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After such a very long time of planning, waiting, more planning, plotting and scheming, the real and tangible world is now hurtling towards me at a pace. MBC got in touch this morning to advise that the slab insulation and the MBC team will be on site on 31st July. That's next week. Eek! Now, I don't know exactly what else is going to happen and whether that's the start proper of the slab going down, but I'd say it's a pretty positive sign of it. Once I have more detail on the schedule, I'll publish on here. For anyone wanting to see the piling in action, I strongly suspect that Thursday will be the final day (we are due a bit of rain there Friday morning, too) and I'll be around if anyone wants to visit. I now need to get my scaffolding booked and finalised - it looks like I'll need it soon. 5pm update: it's the full team arriving to do the slab on 31st July, followed by the superstructure on 14th August. Update 24/7/18 on MBC dates. Insulation and MBC team now due to start foundation on 2nd August, possibly 3rd, with superstructure due w/c 20th August due to over-run on current job.

Phew... I'm getting house selling fatigue. That's the fifth viewing today just finished, cash buyers, near-certain they're going to make an offer. The give away was when they started telling one of their kids "this is going to be your bedroom". They've sold their house and are renting from one of their in laws, and seemed desperate to escape (think I would be, two small kids, living with in-laws, has to be a bit of a nightmare). Next viewing's not until 19:30, so quick break for some dinner, then get the last one for the day over with (another cash buyer, so needs a proper spiel, so no drinking beforehand...) then I can sit down, have a drink and relax. Until tomorrow, when it all starts again...

...a little more action. The piles started going in today and it was a glorious sight to behold after so much waiting and anticipation. It was, in fact, very understated for piles; these are, after all, mini piles, but there was so little fuss and hassle that it was almost underwhelming. Not quite, though. I may just happened to have mentioned before that I'm on clay. Well, I'm on even more clay than I thought. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find anything other than clay on my site apart from a few meagre inches of topsoil where the garden used to be. Although these are mini piles, they still go down to 12m in some positions and all that came up off the augur was clay. Yellow clay at the top, dark grey clay from about 2.5m downwards. So onto a bit of technical stuff for the piles. They are being put in by Advanced Mini Piling Systems, who are based in Bath, and they're very nice chaps. I have 34 piling positions and these were set out by a surveyor on Friday afternoon. Late Friday, two of the piling guys dropped off the rig for an early start this morning and that's just what they did, about 8am. Now, don't ask me questions about loadings and things like that; I can probably find out if you really need to know, but I take the view that as I've paid an SE to work out these things for me, I'm not going to double up on the effort and fry my brain in doing so. Actually, if I come across the pile schedule I can post it if anyone really wants it. First up, the rig is moved to the piling position and the hole is augured out to the specified depth, with the augur being cleaned of debris as they go. Because my clay is so dessicated, it came away from the drill with no problems and no difficult cleaning was needed. The spoil was just shoveled out of the way of the piling positions. The top 3m of the holes are lined with an anti-heave sleeve - this looked like a giant tube of plastic impregnated cardboard and I suspect that's exactly what it is. I understand that they can, at times, be tricky to put in. The team tried to put the first one straight into the hole and seeing someone balancing on one of these to try and squish it in was quite amusing, but ineffective. The solution was very simple - before inserting the sleeve, it got wetted down with water and they dropped right in. The sleeves are a few mm smaller than the hole, so still a tight fit, but the water lubrication worked well. The concrete lorry turned up mid-afternoon. The drilled holes and sleeves aren't left open overnight, they are always poured and filled by the end of the day, with the rebar inserted. The concrete pour was equally straightforward. A dumper truck gets filled with enough concrete to fill one pile position up to the top of the sleeve, the rebar then gets inserted, tied and pushed in all the way. Rinse and repeat until all the positions are finished. Once the concrete has gone off, the rebar will get tied into mesh. Judging by the rate they're getting through the work, the job should be finished on Thursday or Friday morning at the latest. I will add a word about the dumper truck and, in general, the diminutive size of the equipment. Because everything is on a smaller scale, they were able to negotiate the site and all the piling positions that were down and I only saw one squashed pin. Larger equipment would have run the risk of burying everything, if only to manoeuvre around, but this system was very nimble and capable. The combination of smaller kit and the dry weather also meant that I was able to completely avoid the need for a piling mat, which wouldn't have been cheap. I'm chuffed with how the work went today and just hope that the remainder goes as smoothly and no one gets heat exhaustion - it was punishingly hot on site today, even with the strong breeze. Now, what you've all been waiting for, the photos.

@Cazza with not a lot of cash for a build of the size you are talking about if its just something to turn and make a profit you might be better spending your time and a bit of money and selling on undeveloped with a permission. Make a bit - low risk in terms of expenditure.

Time to create your Sealed Bid Form, so that everyone submits all the data in the same format and also provides all the data you require for moving forward. I attach a typical "Offer to Purchase - STC" Form used by EA's , which you can adapt and improve for your purposes. Offer to Purchase - STC Form.pdf

There's a good explanation here.

Hello have a bungalow in Kent, we have been told we could possibly do better if we knock it down and build a house. Never done anything like this in our lives and not sure where to start, we have no idea how much it will all cost either. Are we mad. The plot is about 1/3rd of and acre, the bungalow is rather small 2 beds, tiny kitchen dining room and sitting room. We have 3 sheds in garden with our furniture. Any advice will be gratefully received. We have had one plan refused and another being done for an extension and loft conversion, but the architect said we would get more if we knocked it down, he suggested to get one plan approved and then put in for a new house. Each one slightly larger than the last.

I hope so for you as well, we have probably about 200k maybe a bit more, so extension, loft conversion it is. i would love to build a home here and stay for ever but it would be too big for 2 people and too much for us as well. its a fab plot. will be sad to leave, when we do, i expect it will take us a bit longer than we thought.

We have always done really well with our properties, not bought and sold that many, but always sold within a few days, I am told by others I have an eye for decoration and interior design, I have no qualifications in this I must add. I just love furnishing and decorating. But not much experience with renovations.

Nice post, well described. Mini everything by the look of that dumper? Good luck with the next stage

Building a house for profit if you have no experience can be a risky strategy. If you read some of the stories on here it will put you off for life, but mostly people soldier on and get through it because they are building their dream / forever home. I don’t think many people here would embark on a self build for profit unless they had a stack of building experience. I would go back to the drawing board and see what you could do most easily that may make you some cash. That might be a large extension rather than a new build.

tubs seem like a load less hassle. Arrive to start work in the AM, fresh tub waiting.

Counter battening makes a massive difference An afternoons work and £100

That seems pretty clear to me. I am talking a few years ago so maybe the guidance has updated.

Sounds like a very fair way of setting out what you as a seller want and by what date and then seeing who really wants to buy your house. Gd luck.

Thats where we started from.....2 years on LOL

Essentially you set the conditions for an acceptable bid (in our case confirmed exchange of contracts date and offer price) set a closing date for bids, stipulate that you reserve the right not to accept the highest bid (gives you the wiggle room to pick a more reliable bid at a lower price), then people just put their bids in an envelope and hand them in by the closing date. There's not normally an automatic right to give other interested parties to bid, as there's a risk it might be seen as an auction, but you can decide to approach the next favourite bidder if the winning bidder drops out. As an example, we've just had a couple around to view who very definitely want to buy, but they haven't sold their current house, so right now they aren't in a position to give a realistic completion date. However, if the winning bid fell through, and by that time they had sold their house, then they may well be the next best, simply because things have changed in the meantime. Frankly I doubt that will happen, as I think we've already got pretty firm-sounding feedback from one buyer.

so looks like wrap around with loft conversion, hopefully. We do not want to borrow money for this.

Hanson MultiCem also comes in plastic bags and isn't Mastercrete prices Use this calculator as a rough guide but 12 bags cement to 1 bag sand and 450 blocks isn't far off. So 25 bags would give need 2 tonnes sand and 900 blocks laid there or thereabouts.

I don't disagree - what I was referring to was taking a cavity batt below ground to infil the cavity instead of using lean mix infil. I think we are discussing the same point !

Rockwool data I have shows cavity batts below DPC starting just above the lean mix cavity fill - I believe this is common to just about all manufacturers and BBA certs

All heating ASHPs reverse, they have a four port reversing valve that switches the relative positions of the condenser and the evaporator. The reason they have to have this is to defrost the evaporator. By switching the four port reversing valve the heat pump can draw heat from the water side and use it to warm up what was the evaporator (but is now the condenser) on the air side. This melts any ice build up, at the cost of sucking some heat energy out of the house whilst it's doing it. This is why a badly set up ASHP can have a really bad COP if it ends up defrosting fairly regularly, as defrosting not only means it's not heating for the duration of the defrost cycle but it's also extracting heat from the house, which then needs to be put back the next time the unit switches to heating mode.

This is one reason I prefer finnjoists (osb webb) they can be cut to any length as long as they are specced for the longest length and cutting holes in the Webb is easy (as long as they are in the right place and right dimensions.

Thankfully we rarely ever got involved in selling, as the vast majority of our house moves were via a relocation scheme, where we were just given the value of the house and the relocation company dealt with selling it in slow time, after we'd moved out (never knew what any of them ever sold for, even). I'm 100% with you on the sealed bid idea, and intend telling every viewer that this is what we will probably be doing, asking for sealed bids that include the price and a date by which exchange of contracts can be concluded.

Selling houses has for me, with one single exception, seemed to bring out the worst in people. The very worst was a with a buyer with a close relative acting as his solicitor : the best - the cash was in the bank within a fortnight of the flat being on the market. Almost as good as the Scottish system. Sealed bid gets my vote.

Good point, last time we were looking to buy Google Earth didn't exist! Just had the first viewer around, seems keen to buy, but they have a house to sell. They told me they didn't have a mortgage and had been offered bridging finance, which makes me believe they might be serious, but they are low on my list of possibles. The viewer that's just been around says there's a high demand for bungalows, when I explained that we had a surprisingly large number of viewings booked, so we may well go to sealed bids. Quick glass of orange juice now and a sit down before the next one arrives, whose sold subject to contract, so a better prospect, perhaps. Just checked the advert stats: Advert page views = 4046 Total advert details views or downloads = 1040 (of which 1007 were via RightMove!)

Google Earth and Street View. The Pareto principle applies.

Beware, west-facing windows can still be a problem for overheating because the sun is lower when it is in the West and so the sunlight penetrates more deeply into the thermal envelope. Westerly (early evening) sun is also more of a problem than easterly (morning) sun because by the evening the building is already hotter. (I learnt this by reading about shading affects for passive houses and modelling my own build in PHPP.) On the subject of 3G vs 2G, for me its a philosophical decision of whether to adopt the principle of a fabric-first approach. Fabric-first prizes comfort above all, as does 3G.

Worth remembering that the subjective effective of 3G in cold weather is that it is a great deal more effective than the best 2G. The reason is that 3G can have two internal facing low e coated panes, whereas 2G can only have one. The effect of this is to pretty much half the long wavelength IR heat loss through the windows, and although this doesn't make a massive difference to the overall thermal performance, it does make a massive subjective difference if you stand or sit next to any glazing on a cold day. Our bodies sense comfort by lots of ways, but one is the rate of radiated heat loss. When next to a 2G window more heat from our bodies will radiate out and it will feel cooler than it really is. The IR loss through double low e 3G is so small that I can't tell if I'm in front of the glazing or not, as such a large amount of body radiated heat is reflected back.

Get the fresh coffee on and the bread in the oven ... isn’t that what sells a house ..?!

I agree, I have been told by many that when my conservatory is built (on the South side) I will get massive overheating problems but we are having solar glass in the roof to try to stop it. It’s a little like my heating strategy, no heating upstairs save bathroom towel radiators, yes I might need electric heaters in the bedroom for a few weeks of the year but so what, I am not having a heating system in rooms that are ok for say 40 weeks a year! Likewise I am not having a cooling system (other than reverse engineering my ASHP UFH which already exists) for a few hot weeks a year. people jet off to the sun for a holiday for these temps.

As someone who’s been on the back end of a badly run HMRC investigation I can assure you they are a law unto themselves .....

HMRC are starting to do this more often for DIY claims it seems. Fines where someone tried to claim a refund and wasn't eligible (wasn't a cut and dried case so not amazingly easy for the person to have judged eligibility), fines where the accountant put in more invoices than they could claim again (so for supply and fit where VAT was incorrectly charged). These fines are often being overturned on appeal it seems but the tribunal is taking 15 months to make a decision according to the more recent case listed.

Good innit..!! I’ve got the letter somewhere... mentions “penalties for incorrect information provided” and “fraudulent claims”..... ?