Sips and stones may break my bones...

That's a fine looking house.  I have read some of your old blog posts and it seems that you are living in it now - is that correct?  Are you just living in the upstairs part if you are still doing the floors downstairs?  Sorry to read about all the stress you have been having with loans and so on.  My own future build will have to be very low budget as I cannot borrow and so it all has to come from cash (which I have little of).  I did feel quite held back by this but having read your experiences with Build Store I feel a bit better now.

A nice looking house, that. I particularly like the gable top / roof detail, very neat way to close that junction off. 

Keep going, it'll be well worth the blood sweat and beers.  

Where’s the photo of this Saxon stone then? You can’t just leave that hanging! Will it influence the name of the house? Ethelred the unreadys byre? 

Square feet - in a way, if you can live with the time scales etc, and can build it without a mortgage then go for it. I know someone who did that and although it took several years, of living in a static caravan they got there in the end mortgage free.  Not being in a National Park (unlike us) probably helped, as it meant the outside of the house did not have to conform so rigidly to the norm for that area (basically he built a genuine log house) which obviously translates to  big savings as you can take advantage of different materials and such. Though even for us, although we could only have natural stone and slate, I managed to save easily 50% on the cost of those by using recycled - which of course feels better as it has quite huge environmental advantages, means even your materials have a "history" (our stone apart from the Saxon one, was from an old convent school which was being demolished, and the slates too - the slates are recut one size smaller so have new holes put in,  immediately look aged, and are double the thickness of modern slates... for half the price - a real no-brainer really). The fact is, the stress has been caused entirely by office dwellers, not the tradespeople we've used or "real" issues - just entirely manufactured issues which simply do not need to happen - sometimes it feels as if no one in the UK ever built a house before and the officialdom is doing this all for the first ever time! Well, a spare 100k in the bank would lessen even more stress of course, but hey ho - if we had that, we'd have had custom build, not self build. 

 

Lesgranepotato - the Unready could indeed be very apt! ?   Well it's not particularly glamorous, or a new rosetta stone, but here it is - it is roughly hexagonal but obviously you only see 2 sides now it is built in. The mason deliberately made it stand proud of the other stones so it can be seen - I think he really liked the idea. Excuse the quality, but I smashed my phone lense!   A better camera would probably make it a lot clearer as to why it stood out when it was amongst other stones.        As for the house name, it was to be Curlew House, since you see and hear them here and it is also my favourite bird (the call of the bird just fits into the Northumberland moors perfectly) as well as the symbol of our National park, but then I found someone had given a twee holiday cottage the same name. So we went for a historical name (Todcroft - meaning Fox house) as the next house down was called that in about the 17th century  before becoming the village school, so the name has a historical connection.  Interestingly, we also found a Henry VIII coin on the site!  

Edited September 4, 2018 by curlewhouse

So for out the front  I've managed to scrounge another 2 stone gateposts free of charge! (making 4) The beauty of these is that now I've concreted them in, they will be entirely maintenance free for the rest of my life. I plan to add a third one beside the gate to make a small "wicket" or pedestrian type gate alongside.  Fortunately a farmer friend had a massive machine on loan which was capable of picking these last 2 up in one go and carrying them down for me (another reason I love living in a rural community is how much we all help each other - in the winter whilst living in the caravan we were very genuinely offered accommodation if we wanted it from no less than 5 different people. It is amazing how kind people can be, and even though we did not take them up, I'll certainly not forget who they were should I be in a position to help them in the future). One has an old "bench mark" which was how the old ordnance survey system was done with spot heights. The post had long fallen out of place and was more than half buried in the soil when we found it. It makes you wonder how many of these are slowly disappearing into the soil. I know of several, but having the machinery on hand to move them is the problem since they are too heavy even for most farm front loaders on tractors to manage.  I've also seen them snap when lifted!  I really like the character and story of using recycled materials like this. We can only begin to guess at the age of these posts for example, but what is nice is I know exactly where each has come from.  It also makes the development feel "organic" to the place I think.      

Those gate pillars are fantastic - very jealous, though they would look a lot out of place on  y house

So, in the small sitting room, or "snug" as we are now calling it, which is 7.5m x 3.5m I have 100mm of Celotex type PIR stuff (from Seconds & co) as a first layer, then to keep costs down went for EPS70 for the upper layer in the end.  Oddly I found some of the pallets from Seconds & co of Celotex/Kingspan type, worked out more expensive than new, so I did a lot of shopping around. For the difference in u Value, because the whole is 200mm, using the EPS over PIR for the top 100mm proved irrelevant really, but saved me a lot of money at a point in the project where this is beginning to matter greatly. We are still talking massively over and above code and I think the reality is in real life use, the difference between using EPS or another layer of PIR will have no measurable effect.  Your definitely well into diminishing returns I think.    So next was to get the UFH pipes down. In this photo I'm half way through, with the first 100 metres of pipe (96 metres actually) down and the second loop going down.  I did get a quote for the screeding of the entire ground floor (though I did the downstairs bathroom and utility room (currently functioning as a temporary kitchen) myself with dry mix), I am considering doing this room myself. We have 2 mixers available and myself and at least 2 other men to mix and barrow, so I'm considering taking a few days off work and doing it ourselves. The large room I'll definitely leave to the pros as it is A. large and B. "L" shaped.  The advantage would be that we'd then have somewhere to put all the stuff currently in the large room whilst its floor is being done, whereas at the moment it would all have to go outside for about 48 hours!  It's quite a physical undertaking though as I learned from the bathroom and utility, so I'm going to give it a bit more thought! ?