Self-build guide

Before you start — shuru karne se pehle

Get the drawing approved before the first brick. In a housing society that means the society's building control; in CDA sectors it is the CDA building control section; in Rawalpindi cantonment areas the cantonment board. The approved map fixes your covered area, setbacks, plinth height and the number of storeys — building outside it costs far more to fix later than to do right.

Decide how you will build. On a contract (thekedar) rate the contractor supplies labour and material at a price per square foot; on labour rate you buy every bag and brick yourself and pay the contractor for work only. Labour rate is cheaper and gives you control over quality, but only if you know what to buy and when. This guide and the calculators are for that second case.

• Check the plot: road level now and the level the society plans to raise it to, water table, whether the soil is filled earth (needs deeper foundations), and where the sewer and water connections are.
• Keep a site diary: material delivered, bags used per day, who worked. Most disputes with labour are about quantities nobody wrote down.
• Buy in stages. Cement loses strength in storage; steel rusts; tiles and sanitary items get broken or "borrowed". Order for the next two weeks of work, not the whole house.
• Fix a level. Put a permanent mark on a boundary wall or a peg in concrete for the plinth level and check everything against it.

Buying materials — saaman kharidte waqt

Item	What to check
Cement	Fresh stock (packing date within 3 months), no hard lumps, bags stored off the ground on wooden pallets and covered. Don't mix brands in one structural pour.
Bricks	Awwal (first class): straight edges, even colour, ring when two are knocked together, no white salt patches. Break one — it should snap clean, not crumble. Soak before laying.
Sand (rait)	Coarse river sand for concrete and outside plaster, finer sand for inside plaster. Bottle test: fill a bottle one-third with sand, top up with water, shake and leave overnight. The silt layer on top should be under 8% of the sand height. Reject sand with clay balls or smell.
Crush (bajri)	Margalla crush, 3/4 in for slabs and beams, 1/2 in for thin lintels and PCC. Should be clean and angular, not dusty or rounded river stone.
Steel (sariya)	Grade 60 from a mill with the PSQCA mark. Weigh a 40 ft bar: 3 sutar should be about 6.8 kg, 4 sutar 12.1 kg, 5 sutar 18.9 kg. Light bars are the common cheat. Surface rust is fine; flaking rust is not.
Wire	Pure copper from a known mill (Pakistan Cables, Fast, GM, Newage). Scrape the strand — it should be copper all through, not silver inside.
Pipes	PPR PN20 for water supply, UPVC (Dadex, Pak Arab, Popular or similar) for drainage, GI for gas. Buy one brand of fittings with the pipes.

Foundation, plinth and DPC — neev, plinth aur DPC

For a normal two-storey house on firm soil the foundation is a strip of brick or stone masonry stepping out below the walls, on a bed of plain concrete (PCC 1 : 3 : 6, usually 6 in thick). Depth is typically 3 to 4 ft below ground, but on filled or soft soil it must go to firm strata — have the excavation checked before pouring. Columns on isolated footings are used where the plan has large openings or a third storey.

The plinth is the finished floor level of the ground floor. Keep it 1.5 to 2 ft above the road, and ask the society how much the road will be raised when it is carpeted — a house that ends up below road level floods in every monsoon and cannot be fixed.

DPC: the line that keeps rising damp out

The damp-proof course is a 1.5 to 2 in layer of 1 : 2 : 4 concrete with waterproofing compound, laid across the full width of every wall at plinth level, before the walls above start. It stops ground moisture climbing up the brickwork. Three rules decide whether it works:

Where the ground floor has bathrooms or a kitchen at a different level, or a basement, ask for a vertical DPC or a bitumen coat on the wall face as well. In areas with a high water table use a plastic sheet under the floor PCC.

Walls and brickwork — chinai

• Outside and load-bearing walls 9 in; partitions 4.5 in with an RCC band or small columns at every 10 ft so they don't crack. Boundary walls above 6 ft need 9 in or piers.
• Mortar 1 : 4 for outside walls and below DPC, 1 : 5 or 1 : 6 for inside partition walls. Joints 3/8 in, full of mortar — not hollow with a smear on the face.
• No more than 4 to 5 ft of height in a day; check plumb every three courses; frames of doors and windows fixed plumb with holdfasts as the wall rises.
• Cure brickwork with water for 7 days. Dry, thirsty walls suck the water out of plaster and it cracks.
• Leave the chases for electrical conduits and pipes planned, not hacked afterwards, and never cut a horizontal chase deeper than one third of a 4.5 in wall.

Lintels, beams and slab — lantar, beam aur chhat

Lintel over doors and windows

Reinforced concrete 1 : 2 : 4, bearing at least 9 in into the wall on each side. For openings up to 4 ft a 6 in deep lintel with four 3 sutar bars and 2 sutar stirrups at 6 in is the usual practice; for openings of 4 to 6 ft use 9 in depth and 4 sutar bars. Wider than 6 ft, or a lintel carrying a wall from above, is a beam — get it designed.

Islamabad and Rawalpindi are in an earthquake zone. Running the lintel as a continuous band around the whole house at door-top level, instead of separate pieces over each opening, ties the walls together and is the single cheapest earthquake measure you can build in. Do the same with a plinth band on soft soil.

Beams

Beams are needed wherever a wall above has no wall directly below it, over spans longer than a lintel can take, along the edge of a slab with a large span, and to carry a staircase. Typical house beams are 9 × 12 in for spans up to about 12 ft and 12 × 15 to 12 × 18 in for 14 to 18 ft, in 1 : 1.5 : 3 concrete, but the steel and depth depend on what the beam carries — this is the one drawing worth paying an engineer for. Never let the mistri "adjust" beam steel on site.

Roof slab

• Usual thickness 5 to 6 in for rooms up to 14 ft span, 1 : 2 : 4 concrete, 3 sutar bars at 6 in centres both ways with extra top bars over beams and walls, per drawing. Cover of 3/4 in, kept with spacers, not brick pieces.
• Slope the slab 1 in per 8 ft towards the rainwater outlets and cast the outlets (khurra) with the slab.
• Pour a slab in one continuous session, vibrate it, and start curing the next morning: ponding with water for at least 14 days is the cheapest strength you will ever buy.
• Props stay for 21 days on slabs and 28 days on long beams. Removing shuttering early to reuse it is how sagging roofs happen.

Plumbing: which pipe where — kaunsa pipe kahan

Use	Pipe	Notes
Water supply, hot and cold	PPR (green) PN20, 3/4 in mains and 1/2 in branches	Heat-fusion joints; no threaded joints buried in walls. Pressure-test at 8–10 bar for 24 hours before plaster covers them.
WC / soil drainage	UPVC 4 in	Slope 1 in per 4 ft, gentle bends, cleanouts at direction changes, vent pipe to roof.
Basin, shower, kitchen waste	UPVC 2 in / 3 in	Every fixture through a trap (P-trap or floor trap) so drains don't smell.
Rainwater from roof	UPVC 4 in downpipes	Keep separate from the sewer; discharge to the road drain or a soak pit, never at the foot of a wall.
Gas	GI seamless, per SNGPL/SSGC rules	Surface-run and painted, or in a ventilated chase. Test by the gas company before connection.
Overhead / underground tank	PPR supply, UPVC overflow	Overflow pipe must reach the drain — an overflow dripping down a wall is the commonest cause of "mystery" seepage.

Give every bathroom and the kitchen its own isolation valve, keep supply lines in the wall and drainage in the floor, and photograph every pipe run before it is covered — you will need those photos in five years.

Electrical — wiring

• Draw the points on the plan before the electrician arrives: switch positions by the door, sockets at 12 in and 18 in, kitchen sockets above the counter, AC point and drain at the outdoor unit side, a spare conduit to the roof for solar.
• Conduits (20 mm PVC, 25 mm for AC and mains) go into the walls before plaster and into the slab before pouring. Junction boxes stay accessible; no joints hidden inside conduits.
• Wire sizes: 3/29 for lights and fans, 7/29 for sockets, 7/36 for a 1–1.5 ton AC and water heater (one breaker each), 7/44 for a 2 ton AC or motor, 7/52 from meter to DB. See the wire estimator.
• Earthing: a copper plate or rod in a wet pit, with an earth wire to every socket and every AC point. A DB with proper MCBs and an RCD (earth-leakage breaker) for bathrooms and the kitchen.
• UPS and solar circuits on a separate DB so that only the essential loads are on backup.

Seepage and waterproofing — saim / seelan se bachao

Seepage is the complaint we hear most about houses built only three or four years ago, and almost all of it comes from five places: bathroom floors, the roof, the overhead tank overflow, external walls that were never cured, and soil against the wall above the DPC. Each one is cheap to prevent and expensive to cure.

Under bathroom tiles — the step people skip

• Roof: slope to the outlets, a bitumen membrane or two coats of roof waterproofing on the clean slab, then insulation (polystyrene sheets) and a protective screed or tiles. Parapet tops get a sloped coping. Clean the outlets before every monsoon.
• Outside walls: cure plaster for a week, use waterproofing admixture in outside plaster, and paint with a weather coat. Cracks at the lintel and slab junctions are sealed before painting, not painted over.
• Overhead tank: overflow and washout pipes to the drain, a lid that closes, and the tank sitting on a slab, not on the roof waterproofing.
• AC drains: pipe them to a drain. Water dripping onto a wall for six months a year is enough to stain and grow algae.
• Ground level: keep soil, plants and paving at least 6 in below the DPC all the way round the house.

Plaster, floors and tiles — plaster, farsh aur tiles

• Plaster only after the walls have cured for a week and all conduits and pipes are in. Wet the wall, apply 1 : 4 at 1/2 in inside and 1 : 3 or 1 : 4 at 3/4 in outside, and cure for 7 days. Use the daily mix calculator so nothing is left over.
• Floors: compacted earth filling in layers, sand, 3 in PCC 1 : 3 : 6, then tiles on a 1 in bed of 1 : 4 mortar with a cement slurry on the back of each tile. Keep the finished floor a step above the DPC and outside ground.
• Tiles: soak ceramic tiles, lay porcelain dry; use spacers, keep the same batch number in one room, and leave a 1/4 in gap at the walls under the skirting for expansion. Wall tiles go on a rough scratch coat of plaster, not a smooth finished wall.
• Paint: two coats of putty sanded smooth, one coat of primer, two coats of emulsion inside; weather coat outside. Painting fresh plaster in under three weeks traps moisture and the paint peels.

Common mistakes and what they cost later — galtiyan jo baad mein mehngi parti hain

Mistake	What shows up later	Do this instead
No curing of brickwork, plaster or slab	Hairline cracks everywhere, weak concrete, plaster that sounds hollow	Water twice a day for 7 days (plaster, walls) and pond the slab for 14 days
DPC missing, too low, or soil piled above it	Rising damp, paint peeling in a 2–3 ft band along the bottom of walls	DPC 6 in or more above outside ground; floor just above DPC; nothing bridging it
Skipping waterproofing under bathroom tiles	Seepage into adjoining rooms and the ceiling below within a few years	Waterproof coat plus 24-hour water test before tiling
Separate lintels instead of a continuous band	Cracks at the corners of openings; walls separate in a tremor	Continuous RCC lintel band round the house
Beam or slab steel "adjusted" on site	Sagging roof, cracks under the slab, expensive strengthening	Follow the engineer's drawing; count bars before the pour
Removing shuttering early	Deflected slabs, cracked beams	21 days for slabs, 28 days for long beams
Cheap or undersized wire	Warm switches, tripping, fire risk when the AC is on	Pure copper, sizes by load, one circuit per AC
Untested water pipes plastered over	A damp patch that grows for months before anyone finds the leak	Pressure test 24 hours before covering, keep photos of every run
Flat roof with no slope or blocked outlets	Standing water, seepage into the top floor every monsoon	Slope to outlets, membrane, clean outlets yearly
Painting wet plaster	Peeling paint and salt blooms	Wait 3–4 weeks after plaster; primer first
Buying the whole house's cement at once	Lumpy bags, lost strength, theft	Buy for two weeks of work, store on pallets under cover
Plinth below future road level	Water in the house every rain, no fix	Ask the society about final road level; plinth 1.5–2 ft above it

Rules of thumb — jaldi hisaab

Site figures for ordinary work, so you can sanity-check a demand for material. The calculators do the exact arithmetic.

Inside plaster, 1/2 in, 1 : 4	about 1 bag of cement and 5 cu ft of sand per 100 sq ft
9 in brickwork	about 10 bricks per sq ft of wall; 1 bag of cement per 15–20 cu ft of brickwork at 1 : 4
4.5 in brickwork	about 5 bricks per sq ft
Concrete 1 : 2 : 4	about 18 bags of cement, 44 cu ft sand and 88 cu ft crush per 100 cu ft
Roof slab steel	roughly 1 kg per sq ft of slab area at 5 in thick (per drawing)
Floor tiles, 2 × 2 ft	1 tile per 4 sq ft, plus 7% wastage; 1 × 2 ft: 1 tile per 2 sq ft
Paint, emulsion	1 gallon (3.64 L) covers about 200 sq ft in two coats
Wire	a 90 m bundle of 3/29 does about 6 light or fan points at an average 25 ft run
One cement bag	50 kg, about 1.25 cu ft; one rehri of sand about 3 cu ft; a Suzuki-load of sand about 100 cu ft (ask the supplier)

This guide describes common good practice for ordinary houses in Islamabad and Rawalpindi. It is not a structural design and does not replace your approved drawings, your engineer, or the society's by-laws.