MBC arrived on site, laid Type 1 and soil pipes pretty quickly and 50mm sand blinding and then set to constructing the EPS raft that is now our slab. Its been said many times on this site, but I will say it again. These guys work hard. They arrived before 7am each day and left at 6pm or later each night. They hardly stopped. And after a week it was assembled. Ready for concrete.
The SE suggested digging 900mm deep because the soil survey said we had clay. And we have trees.
I used the NHBC foundation depth calculator and did alot of reading around foundation digs. Overthinking it all, alot.
BC said to dig to 700mm and see what was there. Guess what? No clay (well, only a tiny patch amongst loads of gravel).
So the SE suggested a new depth of 200mm. But we are already at 700mm I said. No problem he said. Fill it back in, with crushed concrete and th
From this
To this
The demolition guys worked alarmingly slowly. They didn't bring any machinery in until late on when the slab needed to be dug up. Unbelievably they were loading the skips by hand, brick by brick, concrete lump by lump. Anyway, we ended up a bit behind schedule due to them taking 3 weeks longer than planned. If we were ever going to do this again, which we are not, we would know better. I would drive a digger into
So, as I am backdating this blog by 6 months I need to catch up quickly. I covered alot of our demolition in other posts due to the asbestos issues.
The bungalow was encased in plastic sheeting and over the course of three weeks amosite asbestos was removed from the soffits, chrysotile asbestos from the roof tile edging and from inside every internal wall. We left this job to the professionals and were pleased to do so. It whacked up the cost of our demolition by about £20K in the
Back in March our new home arrived.
Manoeuvring it into place took more time than we possibly imagined.
And we looked at our snow covered new home from the relative warmth of our 1960s flat pack bungalow and wondered if it was too late to turn back.
Thanks to fellow buildhubbers we got it safely hooked up to gas. Thanks to You Tube we got it levelled. Thanks to him indoors it got all plumbed in to mains drainage. We moved
A brief update on my inward leaning gable that I posted about recently. Just to recap, I spotted that the gable section of my west facing bedroom wall was leaning inward at an angle and made it look as though there was a problem with the window, which turned out not to be the case.
Over the last couple of days I've been liaising with my timber frame company, MBC, and my window company, Norrsken, to see what needs to be done. I've taken plenty of photos to illustrate the problem and
It's been a little quiet on site over the last 10 days or so which hasn't been a bad thing as I had a nasty cold last week so it gave me an added incentive to stay at home and get some more forward planning done. One of the downsides, though, is that I only today spotted an issue with the west facing upstairs gable that's only really visible from the top scaffolding lift.
When I first saw it, I thought 'oh bugger, another window problem' and promptly got on the phone to the guys at
Yes it seems the main phrase for our build currently, is "nearly done" - As much as September seemed to be a frustratingly slow month progress wise, I am optimistic that we shall see things all come together during October allowing us to move in for November !!
Having said that when I look back on the photos that I had taken, quite a bit of progress had indeed been achieved. It is easy to lose sight of such things when you are in the thick of it on a daily basis.
The upstairs i
That’s exactly what it feels like! Builders have said they have a weeks worth of jobs to do, there’s been a hold up with the staircase, nobody signed it off, the architect came out and did all the calcs and I asked him to contact staircase firm with them, at the same time I emailed them and told them architect was going to contact them but I did feel they needed a visit to see what they were dealing with, this was on August 29th , they never answered me and I took it all was in hand, however I d
Because our site was on a slope we always envisaged having a walk-in basement, that’s a basement surrounded on three sides by the slope and open at the front to a lawned area. The architect recommended a structural engineer to design the basement walls, what I hadn’t realised until it was too late, was that the design would be way over-engineered. His design is for a 200mm thick steel reinforced poured concrete wall tied into the basement slab. The slab and retaining wall contains about 52m3 of
I'm currently awaiting the Architects tender documents for review. It's been a two month process and I've been making inquiries into specific heating, MVHR and window options. Budget as always is a worry. I've drawn up a list of timber frame companies and builders and met those on the short list face to face. The Architect will have other names to drop I'm sure but getting a feel of the building pulse and talking with the builders really helped me identify the risks as they see it. Masonry vs Ce
So for the larger ground floor room, we got a professional screeding company to come in. They were due to start Monday morning so I took the day off work. For some unknown reason, over the weekend both my wife and I had we had an uneasy feeling they weren't going to turn up, but there was no logical basis for that. By about 0930 I had a suspicion, and sent a text asking roughly what time they thought they would arrive. A few moments later the phone rings and its the owner apologising saying th
In the last blog entry I was putting down insulation and the UFH pipework in the smaller of the 2 main downstairs rooms.
In the end I decided we would do the smaller (3.5m x 7.5m) sitting room ourselves. So with myself and daughter levelling, wife and friend mixing and super fit farmer friend on the wheelbarrow we mixed the requisite 4 tons of screed and ton of cement and laid it in a day. Fish and chip lunch provided of course to helpers!
All in all we didn't to to
Today, I had my site meeting with the line manager of the local wayleave officer for SSE, to further discuss the situation regarding high voltage wires oversailing my property, all of which I mentioned in a previous post.
The meeting went well and AJ's line manager was as different as she could be from AJ and the whole thing was conducted in a civilised manner. The resolution is that OH and I will grant an easement to SSE for the wires to be allowed to pass over our property in per
Before we get into the events of the day, I have a little quiz question for readers of the blog.
- What is the connection between my build in rural north Dorset and a mystical character from the legend of King Arthur?
Answer at the end of today's entry. All will become clear.
Today was another busy day on site, with 3 main areas of activity - flat roof, pitched roof and windows.
Let's start with the windows, as they are (mostly) looking great. Bo
So far this week, things are going okay, but in their usual messy sort of way, and with a few time slippages thrown in that are keeping me on my toes.
Let's start with the main show of this week which is the arrival and installation of all my glazing. Woohoo! All arrived intact and, as far as I can see for the moment, undamaged. Everything turned up on a lorry from Poole yesterday morning, so a relatively local delivery as I'm only at the other end of the county rather than the co
Our site slopes, so we had the idea of digging into the slope and creating a walk in basement. Having done two trial pits into nice soil and clay during the initial design phase, we were confident that it was a simple soil dig out sort of thing! Once the bungalow was demolished it became clear we’d quite by chance dig into the only two areas of soil and clay and the house had been constructed on a large lump of limestone rock called Cumbria. After a hit of head scratching and a coffee with my
Having promised my wife Debbie that I’d get people in to do most of the Work associated with the new house, i contacted two local demolition companies and got prices to demolish the old timber bungalow. The prices were £6,000 and £12,200. Being tight I demolished it myself, it cost the price of three skips, £540, The bonus for me was over £1,000 in payment for the scrap from the house, things like a hot water copper cylinder and piping, lead off the roof, the old cast iron AGA and two baths, the
Having vented my spleen about the DNO and AJ, its wayleave officer, it's time to move on to more interesting things, like the puzzle of getting my roofing done, amongst other things.
For my sins, whilst our house is an interesting design and has quite a few twiddly bits, they have proved to be less than straightforward to actually get built. For a start, the house has a combination of pitched and flat roof sections, there will be an in-roof solar PV system up there and the parapet t
If there's one thing that really gets my back up, it's someone trying to bully or intimidate me. It rarely works, it just makes me angry.
If you've been following this blog, you may recall a post some time back in August concerning the high voltage power lines that oversail my plot, sadly very close to our new house. They do, in fact, just about cross directly over the very furthest corner of the garage. Now whilst these lines do not supply my new house and there is no equipment a
Like all Self builders we found we had a limited number of options for living accommodation during the build, given that we needed to demolish the bungalow to clear the plot for the build.
The options were, rent locally or a caravan on site. Renting locally wasn’t an option due to the high rental costs, so we looked at the caravan option. The main problem was access, an 8 feet wide drive with a hairpin bend half way up, a dry stone wall, 80 feet tall trees and limestone outcrop put p
Having done a large renovation project and turned an old 1770s vintage wreek into a fantastic Home we decided that living in Cheshire was no longer for us, so we sold up and moved, to be closer to family in the Southern Lake District.
However the journey was far far from straightforward, we really had no idea what we were looking for, was it to be another renovation project or a self Build? Having viewed around fifty ‘oportunities’ ranging from dilapidated houses, to an old pub, t
Our neighbours talk of them in hushed tones. Our friends look puzzled, and then after a few moments get that thousand yard stare. It’s easy to bore people when you mention the humble newt. But people on buildhub.org.uk searching for what to do about them in planning terms won’t be bored. So here is a summary of our experience in the hope that I can save you some time, money and worry.
Quick Read: The great crested newt (GCN) is a protected species. It is unlawful to handle them (unl
