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The main kitchen / living room downstairs is progressing well. Now plastered and painted. More on the blog at http://www.willowburn.net/ Look for the entry Main living room / kitchen Next step under floor heating and Oak flooring. Then a kitchen and we move in........

I'm using Hep2O manifolds in my plant room as done by other here. I put in three manifolds, cold water, hot water and rain water. The rain water manifold is fed by a small gravity header tank in the attic and the manifold feeds the WC's and outside taps. Now the header tank has two ball cocks. One for a rainwater tank in the garden and the other, a mains for when the outside rain tank is empty. The tank you put in the garden as you said is about 1,5000 to purchase. A big expense. I don't have the money currently for this so my rainwater header tank is currently fed from mains water as if the outside rainwater tank (which I don't have) is empty. The whole thing is working great and all I spent was €60 on a small header tank and two additional runs of Hep2O from the manifolds in the utility to the attic. If I ever decide to put the big expensive tank in the garden I can and the whole house is currently plumbed for it.

Like most I have had health problems for many years ( stress related according to some) and friends told me that taking on my build would not be good for me. I have found the opposite, I do not get stressed ( but have no mortgage or borrowing to deal with) I have learnt to have a very laid back approach to life ( something I tought myself). I have thoroughly enjoyed the achievement of my build and bloody proud of what I have achieved. My wife gets uptight about somethings but I refuse to. Life is too short, life is not a rehearsal, life is to be enjoyed ( as much as you can if your not well) I do ache from the physical work but that is not a bad thing. Do you know what?, I have been working indoors during this glorious weather and I am going down to the beach in a minute in my historic open top sports car for a coffee, the work can wait for a couple of hours ?

Hmm, I had no health issues before the build. Clearly building was bad for my health lol.

It's been a quiet few weeks on the house site waiting for the contractors to come back, but we have done the following: Building control and quantity surveyor inspected the works carried out to date The plumber supplied our the internal drainage. Anchor straps fitted. Alum clad, triple glazed windows order finalised and placed Attic trusses design reviewed and finalised We are now commencing the final stage of the foundations. In filling the solum is the first job. The solum has now been infilled and whacked with the aggregate. A finer layer is now being added on top. Plenty of diggers and dumpers here. Last day of the foundations. DPC was put down and then the concrete wagon came back on site. We used around 25m3 of concrete and as the photos show through the last few blog posts, we had fantastic weather conditions during this foundation. I was also pleased with the amount of the rubbish that is going to the dump, just four cements bag full of plastic waste.

^^ I expected him to stagger off and fall over at the end, like on YBF.

Only if the concrete is new......... So you’ll be fine ..!

Probably find it’s cheaper to go with solid - some good deals on it and it can even be used as the structural floor to save cost.

25mm by 50mm battens following the joists. Then engineered oak flooring, with the UFH in the gap. The OSB that has been our temporary floor for well over a year remains with the sole job of supporting the UFH pipes. That will be the next job. Kitchen choosing starts soon.

Decent Wilo pumps reduced at BES - ideal for ASHP circuits etc Wilo Yonos

Hi, So a little background as I'm fresh on here... Decided we would knock down our house and build from scratch (As you do!). So we spent some time trawling the planning portal looking at local builds that had been approved and the state of the drawings etc. The theory being that someone who had experience and success with the local planning office might be at least a starting point and the the quality of the drawings (I know a fair bit about CAD) might also be a plus. We prepared a starter pack that included my initial concepts & sketches, bubble diagrams of how the rooms should ideally link, some mood board images of what we kind of liked, a list of wants in an ideal world &ct.. &ct.. Met and engaged an 'Architect' who it turns out is an Architectural Technologist or whatever, but didn't highlight the fact or difference to us. And not that we are snobby about that kind of thing, but just saying! Gave him the pack as a starting point. So other than the evolution of the layout, the First draft was incomplete as a design, no garage block and several fundamentally missing rooms. Second draft still missing a garage block and a topological survey still outstanding, which given the 1m drop over the length of the footprint we felt was required to continue. Bear in mind that by this point I'd completely modelled it all up in SketchUp to review in 3D and push to VR (Well you may as well engage the technology at hand given what you are potentially going to spend!). And I'd sent 3D images of changes and ideas back to him in detail after some discussions with my wife more than once. Third draft garage still not correct or to envisaged scheme sent to him. Now the crux of the matter is that though it's basically done, we are, neither of us whooping with joy at the current plan. It's a house/location we want to stay in for 20 years+. Are we expecting too much to be excited, to feel our designer gets us and how we want to live? Is it time to find another 'Architect', cut our losses and start over. It's undoubtedly better to write off £2-3k than commit hundreds of thousands on what's just not right. I'd value some opinion... Many thanks.

Don't forget windowlean to stop certain people from gazing in.

Screw or helical piles may well be a good option, quick to put in, no concrete needed and are load bearing as soon as they are in. We looked at them for the first plot we tried to buy (coincidentally also in Wales, just, in the Wye valley) and I was pretty impressed with what I found out about them, particularly that there were screw piles still supporting some seaside piers that were over 100 years old and still fine.

Yup - and you have the satisfaction of a jumbo up-cycling project.

Our architect came up with a design that was contemporary but also fitted into the street scene, met our aesthetic and delivered on the usability front also. We had a lot of input into the process but got a lot out of them also. We got it through planning on the second attempt and their knowledge of local planning politics and ability to tactically draw on expertise (traffic engineering, planning consultants etc) was very useful and central to getting planning permission. Would never have managed to get this far solo. Thereafter however we parted company (on friendly terms) as they wanted a sizeable fee for the next stage building regs / planning conditions / tendering etc. As it was, we had a pause in proceedings while we decided on our build strategy and I stumbled into this forum's predecessor - learning about low energy builds etc and then going down the route of timber frame package builds. This gave us the confidence to take on the second stage activities ourselves and proceed to project manage the build. Like Jack, while not perfect, we're pretty happy with the outcome. I have friends in Ireland who were about to start work on approved designs, got cold feet and started again from scratch - never regretted it for a moment, despite the sunk cost. Look at it this way, you've not entirely wasted the money you've spent so far as you've qualified a lot of issues but you may need to spend some more to get what you need. Believe me, by the end of the build, architect fees will seem like a distant memory

@PeterW told me he checked everything was watertight after you’d fiddled with it

Only plumbers have leeks surely? ? For everyone there are daffodils ? ??????? ?

We have put IdealCombi in our latest project. We used a combination of inward and outward opening.

I have just come off the phone from speaking to Trading Standards. On their advice my next move is a recorded delivery letter stating it is not of satisfactory quality (because it does not work) and I am requesting a free repair or replacement within a reasonable time. I then have to give them 14 days to respond and if no response or non favourable, continue with trading standards who now have this complaint logged.

It sounds like you have reached the end of the road with this person. I favour getting an architect to work the design up to planning consent stage and using a different firm for building regs. Make sure when you appoint that that is the understanding and they will hand over the CAD files. Needless to say you may need to do a bit more research / look at the designs, planning success rates etc before you choose next time.

@jack, I agree, the DIY approach certainly isn't for everyone, or for every plot, either, and I definitely think that a good architect can add design flair, especially to the exterior. I found that aspect far and away the hardest to get to grips with, and even harder was trying to work out why the initial designs we came up with just didn't look quite right. I'm sure a good architect would have resolved this aspect easily, and probably produced a better looking exterior than we ended up with. To qualify my earlier comments, I should add that since building this house I have met a very capable architect who I wouldn't have hesitated to use had I know of her when we were first looking around. We approached four local architectural practices, had initial short meetings with each, and gave each the same detailed brief, but were disappointed with them all. Perhaps if I'd had more patience, and cast our net a little wider, I may have found an architect we could have worked with, I just don't know.

Yes I agree the listing isn’t very clear. As it doesn’t clearly state manufacturer in the listing I would assume that the supplier is offering this just as John Lewis offers a 2 year warranty on most things. If you read how to use the JL warranty there is a dedicated JL helpline number to use. And bringing it back to this it should sit with the supplier to address.

My knee goes click but I didn’t buy it. Had I done so I would want my money back as not fit for purpose!

Mandatory deviation from the thread topic is almost a requirement here...

All mended, no big deal ( although it sounded like it) . For those anal enough to know, the disc backplate bolts had come loose and catching on the wheel bearing hub, the bolts are now a little shorter?. frankly this was a little light relief from the endless building work, back to it now. p.s. I did not deviate from the thread as my car was going click, and I did buy it.

Yeah, the only reason I asked about the temp is because I dropped my worklight this morning which dislodged the LED bulb and I noticed it was surprisingly hot. I now get the wife to write and date her decisions as 6months down the line she will either say we never discussed it or that she wanted option A, not B!

If you don’t want engineering bricks all the way up,why not make it wider by half a brick at the bottom & step it in with a plinth course & then facing brick? Looks nice on a pillar,IMO. The size you show would be 2.5 bricks square,the smallest dimension for true Flemish bond,if you wanted.

With the thin joint ststem I believe you can take it right up to wall plate but you should speak to a rep or someone before considering that. For s&c mortar,really the biggest consideration is safety. If you are having catnc style lintels then you can only go up to head of frame & rack back;if they’re separate lintels for inner & outer leaf then you could go up to first floor joist. I certainly wouldn’t put the joists on though without the outer leaf being up first though. Your enemy is going to be the wind-any work above 4-5 courses is going to need bracing to stop it being blown over.

I have been in a panic about delays, but looking back it is me that is actually holding up proceedings have you dug your footings? have you laid the concrete? have you got your floor in? drainage? Services? if you place an order now by the time you are ready I bet a couple of months would have passed.

The top frost rating for bricks is F2 with F2/L2 bricks being the highest grade you can get (the L rating refers to salts and the bricks tendency to show efflorescence) Under the previous standard it was F/L for frost resistant/low efflorescence and some manufacturers still use this description.

Go on, someone say "thermal mass"

Ah, that did not go well!, half way to Bude and lots of noise from front wheel, limped home hoping nothing goes bang or falls off, so that’s something else to do, mend the car ( at least it’s old enough to be mended with a set of spanner’s) ?