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Blogs

Recoveringbuilder

Are they doing it on purpose!!!

So 16 days ago the builder said he had a weeks worth of work to do, 16 days later he still has, the electricity connection is happening this week and we’ve told them once there is power we’re in but it doesn’t seem to make any difference to them, the plumber said today when I told him our plans, do you really think this will happen, short answer- yes you lot are not forcing me into staying in this caravan any longer my furniture is coming home next Thursday and once it’s here there’s no builders
Blackmore House

Electricity burial

No, I haven't managed to sneakily bury the wayleave officer somewhere on site!  This post is for the other electricity cable on my site, namely the one that directly supplied the previous building and will supply the new one.  This comes onto the site via an overhead cable and a post and stay that are very close to the new building.  Entirely safe but very ugly and certainly won't fit in with the lovely garden that we're planning. So, from the outset, we've planned to bury this supply as much as
Yaffles

Ooops (anyone need a window?)

So going on holiday in the middle of your build is not ideal.  Best laid plans and all that.  Holiday booked a year previously.  With extended family so couldn't avoid it.  House build delayed by lots of things.  Resulting in our holiday being slap bang in the middle of the timber frame construction.   Reluctantly we left for northern France, asking the build team at MBC to send photos.  They didn't.  [But a friend did, so we knew it was all going up] The problem is that we didn't
Yaffles

Blink and you miss it (MBC timber frame goes up)

Using a timber frame company (such as MBC) made the frame erection stage of self building quite satisfying.  It only took two weeks to build something that truly looked like a real house.   We did spend more than 7 months in dialogue with MBC over all the little details.  And still we made some quite clanging errors.  More of that in my next post.   It was glorious weather back in July.  [How I wish we weren't in rainy autumn now - we are still not watertight......]  
Yaffles

That's alot of polystyrene

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.                
Yaffles

Foundation - how deep shall we dig?

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
Yaffles

Demolition part 2

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
Yaffles

Demolition

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
Yaffles

Our new home

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
Blackmore House

Wonky wall update

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
Blackmore House

Not so square after all

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
Our Journey North of the Border

The Build - Nearly done!!

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
Recoveringbuilder

So near but so far away

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
Mr and Mrs Triassics New Home

Foundations

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
The Fun Irish (House)

Windows and Tenders

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
Sips and stones may break my bones...

Screeds and screams 2 - how the pros do it.

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
Sips and stones may break my bones...

Screeds and screams 1

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
Blackmore House

Wayleaves - a resolution

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
Blackmore House

Smashing!

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
Blackmore House

Delayed gratification

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
Mr and Mrs Triassics New Home

A Winter of Peckering

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

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