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is underway and he is doing such an amazing job cutting all the angles in I wanted to share it.?

That's not an envious task, as I've said. I think you should express your happiness with bacon and beer. I'm a fussy tiler, and that's looking absolutely spot on. ???

Welcome and I hope it does go hazy - I'd rather forget the whole thing

Welcome from me, too. I can't offer any words of wisdom on ICF but I would say stay open-minded about your build system. As well as looking at the costs of the materials, try and take into account the labour associated with them, too, and how much you need to know about it if you plan to manage the project yourself. When thinking about build styles and ideas, I found it really helpful to go snooping on the planning permission part of the local council's website and try and get a feel for what was granted permission and what got kicked out. Reading the case officer reports was informative and worth digging around for. I also looked on Rightmove for properties I liked the look of and if they were relatively new, dug out the planning history on them as well. This was useful for getting a feel for the style of local architects. Looking forward to seeing your project develop.

Hello! Just under a year ago we bought a little cottage and some land on the Hampshire-Surrey border. The original stone cottage dates from the early 1800s and previous owners have added a couple of extensions in the 1950s and 1970s. The house itself is nothing to write home about - it's not in great nick, the stone cottage is damp and the combination of a lot of single glazed windows and no effective central heating makes it pretty chilly in winter. Brass monkey chilly. We agreed to live in the house for a year before deciding what to do with it. Before we knew it that year flew past, during which time we made one major decision: The old house has gotta go! The plan is to replace it with something fit for purpose. Something that is more a warm and homely house and less like a cold, mouldy sieve. We're still at the early stages of our thinking. We've taken some advice from a local planning consultant and started sketching out some ideas of what we want and think/hope will comply with local planning guidelines. At the moment I feel like I'm looking at an infinite number of options and want to explore them all without closing any doors. We have a few challenges - the main one being the site is on a slope and we'd like to flatten out a decent-sized section. There's going to be a lot of digging but I'm hopeful we can move the spoil around rather than have to take it way. I'd love to hear from anyone who's flattened or terraced a sloping site. The good news is that the garden is big enough for us to live in the old house whilst we build the new house. The other thing that I'm really interested in is hearing about people's experiences of building with ICF. We want to keep the costs down and are happy to put in hours of (unskilled) labour. I've read some of the trials and tribulations of @recoveringacademic and I'm not put off, yet. It'd be great to learn from everybody else's mistakes so I can concentrate on innovating my own c*ck-ups and then share them for your advice/amusement in the months ahead. And I gather everyone on here likes a photo so here's one of our 1800s cottage with the salmon pink 1970s extension. Thanks, Piers

That a deliberate, totally unnecessary feature just because you can! Like a fall line yet no fall. LOVE IT! I think you should celebrate that with a night...on the tiles!

If it's in that state outside, the inside must be terrible.

Actually I noticed a few. Please strim and re-post. Quite shocking.

Yup, just spotted it.......? When your right, your right. ?

Nope, stray blade of grass there...messing up the magazine shot. Poor performance if you know...?

Looks great. All the detailing (cladding thresholds etc) look very sharp

looking great

Got the keys today, hooray! I will upload plenty more images and plans on the existing and new posts. Today we just had the Kitchen furniture guys to come in and take some measurements (It was Wren kitchen, will see if we go with them or not, any feedback on them is appropriated) Structural engineer to come in and have a chat about wall removal Removed some floor boards to access the crawl space to take some photos Oh yeah and we found strawberries and raspberries (not ready yet) in the garden

Super smart, you are right to be pleased!

Looks great Lizzie

No need to draw attention to the fact that you were a child when I was married ? I was a child bride ?

You could repost on the Talk Electrician forum and search out @binky on there. He's a solar guru. https://talk.electricianforum.co.uk

I used a couple of second hand acoustic foam panels at the back of my Geberit frame to hopefully damp down the flush noise. Off eBay. As good as new the front with just a bit of spray glue on the rear. DODO Mat is used for sound deadening in cars etc.

So pick the min 100mm and work from it. Some gaps will be bigger than 100mm but none will be smaller. Then get blown bead insulation installed - fills every cavity and you will have no gaps and a really decent level of insulation. The only plans you would need to change for TF would be for BRegs as planning doesn’t care what the inside looks like ...

What are your tastes? Cross-stich panels would work well. Or what about rough cork tiles as notice boards? Or furry carpet for that 70s look?

You can use the Nulok system on a very low pitch. @recoveringacademic Is currently installing and @Paul Stevenson will be able to give you some pointers.

That looks fabulous!

How are you going to tie both skins together?? What kind of insulation is going in between?? Any particular reason for using block as @ProDave said on your other post why not do it in timber.

Welcome and remember there Is no such thing as a silly question, silly is not asking! .

There are some days when i question my sanity and wonder why i started this seemingly never ending task That's been my experience along the way. I usually find that someone else has been hit with the same or similar issue and some helpful soul has given a solution. Hopefully anything i ask will have similar value to the next googlenaut. Thank you :)

The room terminals don't usually have filters, and the main problem area with MVHR is the intake filter, where air is drawn in from outside before going through the heat exchanger.

Welcome! We're probably not far from you (Surrey/Hampshire border). Lovely part of the world!

Welcome Bit of Es and Whizz and it will be done in no time. Have you thought of just renovating to a high standard? Seems a nice place to me, but then I live in a 1987 terrace. I know a guy who is currently building and ICF place, seems to be taking him forever (and he don't do much else). I teased him before he started about it and asked how he would get around the well know problems. 9 months on he is very sheepish about it all. Must go and have a look at it sometime soon.

Do you mean the filter on the kitchen extract grill, which is a grease filter and, at least in our system? This is the only room grill with a separate filter on our system and we change this filter at the same time as the MVHR inlet filter. It is only 200mm approx square and is in a metal farme, so standard filter material can be cut and fitted to suit -in fact, we saved a load of such material used for packing the G7 filters delivered from the Netherlands.

Welcome! I don’t have any experience of ICF, but wanted to say welcome and looking forward to seeing what you create. If you wanted to start a blog on here that would be a great way of capturing the project from start to finish. I got bored of doing my blog and stopped before the end. Looking back I so wish I had completed it, and I wish I had taken more photos of various stages too. So my advice is to photograph like crazy and write up every stage. When you are in the thick of it it’s hard to envisage that you could ever forget, but the memory does go hazy after a while. Looks a great project BTW!

Making the sructural alterations to the roof for the dormers would have required building regs even if it was still just a store room. That is more likely what the buyer and their lender will be bothered about. I am surprised the builder did not mention that, he should have known. Often it's possible to "solve" this with an indemnity policy but ONLY if you have not tried to resolve it with building control. Talk to your solicitor about offering that option first before doing any more.

What do the estate agents details say..? If it says storage then it’s more “defendable” than you saying it. If it says study/bedroom etc then it’s a problem as it’s potential misrepresentation ...

The LA are not going to do anything about it. It is very difficult to control the use of privately owned property. You may be in hot water if you rent it, however. Carpet and stairs could just make it a games or hobby room.

If you want to split the labour, I would say the plumber has to fit the shower former as he has to connect the waste to it. If he is not comfortable with the tanking kit, get the tiler to do that. It's also best not to fit the tanking kit until you are about to tile, less chance for it getting damaged if there is a long wait.

Yep its the last set of approved planning drawings this can include changes that have gone through planning. So if you intent to change the cladding from painted render to painted gold best get a planning change done so you can claim the VAT back on the gold rather than the sand and cement. Does gold attract VAT I wonder?

If you do not intend to sell it as habitable space, then it will surely (?) not be very important if he declares it to be habitable space. If he declares it not to be so, you are either exactly where you are now, or know what you need to do to make it habitable. Otoh is it is habitable, then won’t your house be worth more? As a buyer, I would be looking for something where I knew the proven status, or making the worst assumption should you not be able to tell me. One way could be to ask a loft conversion company to quote for making it into bedroom x+1 . F

The answer is 0, Zero, Many modern screws have flashing and burs on them and you will end up with splinters in your mouth. I never walk with anything in my mouth after witnessing one of my school chums having a fountain pen removed from his cheek after he fell over in the playground while carrying his pen in his mouth. He was very lucky.

Some plumbers will do it But a decent tiler will be doing them on a regular basis

Our local tiler will do the tanking if you want him to. But it is not difficult. You could do it yourself it you wanted. http://ardross.altervista.org/Wilowburn/bathroom-wet-room-floor/ That's an Impey shower former and tanking kit.

Got a nail bag, but it is a lot faster if I put about five in my mouth and four in my hand, and one being driven. Ibuprofen dose by 10:30 I suppose... ?

Off thread a tad but my friends and relatives delight in taking the pi$$ how well my "UFH" works. I had to "temporarily" divert the downstairs, single pipe system in order to gut the bathroom (the date stamp suggests it was taken 9th July 2015 ) Running at whatever the oil boiler kicks out, under now carpet tiles, the white pipe just under the surface of the floor provides a lovely warm strip in the depths of winter. This in an otherwise unheated room. Visitors, the kids and various stray cats migrate towards it and will fight over who gets to lie on the floor!

Every single rise to waste from under the house should be 110mm, without exception. Do not run even 50mm for a basin under there, ill be surprised if your BCO will be happy with that either. You should not have a trap / gulley there as it can block or even prevent rodding ( unless you have it on show and can easily get to it ) "no ta" to that! Traps on the end of each run will suffice re smells etc, and if you vent effectively at the plant then you shouldn't get any built up gases in the run anyway. As you have a plant, why are you even considering getting a pipe to atmosphere from inside the dwelling? A vent to atmosphere is only stipulated if you are connected to the mains sewerage network, as each property has a responsibility to vent the sewer gasses to atmosphere to vent the entire network. AAV's ( stub-stacks ) will more than suffice in the upper rooms, and if the downstairs rooms have less than 1300mm to the invert you won't need one at all as the water pellet won't have a chance to from a vacuum when flushing. Adding anti-syphon traps to the basins or remote small-bore AAV's will suffice there. If a vacuum cannot form then there is no requirement for air admittance as it'll be doing zero. You should be fine teeing grey water into foul under the house, so that may help to reduce the number of pipe runs to / from the IC's.

I feel your pain

Welcome .... I’d line the undercroft with DPM, seal the airbricks that are doing nothing to help as concrete doesn’t rot like timber and fill the whole void with EPS beads ..! Quick and simple and will give you lots of insulation ..! Don’t even consider UFH unless you’ve got 100mm of PIR below the floor or you will be wasting heat ...!

I think I was lucky, as I bought five pairs of filters from them before they reorganised and changed their online outlet. They were a lot cheaper than THE, looking back I paid £124.14 for five F7 intake filters and five G4 extract filters. With hind sight I should have purchased twice as many intake filters as extract filters; as @HerbJ rightly says, the extract filter doesn't really get anywhere near as mucky as the intake filter. Looking at the itemised prices on the invoice from Jasun Envirocare, they list the F7 intake filters at £12.19, plus VAT and carriage, and the G4 extract filters at £5.50, plus VAT and carriage. They charged £15 carriage for the whole lot of ten filters. IIRC, THE wanted over £25 per filter at the time, which seemed expensive to me. I'm trying to find someone to make up metal frames that will take washable foam filters. When I originally spoke to Jasun Envirocare they offered this service, but now don't seem to. Rolls of filter material are relatively cheap, and it seems a lot better to be able to just wash and reuse a filter than have to throw it out. I have tried using the vacuum cleaner to clean up dirty filters, and it sometimes works, but I found it easy to accidentally damage the pleats in the filter.

As least you know it can be done like they say! I'd hit the weak point with the punch NOT the hammer!