Finally got watertight after much fighting with Velfac doors, wrestled with insulation, polythene, underfloor heating, shuttering for liquid screed, access for 3x concrete trucks. Anyway the pumped screed was finally completed today and this has always been a major milestone in my mind. It also happened to coincide with the day the scaffold came down which has put today up there with the best days of the build so far for me.
Sitting back with a brew now enjoying the moment after hav
Prior to purchasing the plot we’re planning to build on, we lived in a 120 year-old single-storey Farmhouse sitting in 1/3 acre plot with lovely views looking down onto a loch a few hundred meters down the valley. We loved living there, but with our daughter heading off to university in Autumn 2014, we realised that we did not need a 5 bedroom house, and the annual maintenance was expensive both in terms of time (tending to the gardens) and money (regular replacement of the slate tiles due to th
A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse - Shakespeare’s Richard III, Act V, Scene IV
Hello, and thanks for stopping by.
Firstly, apologies for the title of this blog.
I can’t really say that I’m a big fan of Shakespeare, but I was struggling to think of a title for the blog, and, like Shakespeare himself, I do like a play on words.
By way of explanation, for those not from Scotland, the region of Fife (the location of our plot) is known as the K
It's been a couple of months since my last update, during which time we have (almost) finished work and moved in. In this entry I'm going to talk about the joinery work.
As readers may recall, our UFH was switched on 2 weeks before Christmas, which meant there was very little activity on site until the builders came back after their Christmas fortnight.
The joiners were first back, and got to work straight away laying around 105m2 of engineered oak flooring in the main
So we ended up with 2 builders in the running. One who has built SIPS before but who was quite negative, (saying his guys wouldn't like the travel, his masons wouldn't like the reclaimed stone and his roofer wouldn't like the slate... he was also not happy with how he'd get pallets of the stone to 1 side of the house where it's near the boundary) and the other who had a "nothing is a bother" attitude, and an excellent reputation locally. As it happened, the second one also had the most competiti
Just in case anyone is interested in making their own shed, I thought I'd put the pics all in one place.
I was given 34 sheets of 18mm OSB so it's super sturdy and otherwise I spent £500 on timber and another £100 for ironmongery and roof felt.
And as ever my time was free...
Used mostly old 5" posts dug in and secured with postcrete.
There were a few comments that these will rot over time but I'm hoping they will stay fairly dry as they are covered by the shed.
So the roof is now totally finished- was a beast of a job and having finished the ridge I felt as though I had been riding a particularly fat horse all week. Physically tough doing it without help and using just a ladder, but I'm impressed with the corrugated steel and would happily use it in future. I would seriously consider it for wall cladding as well, as it was much quicker and not any more expensive compared to my larch.
I had made a start on the larch wall cladding a few month
I have been doing the design validation of my plumbing solution partly so I am comfortable that it is feasible and partly to write this up so that others have a model of how to approach this task. The last time that I did anything like this was with my current house where everything apart from taps for drinking water was fed off a (non-potable) header tank in the roof space and the central heating system was a classic 2-pipe (with branches) radiator system fed from a gas boiler.
Eve
If you have a Combi boiler, or SunAmp, or pretty much any device with a built in Plate Heat Exchanger (PHE) and live in any region which has hard water (about 80% the UK population), then you will need a water softener if you want any decent life out of your plumbing installation. As far as I can see you are down to one of two options for a direct plumbing solution: the UK Harvey twin tank system and the US Kinetico range. All of the rest are niche suppliers, IMO. The Harvey system seems to b
So I'm still here, plugging away. Apparently I have a roof that is constantly underestimated in terms of the amount of work required. Both chippies and roofers took weeks longer than expected. Still, all part of the fun!
Since my last update the cut roof elements were completed, dormers etc. Tiling was completed this Monday. I've insulated the loft. Marley Cedral cladding has begun in the past couple days.
Next steps are for fibreglass flat roof to hopefully be complete
We have a passive-class house where the net heating requirement to keep the house warm in the coldest winter months is approximately 1kW. The only heating system for doing this an underfloor heating (UFH) system base on 3 ~100m UFH loops buried in our passive slab. That's it; no upper floor systems; no towel rails; nothing. The reason for this is that our timber framed house is super insulated and air tight so there is very little temperature variation throughout the house, but that's all bee
I just wanted to include a brief post explaining from a self-builder perspective why we have decided not to use an Unvented Cylinder (UVC), Thermal Store (TS) or combi-boiler for our domestic hot water (DHW) in our new build. Instead we are using 2 × SunAmp PV heat batteries heated by E7 tariff. So why?
We decided that we don't need gas to be installed avoiding the Gas connection charges, per day supply charge and the maintenance costs on gas appliances. Big saving here.
As I've previously discussed we have an MBC Passive Slab and Timber-frame, but unlike most builds, our house also has a very traditional stone cottage-style exterior because the new build sits between our current farmhouse, which dates back over 400 years and a cottage which dates back approaching 200 years, so our planners required that we use the same local quarried stone. So a topic that often comes up is "how do we do the window / door treatment on a timber-framed house with an exterior sto
Hmm, sent the full plans off for the SIPs price a while ago, and got the proposals and price back showing where steel beams would be required and were factored into the price etc. Sent our deposit off and now getting emails (in language we struggle to understand what they are actually trying to say) saying they'll have to add this that and the other - starting to get a bad feeling that the price is getting bumped. The designer is saying they did not allow for X, Y & Z in the price and so
Not a lot happened over Christmas and New year while we waited for the builder, Patrick, to arrive to remove the pillar between the kitchen extention and the middle room. We initially decided to not remove the pillar but after great thought, it seemed to be the best thing - it would create more light into the dark middle room and hopefully it would make the kitchen easier to fit out. And at a cost of around £2k it was a large chunk of the budget.
This is the view across the room, into th
I had the offer of some help from a neighbour so decided to crack on with the roof sheets. These are corrugated sheets 4x1m and in the thicker 0.7mm spec, so fairly heavy and awkward things to handle. I did get the first sheet up and fixed by myself but am not daft enough to turn down an offer of help when it appears!
When I bought the roofing, I had recently read @ProDave's less than glowing review of Jewsons' plastic headed roofing screws, so made a point of asking what would be su
Well, we finally started real work. Fortunately the snow melted yesterday, but the sun shone on us today and it was perfect weather for setting out and stripping the site. We finally found a good builder with a lovely attitude and a fair price. I know these folks by reputation so was pleased to find their quote was competitive. Just the owner was on site today along with a digger driver from a firm he uses, and what an enjoyable day it has been. The two of them taking the mickey out of each ot
I was about to write 'time flies by with too little progress to show for it' and then realised that was exactly what I said last time! Anyway, since the last update, I have battened out the walls and fitted the first layer of larch cladding on the gables. There was a fair bit of head scratching and working out how the detailing around the windows etc was going to work out before I could get on with the battens. The larch also had to be treated with preservative oil- this will be an ongoing task
It's been a few weeks since the last update, but we've had plenty of activity on site.
The decorator has taped, filled and sanded the walls. He was good enough to do the house in two sections, which let me paint one half of the house while he was taping and filling the other. 10 days in total of painting say me roll three coats onto the walls and ceilings. First coat was a thinned down Armstead contract matt. Second coat Armstead contract matt, finished by a third and final coa
(This post is a précis of a post and thread discussions that took place on the eBuild forum October last year and subsequent discussions with my builder.)
Many of the self-builders active on the forum will have used or be familiar with the Passive Foundation system marketed by MBC Timberframe. The essence of this is that the foundation is a raft slab that incorporates a ring-beam that sits inside an EPS former. This former both acts as shuttering for the concrete pour and as insula
I got the notion last week to start up a Blog on buildhub after enjoying the advice and knowledge everyone had contributed over the past year (or part thereof) since it launched. I've been on a journey to finding my own home for about two years after renting for the last 20. I thought I'd summarize where I'm at and how I got here to help others hovering around the same place and to spur them onwards to achieving their great dream too!
So, where am I exactly? I've completed Stage 1 -
