Based on our brief, our architect had taken the original designs that came with our plot, utilised the same house footprint, and had come up with a new set of designs and internal floor layouts.
We had two choices for the external design - a flat roof or two mono-pitched roofs. After a little discussion between my wife and I, and with to the architect, we agreed on the two mono-pitched roofs design.
The house to the west of us had an almost flat roof (they initially submi
The first decision to be made with the new architect was how to change the external house design to remove the lack of head height in the roofspace, but stay within the existing footprint.
In the napkin sketches, the architect had suggested two mono-pitched roofs to replace the existing dual-pitched roofs and we immediately liked that design. However, he didn’t immediately just go with that design and at the start of July 2016, he sent us through a couple of options, one with a flat
Its nearing the end of May 2016, and we’d owned our plot for 10 months. In that time we had:
Pretty much decided on a builder, although we’d not signed anything contractually
Cleared around 1000 tonnes of soil off the site
Found out that the approved plans that came with the house were unworkable for anyone whose ancestors originated from somewhere other than The Shire, Middle Earth
Come to the conclusion that while architectural technicians are great at CAD,
Well the kitchen wall has gone and we love the extra space - shame its only for a while till the bathroom wall gets put back. Our neighbour needed somewhere to store her old sofa and asked if we could keep it for a while so the room is now half full with that. It gives us somewhere comfy to sit in front of the wood burner but it is a pain wehen we have to move it back and forward. Luckily we are concentrating on the upstirs so its not getting moved often.
Most of the last couple
I just realised that I missed a couple of things out from my previous post.
In December 2015, a boring rig was on site to do its thing for a mineral report. This was required (in addition to the coal authority report) to identify whether there were any coal seams in the area, and also to get a general view of the underground minerals which would feed into decisions on the preferred foundation design for the structural engineer. This was arranged through the builder.
The d
It’s September 2015. We had our plot, we had approved planning permission, we had a builder who was about to start a build in the plot next door to ours and who had provided a build estimate that fitted with our budget. What could possibly go wrong?
18 months later, and I’m still not sure I can adequately answer that.
On the positive front, the 120 year old Farmhouse we’d put on the market a few months earlier had sold for a price we were very happy with. We were less enamour
It’s May 2015 and around 4 months since we first saw the plot and 3 months since we decided not to buy it. There were various reasons for this:
The was a train line running along the rear of the plot, serving the local power station
There was a BP pipeline running through the border of our plot, imposing a 3.5 meter no build zone on our plot
We’d never done anything like this before. We were not self-builders. Buying a plot was for people on Grand Designs or Building
In my previous post, I explained how we came across our plot when out walking close to where my mother-in-law had moved over from Dublin. It came with full planning permission for a modern house built into the hill, as shown on the boarding on site. Interestingly, the boarding was from a local builder (which I’ve blurred out here)
This is the image shown on the boarding:
Here’s another sample image of the house:
“Our” hou
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
