committee was set up to investigate and an architect’s report was commissioned. Holes were made in ceilings and samples of concrete were taken from the beams in autumn 2002. The report came in with the result that all the beams would have to be replaced or reinforced, a process that would involve taking down all the ceilings in all the flats. It is widely known here that this process may take several months during which time the dwelling is uninhabitable. The cost for my flat was estimated at approaching € 30,000, of which 35% would be subsidised by the Generalitat (Catalan government) and another portion might be paid by the city council, depending on my income and financial state. The rest would be made up by a bank loan, the banks having no choice about giving it or as to the interest rate they can charge.

The particular problem in this case is that of the 36 flats about fifteen are owned by one man. This is the man who bought the whole property in 1997 and sold the flats to the then tenants, including us. The prices were fair given that they had sitting tenants – I bought mine for 12m pesetas (£ 60,000) – but this price did not take into account the problem with the concrete beams. Moreover, the problem was exacerbated by the fact that the man in question is a builder, he was angling for the contract for restoration, and no-one knew whether he had known (or suspected) at the time that he bought the flats and sold them on that the structure was in need of major repair.

Reactions from the owners were mixed. We had people saying that they had bought their property in good faith and wouldn’t be able to sell it; there were old people saying that it wasn’t going to be a problem for them and if the building wasn’t falling down, why pay good money to put it back up again? Some said that property with this cement was selling at a discount of 15%, which was less than the cost of repair; others asked who was going to buy a blighted property when there were plenty of sound ones to be had. Some wanted the work done piecemeal at the discretion of individual owners; others wanted it done all at once to avoid disruption over a prolonged period. Some said that only certain rooms (kitchen and bathroom) needed doing others replied that the rot would spread eventually and then it would cost even more.

There was a lengthy pause, and then another report, from a different architect. This one recommended the taking of new samples where appropriate but that the work should be done only in rooms where it was needed, essentially kitchens and bathrooms. Then reasoning was that the future progress of the problem was unknown, that the beams that not been unaffected in the last fifty years so far might not become seriously affected, and it was not even possible to guarantee that the building would still be standing then. In short, we should do the work where necessary. An architect came last week to examine the beams in my bathroom. He showed them to me and said they were very bad; I agreed with him. But doing it this way means that my share will be around € 3,000, about one tenth of the original estimate.

But I still have a problem: I desperately need a new kitchen and bathroom, and the plans involve a major reform of the two together, extending the kitchen to include part of the bathroom. But all this had to be put on hold some years ago when the problem became evident. There is no sense in installing them before the ceiling in the bathroom comes down and all the work is done on the beams, and some minor work is also required in the kitchen to make good the damage done by the sampling in 2002. When the work will be done is anybody’s guess, and meanwhile we wait.