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Just don't put them in like this.

You have a large plot don't you? Any chance of planting a leylandii hedge along that boundary so you never have to see him again? Obliviously if it blocks out light to his house thats an added bonus.....

Well guys ( and galls) I don't do blogs but I thought I would share a photo that I received from my builder this morning. It's the first floor I joists going in. I am unable to be on site much at the moment unfortunately but as soon as I can get on site woohoo. p.s. To say my builders have been brilliant.

We are in very final stages of house planning but one of our/my earliest decisions was the windows. I wanted internorm and picked Studio kf410 aluclad. Initially wanted to move away from PVC but realised that the wooden interior finish looked like it was wood effect PVC and the cost difference couldn't be justified.

I have just been pointed at the fairly new " Graf, water treatment plants " " one2clean" and as this is something I will need a decision on this coming spring I was wondering if anyone else has considered one, had one or just has any views on its merits or not. https://www.drainagesuperstore.co.uk/product/domestic-sewage-treatment-plant-5-person-3750l-graf-one2clean.html

Hi All I have just joined this forum. I am planning a build in the Western Isles in Scotland and looking forward to sharing some ideas and getting feedback from folk on the build process in general. Many thanks Martin

For a change I was kidding! Sacrilege to cut that walnut! Got the offcuts from when I tapered the bath sides: Not sure if the mills are still going tbh. None of its mine but this is the lathe I have access too. Take your life in your hands sort of thing:

if you made them out of stainless they would last forever.....

You can't extract air with a cooker hood in a house with MVHR. You still need a recirculating hood though because this will remove the vast bulk of oil and particulates in its filters. The de-greased air will then be removed by the normal MVHR extract duct(s) in the kitchen.

Quite a few actually: It can take months to get a plot registered with the LA and get a street number formally allocated and ripple around the service databases. if you don't start this process until you've agreed a sale and are on the way to exchanging contracts, then you might be living in a plot that some or none of the services know about. If you haven't split the plot then as far as the DNO etc are concerned you are trying to add second connections to an existing plot. With the plot split, you are adding connections to a new build on its own plot. Financial. You will almost certainly want to have a mortgage on one or the other: a remortgage on the old build or a self-build mortgage on the new. The mortgage company will normally want to record their interest in the relevant dwelling in its LRO title. Having both dwellings on the one title complicates this and could give the mortgage company claims on the second dwelling in the case of a default on the first. Splitting titles keeps this all clean, Insurance. Similar argument. The new build needs a standard self-build insurance before final certification, the old house standard house insurance: keep them separate. If your plot is unregistered, then the process of getting it registered can reveal boundary disputes that can take a long time to resolve. Get this all out of the way before you even want to put the property on the market, otherwise you've lost your negotiating position with your neighbours. Simplifying the sale. Many buyers will want to use a fixed price sell and buy package from a solicitor. Messy conveyances which include a split off of land will surely fall outside the scope of such standard fixed price packages, so you might find yourself losing the buyer that you wanted over what is a pretty trivial reason. They are the ones off the top of my head

Interesting point! I to have buried traps in our design and the traps are rubber olive and nut joints. I wasn't worried about the joints as we have exactly the same set up here in our ground floor wet room and it went in 12 years back and so far no problems.

No way of telling Joe. Graf are well-known in the chemical sector. From memory it's a family company: we dealt with them a bit ( a very little bit) when I worked in Berlin.

I've been doing some digging around about air blowers and oxygenation levels needed to maintain an aerobic environment in these plants. It seems that pretty much any blower-based system can be run with the blower cycled on and off, to reduce the power consumption and increase the pump diaphragm life. The key is to make sure that the sludge settling time is always a lot longer than the pump off time, as that makes sure the aeration holes don't get blocked by settling sludge (the problem Peter S reported some time ago). I've prototyped, but have yet to install, a combined treatment plant alarm and pump timer, that uses a solid state relay to turn the pump off for 15 minutes every 30 minutes (so 30 minutes on, 15 minutes off, with it defaulting to being on for 30 minutes immediately after a power cut). Combined with the lower power JDK-60 pump, that will reduce the energy used by the treatment plant by around 50% or more over the older pump, and should bring the running cost down to around under £35/year (233 kWh/year energy consumption). 15 minutes is too short a time for the sludge to settle, and 30 minutes if more than enough to ensure about 50% more aeration than needed at full capacity. I've a strong feeling that manufacturers have just picked a pump on the basis of price, availability and the pressure needed for the depth of their tank, rather than the actual aeration capacity needed. One consequence is that I think a fair few of these plants are over-aerated, as that's always going to be the safe option, and few customers are going to be that worried about the thing costing another £30 or £40 a year to run.

That is a really nice looking blend of high tech house with traditional exterior.

Think I missed this thread first time round, congratulations to you for seeing it through with the planners. They can be a contrary bunch. One of my childhood memories from my parents' self build was of driving around the local area to take photos of houses containing all the features the planners had said we couldn't have, because they were out of keeping with the vernacular.

Can you not run the ducts in the roof void before the insulation by MBC gets pumped in? Thats what we have done.

Does your supplier offer floor vents? We used these in the bedrooms, because we had similar access issues and didn't want to give up space just for MVHR duct risers. Not ideal from an air mixing point of view, I know, but we've been in a year and they seem to work fine. You install a unit like this (which can be cut down as required) then drop a vent on the top. We were able to put one in the preferred corner location in each bedroom. Probably saved about 10m of ducting, too.

Because the MVHR ducting is the best ventilated part of the whole house!

Don't. Self-building requires a certain amount of sod-it-I-will-not-be-beaten. You have got under their skin and they can't deal with it. That's their problem, not yours. Let them own it. All of us have problems wherever we are. Push off and yours will follow - they'll just be a different set of issues. This place is full of gutsy people: have a look at these for inspiration @joe90 read his stuff and you get a feel for dogged persistence @JSHarris, read his blog here and on mayfly.eu, especially the bit about his fresh water @jamiehamy, sheer guts and determination @ProDave, his trip hasn't been easy Waste a few hours here and you'll have some lead put back in your pencil Coupled with the odd bit of 'treating yourself' (to a Mars Bar, or a walk, or meal out with the other half). Oh, and watch a Peter Kay repeat

You put so much effort and energy into your build that a bit of me wonders whether you're also plain knackered, and at long last you have given yourself permission to rest.

I should've added to the above that our proposed house is very contemporary and has grown too big so the cost difference to have the wooden interior would be significant. I hope to get a chance to post up the floor plan and elevations.

We went for the old trick of having a baby half way through the build. Now I grab every chance going for a bit of shut eye.

@Clareandharry To mention another member ( and they get an instant notification ) type @ and then the first letter of the members name. A drop down box will appear and then simply select your victim .

Hello again, Clare. I spent an hour or so this morning having a read of your blog and Planning Docs, and you seem to have a Planning Consultant and architect who did their job just about right, especially in not giving the Council technical detail about the house that Planners do not need. I think some of us may have some useful comments if you want to start a thread ... or do you want to chat here? For example I think you may have overheating issues with solar gain in some seasons, depending on the spec of your house .. e.g. The experience of some here is that lots of south facing glazing with no shading may cause trouble if you are significantly better insulated than building regs basic spec. I have a few detailed comments which I will hold off until after a couple of busy days. Ferdinand

Welcome. PCs; their responses and public musings in relation to planning issues are commonly criticised. Almost by definition parochial, and very often, just plain wrong. Why do I say that? Have a look at this Oh, and before I forget this.... Having read your blog, it looks like we could have plagiarised one another's content. We'd been waiting since 1985 for PP. Yer pushin' on an open door here maam. You are most welcome. Ian

I'd keep that quiet if I were you March 2018 deadline then ? May as well set the bar .

Cheek! I started it on eBuild in March 2015!

Hi Clare - I love the house! Fab design and great use of internal space. So have you got full planning yet? or is that still to come?

3 pages vs 19 @TerryE ? You've some way to go mate

Hi and welcome aboard. Have a rummage around and don't worry about resurrecting dormant threads as it's always good to blow the dust off 'em Enjoy

Welcome and well done! Crikey how many years has Clyst House been empty now? Incredible really considering its status in the good old days of insurance. Having been to most of the Aviva sites in recent years it was certainly in one of the best locations!

No, it won't cause any issues at with the MVHR, as it's not changing the air flow at all. They suck from surface level to remove cooking smells, vapour etc, filter the air then blow it back out into the kitchen, with the smells and vapours etc mostly removed. Most use a mixture of washable filters to trap oil and fat vapour, plus an activated carbon filter to remove most of the smells. The manufacturers would like you to always fit new filters, but on the conventional recirculating hood we have in our old house I found that the two filtration units were easy to clean/rejuvenate. The mesh oil and fat filter cleaned up well by just sticking it in the dishwasher and the activated carbon filter was just carbon granules between two bits of stainless mesh. I found that it was dead easy to take one of the mesh sides off and bought a big bag of activated charcoal granules very cheaply (the stuff is used in pond filters). empting the carbon out and filling the filter with fresh stuff was clean and easy to do, and a fraction of the price of replacing the filters. I still have a bag of activated carbon I bought several years ago, left over.

Your project looks really interesting from the blog, and congratulations on your tenacity in chasing Planning Permission. I can see some of us being interested in learning from your experience in finessing the community development boundary. When I applied for my PP, some of the Planning Committee didn't actually know where the boundary was. We similarly relied on the presumption to develop when our plot - a little different as it was for a housing estate - was taken out of the Local Plan at the last minute, and we won on appeal. There are some people building in your general area on Buildhub, so please do ask any questions or share any insights. Ferdinand

Wish I had a mighty sw.....

Me, overthink things? Might come from having an older, more successful brother and my always seeking approval.... as my parents say "We've Adam the eldest, a barrister don't you know! Then the other one who likes playing with bits of wood!"

Hey all, I'm nearing (!!!) the point where I need to consider PV panels, ASHP, UFH, MHR etc. As all these things kind of interact and effect one another should I use a single company to design such a system taking all this into account?? I *presume* this would be a better approach rather than mix 'n' match approach..... Advice/recommendations welcome!

Lovely stuff. Hope you bought bulk Windex(TM) (other glass-cleaning products are available) given you have youngsters in the house!

A bit more 'readers stairs' promise this will be the last - unless there are some requests for specific angles Sparky is coming to do LED strip in handrail later - he buried a cable in the wall and will use their pre drilled fitting to get cable to the rail.