Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda…
Entry posted by G and J in The house itself.
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And yes, that title is a nod to the wisdom of the Beverley Knight song. But it also applies to self building, methinks.
[Health Warning: The following diatribe focuses on the 2% that’s not gone perfectly, and risks massively underplaying the 99% which has gone right. But maybe that focus is what makes selfbuild what it is, and why for normal people, it just doesn’t add up.]
We are now in, living at no. 11. Well, not this exact moment in fact. Right now we are cooking in Flora the Explorer (campervan around which our garage was designed), parked on a cliff top on the Isle of Wight overlooking the English Channel.
Being boiled alive (slight exaggeration) in a Fiat tin can is at least variety from being boiled alive (bigger exaggeration) in a new build. We moved in to a substantially but not completely finished house just in time to enjoy some heatwaves. How very fashionable.
The decision to categorise the main bedroom fancoil as ‘to be done later’ seemed such a good idea when the choice was delaying moving out of the s@#*, I mean rental, and in my few rational moments I know that it was a good idea. If we had stayed the rental would have been much, much worse than no. 11 is. But if I’d had free choice I’d not have started our living in our new pad in a heatwave. Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda (henceforth SWC) put the fancoil in.
It’s made a bit worse by our choice of sleeping in the west facing front (sort of) bedroom, which sits next to our biggest window, the one above the front door overlooking our stairs and hall. We passed part O with flying colours, so we now view the afternoon solar gain with incredulity at what a house would be like that didn’t pass part O.
But every day is a school day, and the first thing we learn was that we could comfortably sleep in no. 11, even on a sofa bed, at temperatures which would have prevented rest at our last house. It’s hard not to attribute that to the life support (MVHR). The worst days at our last house were when the nights were completely still, and I’m guessing that meant higher humidity and CO2 levels. No more, not with life support.
We are now in the habit of whacking the life support onto Boost n Bypass once the outside temp falls nicely below the inside temp. Even when we have the upstairs windows open it seems to help.
To start with opening a window (in my mind) required kneeling to confess our sins and three Hail Marys, but I soon got over it. And whilst we still don’t have our fancoil(s) thats how we are managing the upstairs overheating. Downstairs is a different matter.
Downstairs we have porcelain tiles throughout, gently cooled by Maxi the moody teenager heat pump. It has helped enormously and once we have a way of transferring some of the cool to upstairs life will be peachy, though it’ll likely be 6°C outside by then, given the current todo list.
We’ve wrestled with Maxi to get it to a sensible working arrangement, and that work is ongoing. At the mo if we set the WC curve (no, thats not the shape of the toilet pan) so that the flow temp is set to 15°C Maxi bothers for about 20 to 30 minutes and then sulks for an hour or two. Following a call with the Energy Lab, the distributor of Maxi, it’s better than it had been as some of the settings weren’t sensible, but it must and will do better.
Our tiles sit at 19°C to 20°C, which matches the return temp to Maxi after a few minutes of sulking. That makes for a noticeable improvement in downstairs temperature but it’s as low as we can get it without cranking up Maxi to full condensy by dropping the target flow temp loads. A work in progress which is currently delayed by The Energy Lab being about as responsive as I am when a glowing J asks when I hope to get the fancoil(s) in. SWC properly tested Maxi when first installed. Sigh.
It has given us the ability to start the balancing process, which I think is a good thing. The downstairs bedroom and bathroom floors were colder than the rest of downstairs, enough to make it slightly uncomfortable in bare feet, so I’ve tweaked the flow controls on the manifold and that has helped.
The downstairs bathroom is in the process of being renamed the paddling pool. We have gone for a sort of wet room shower and loo, etc. and it looks the business even if I do say so myself - it’s just that we didn’t realise how wet a wet room would be. That bloody great big rain head shower jobby feels great when showering but oh boy, the water distribution! I think we can get away without a sign indicating which is the deep end, but for some guests we might need to sand bag the door.
Some friends of ours came to dins recently, they have a nice big downstairs shower wet room with a bloody great big rain head shower. No doubt that was part of the subliminal thinking route to choosing them ourselves. During the inevitable tour (we are in huge danger of continuing to be self build bores for years to come) we shared our concerns regarding the paddling pool. “Oh yes” they happily said “we never use ours, far too messy”. Humph. SWC asked them methinks.
And you can guess how good a nicely cooled tiled floor is at drying out. But there’s a ‘learn’ even there. We’ve discovered that the floor dries out much better if the door is left closed. The mechanism seems to be that the undercut forces the whole room to be ventilated, whereas if the door is open, which is how I automatically left it when it needed to dry, the moving air goes through at a higher level and the floor stays wet. Who knew? (Everyone with life support, probably!)
Anyways, all that misses out all the fun of getting from our last post to here. Maybe that would be a good thing, but if you don’t have a strong constitution, look away now….
Last time I happily reported that we had dug our trench to connect our poo pipes to the sewer, and we’d found the capped off sewer, and the levels all worked. Happy days. Till the next step.
In theory all we had to do was uncap the sewer, put the last few meters of pipe and a manhole in, and then bury the whole shebang. In theory. In practice when one of the groundworkers popped the plug out of the sewer we had a bit of a foul fountain. Quite a bit in fact.
He was so shocked he literally just stood in the hole with his mouth open (yes, literally), whilst I and his workmate screamed at him to get out. He did, but he was rather messy. I threw a block into the trench and pushed some soil in to limit the aromatic expansion. It subsided with about 8’ of swarfega consistency sewerage filling the trench. Lesson: it’s not happy days till the hole’s filled in.
I knew our sewerage run was old and wasn’t on the Anglian Water sewerage map. I didn’t think that mattered. Wrong. Not on the map means not maintained. We are the second from the end of a run of perhaps 5 houses on an ancient spur running to the main road main sewer. There had been reports of the drains backing up in the past (danger sign no 2 I missed), and I knew from my water level that the whole run was very shallow and had little fall. Danger sign no. 3. In the year the sewer was capped off the debris that had sat in the pipe for decades had collected lots of gooey solids and was apparently only letting liquids through. If a few more months had gone by next door would have noticed it backing up, but we hit the jackpot timing wise and many linear meters of pipe’s worth of thick sludge finally saw daylight.
It took a week to get the whole run blasted out and the stuff that came out was horrendous. We had excellent service from Anglian Water, they even dug out and took away the by then remaining solids from our trench, before spraying many litres of disinfectant. Then work could resume. It delayed some things by a week and made site access a nightmare as walking a plank over septic ancient sewerage is not for the faint hearted (or the sensible).
I’ll remember that long after I’ve forgotten the excitement of seeing the bathrooms tiled, or the downstairs porcelain floor tiling grow daily, or the test lighting of the woodburner, or us exporting lecky for the first time.
Yet in many ways things like those or the posh Lino going down upstairs or the Pax wardrobes sprinting into shape or the furniture going in and looking just right or many, many happy things are far more important than the wrinkles.
Over a relatively short space of time the shell of a house got coloured in to start to resemble our home. Making one’s self stand back and notice current status, let alone daily progress, is a skill that will always ellude me. When there are others on site (old fogey repeating himself yet again warning!) my time disappears in a whirl of checking and answering questions and tea making and organising and tidying up and ordering for other days and and and…. and I get nothing done myself. Except that is getting something done but it doesn’t feel like it.
Bits of kitchen and utility room arrived and got fitted, painting got done, internal doors finally arrived many weeks after they were due and got fitted, and in odd moments late each day and at weekends I got to do stuff myself, including some plumbing.
Doesn’t feel like plumbing in many ways as there’s no flux or burnt fingers involved. It’s more like Lego. Cut the pipe to length with glorified scissors, select the correct bit, click, realise the mistake, swear whilst taking off the incorrect bit, click on the actually correct bit, turn on the water and wait for the drip that doesn’t appear. So simple it’s almost surreal. I’m used to electrics just working, perhaps because it’s my background, but with plumbing it’s almost like I need to find and fix a leak to feel comfortable.
In my mind the time leading up to us moving in is a big mix of memories with few distinct bits, but between J and I we kept things just about under control enough to get ready to move in, meaning J kept an overview in the form of lists of the bits we needed done. Vital.
One big milestone was commissioning the life support and the dreaded air test. I built a nice strong stand for the Zehnder unit as otherwise it would have been hung on the block outer skin of the downstairs bedroom wall and we were convinced the hum would keep guests awake. Good news if like me, one doesn’t like guests, but apparently not a good thing.
So when I turned the system on I realised it was faulty as it wasn’t running. Only the air was moving but it was just so ridiculously quiet, so actually it was working. (SWC gone and stood next to a working Zehnder to realise I could have saved myself time and bolted it straight to the wall).
It defaults to a lot higher flow speed than we needed, and even then it was nice and quiet. So after commissioning it’s wonderfully invisible, apart from the odd shaped vent thingies in the ceilings. Works brilliantly at clearing the steam from the one little shower room we had working to move in with too. Very happy.
The air test was not quite such a happy thing, however. Over and over again I was told I’d done everything needed and we were bound to be fine. Rolly, our chippy, had never seen such an airtight build and he knew we’d be super airtight. If only.
1.65.
Bugger.
During the first test, after a false start where I’d left a 40mm waste pipe uncapped giving us a 5, it was identified that I had a sodding great big leak at or near the base of my internal soil stack.
I just knew I’d have a problem with our flat roof and the junctions thereof so I put lots of time into that. That was all fine.
I absolutely knew that the entry point of the 15 MVHR ducts into the house would be a problem so I put time into that too. All fine there too.
I knew from what I read on here that my Heath Robinson DIY loft hatch would leak. Nope.
I thought I’d taped to death the DPM round the soil stack. We all know what Thought did.
The DPM forms the bottom of our airtight layer, being taped everywhere (or so I thought) to the VCL. I knew all along we should take time out to test the airtightness. I even borrowed a leaf blower to have a half baked go at it using our loft hatch to test airtightness. But I never took a day out to do it. There was always something else that needed to be focussed on at the time, the silly and arguably unnecessary air test can be done later. Only it never was. SWC cubed.
The leak appears to be near the bottom of the soil stack but as it’s all but encased now in studwork and plastered plasterboard so where the actual breach is is impossible to tell. I went nuts with the Passive House Systems airtight and insulating foam but it made no difference at all.
There’s little leaks in the external doors but nothing like the one near the soil stack. I’m guessing we are looking at a hole about the width of an index finger. Perhaps something a single piece of tape could have sorted. Who knows?
But does it actually matter? Well, there’s a good question. I’ve not rerun Jeremy’s spreadsheet and in truth the horse has already bolted. And if that means Maxi is actually slightly undersized for -3°C outside then at least we do have the woodburner and we could always invest in a little fan heater.
But as you can imagine, I am royally annoyed with myself.
The house is shaping up to be a really nice home to live in. The garden is coming along a treat. We love living in that location. That’s the 99% I need to focus on. Maybe writing this interminable blog is part of that reconciliation, and I know it will happen, but I’m still really, really, really annoyed at myself.
In case you aren’t familiar with the song I’ll share one particularly apposite line from it.
"Shoulda woulda coulda" are the last words of a fool.
Sigh.
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