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Look at what's already being passed on here by builders sharing experiences of what went wrong with e.g their slab pours. Others following on benefit from this immensely whether it be by being better equipped knowledge wise, stricter with their overseeing of contractors or just being mentally prepared for what can go wrong when it does.

already done bottles!! Good call.. turns out our neighbours all love Port

"Kneejerk empathy"? Good lord, what a hideous phrase! What's wrong with starting with empathy, then moving on to the best practical advice we can come up with collectively for the current situation, tempered with advice for those who follow so they don't make the same mistake? I'm sure you've learned plenty from the site - it isn't all just hugs and drum circles. And yet Jeremy candidly admits that several things went wrong, despite the fact he's clearly a highly capable human and spent a lot of time researching and planning. Bully for you. Sounds like you have it all worked out and everything will be perfect until the day you move in. Nevertheless, in the unlikely event you do hit an unforeseen roadbump, you can be sure there'll be kneejerk empathy and practical advice here if you want it.

What are we meant to do then just post funny remarks mocking someones plight. I think you will find most of the posts start with empathy and then move on towards how a solution can be found. Just because you don't have time doesn't mean you shouldn't be going over every detail. Also just because you hand the reins over to a higher calibre crew won't mean it's done right either. Plenty of examples on here to illustrate both.

In 2009 my wife and I moved into a 3 year old developer built house in Kingseat, Newmachar which is 6 miles north of Aberdeen. Kingseat was originally a farming estate, in 1859 Aberdeen District Lunacy Board required a new mental health facility for paupers and acquired the site. The hospital was constructed between 1901 - 1904, the various buildings were laid out in a villa format, with lots of green space including trees, a football pitch and tennis courts. One of the old hospital building - our current rental accommodation is in this building The hospital closed in 1995, due to the historical importance of the buildings the area was designated a conservation area. In 2006 a house builder was granted permission to convert the old buildings into flats and to build new houses in amongst the old buildings. Typical developer house Another typical developer house I have wanted to build a house since I was a teenager (I'm now 36), in June 2016 we finally decided to take the plunge and put our house on the market, with the intention of building a new house. Initially we were looking for a plot near our current house with a more rural location. However when we saw there was a plot of land available in the Kingseat development we decided that this would be a better option because our son (he is now 8 ) had friends in the development. Our house was on the market for a while because of the fall in the oil price, we managed to sell in February 2017 (10% below valuation). We immediately made an offer on the plot, after some negotiation (on price and us agreeing to put in a mutual driveway at the back of the plot to neighbouring property at our expense) our offer was accepted, although the sale didn't complete until October 2017. The plot is a corner plot approximately 950 square metres. The plot previously had planning permission for a 200 square metre house, however this had lapsed. South North East North East North South West South In the meantime we moved out of our house in May 2107 and moved into a rented flat 100 metres away from the plot. In March 2017 we started working with an architect, initially had a topographical survey of the site completed, Followed by a tree survey. All the trees in Kingseat were covered by a tree preservation order and we had 4 trees in the middle of the plot. Luckily all 4 trees were not one of the original species planted at Kingseat which meant we could remove them. Next we starting to design the house, our brief was: Open plan living room, dining room and family room utility room snug master bedroom with dressing room and ensuite 3 other bedrooms, ideally all with ensuites attic trusses for potential future development of 2 further bedrooms/office Attached double garage 2.7 metre ceiling height ground floor and 2.4 metre first floor The house would be traditional on the outside, similar to the other houses on the development. However inside wanted it to be very contemporary light and airy house with white walls, flush white doors and skirtings, cantilevered stairs etc. The following Images are the style we were aiming for. Our first planning application was rejected because the conservation officer thought the orientation of the house was wrong and the exterior was a bit too bland. The architect and I had a meeting with the conservation officer and discussed the changes that she would like to see and what I would be comfortable with. I feel that we left that house with a better house! The interior was almost identical, however we added an extra gable to one end of the house to make it less symmetrical and broke up the building by changing the garage cladding to black timber. The only thing I wasn't pleased about was reducing the roof pitch to reduce the ridge height, so that it's a similar height to the old cottage next door. In December 2017 our second application was accepted. The following is the design: Ground Floor First Floor Future development option for the attic space Architect 3D render of open plan area.

@epsilonGreedy, it's probably worth looking back at the history of this forum, and it's immediate predecessor, Ebuild. I joined Ebuild in 2008, as a complete novice. Others here were member of Ebuild long before I joined ( @caliwag and @Temp immediately spring to mind). This forum is structured in the same way as Ebuild, but with a more robust management team and a determination to be fair, unbiased and non-commercial. We're community run and funded to keep the forum free from any commercial influences. It took me from 2008 to 2013 to acquire what I thought was enough knowledge to start a self-build. I was hopelessly optimistic about my understanding of the domestic building sector and the way it works, even after 5 years of research (and I'm a 65 year old scientist, so acquisition of knowledge is in my DNA). I cannot believe that there are any shortcuts for self-builders in learning how trades work, and what a self builder needs to know in order to avoid the worst consequences of the inevitable problems that will definitely occur in every build.

Okay, I agreed to split the weigh-in of the copper roof, so got £1,900 back for that. The rest—wood and whatnot—he could have. Re: the broken up slab mountain, I've done a deal with him to remove the excess debris for £85 a load. It's cheap I know, but it's also open to exploitation; is the truck the size of a small wheelbarrow? will they fill each truck completely? and will they be entirely honest about how many trips they take to dispose of it. The only way to find out is to put on my wellies, set up camp, and watch ? So that is what I'm going to do...

Getting back to crushing up a house I have recently just done a few rough sums for this and my conclusion was it wasn’t worth the effort my situation. If you look at my blog you will see I had an unexpected amount of concrete on site I didn’t know I had. So eight truck loads to remove from site. @ £140 per load cash. After all all this was gone I needed to make a Matt for the piling rig and also fill in under my floor 7 loads of crushed concrete bought in @ £140 plus vat per load, hire of skid mount crusher for 1 day £1200 plus vat plus fuel plus excavator to load crusher. Total about a couple of grand. Unless you have a lot to crush I would bite the bullet and get the big lumps removed and track all the bricks into the ground to make a nice hard standing to work on and park. In the end I paid to remove two loads from site of the biggest nastiest lumps, the rest has been buried in areas I know are going to end up as parking.

Ensure that they break the figures down into erection, dismantling and hire. The first 2 can be zero rated, the hire charge cannot. Ensure that you know exactly how much it will cost if you need the scaffolding to be there longer than you initially envisage. Understand what their service includes, eg does it include them coming to fix things that the builders mess about with? Probably not so you will need to understand how to handle those situations. Ensure that they put a 'ticket' on the scaffolding that should evidence the insurance cover and formally mark it as 'on hire' rather than in a stage of erection when it should not be used. I say this because my scaffolders were crooks for want of a word and didn't put the insurance cover in place, then when there was an accident tried to say that it wasn't formally on hire at that point despite it having been up and used for weeks before! We didn't know it should have had a 'ticket'. Don't let them erect it too close to the house! Sounds obvious but there are a few of us on here who have been caught out by that. Expect them to be challenging (that might be unfair but it was my experience).

As part of the agreement for buying the plot the previous owner agreed to clear the plot of the 2 mounds of earth. In April 2018 The site was cleared by the previous owner. We had to arrange a tree surgeon to fell the 3 trees. Before The tree surgeon cut the trees into manageable logs, these were easy to get rid of, to various friends. I thought the best way to get rid of the remaining branches and shrubs would be to chip them, I left them to dry out between April and July as chippers don't like greenery. I hired a Timber wolf chipper (£150 for the weekend including delivery, fuel and PPE), it should handle 5" diameter branches. The chipping was slow going as all the branches had to be stripped basically to straight poles, otherwise the chipper would jam or get blocked/bunged up. We filled about 1/2 the box trailer with chippings but then the chipper started to play up, so we put the reaming branches to the local skip. Ready for the site scrape

Christ it's not cheap is it? Can you get it in a wine box? Are they fussy? https://www.costco.co.uk/Food-Wine-Household/Wines/Fortified-Wine/Kirkland-Signature-10-Year-Old-Tawny-Port-75cl/p/787876

You missed, get the neighbours inebriated so they don’t or can’t complain ?

Right then, what have we got so far? be careful about talking to contractors take notes try and formalise the agreement maybe write it down accept that self-building is a set of steep learning curves ask for advice on BH before hand take a little time to do some research before diving into 'it' the power of a recommendation disposal off site for materials requires a paper trail (Household Duty of Care) check waste carriers license 08708506506 consider on site crushing Self building is bumpy : straighten-up and fly right despite the turbulence be present at the build if you can and finally, Dont bother engaging @jack as a bodyguard.

@laurenco if you do go down the crush-on-site concrete route I would be really interested in how it works out in terms of time, costs, dust and noise etc as I have been put off in the past. The build we have just done is town centre and it would not have been possible but I would consider it in the future.

Perfect ..! It’s where you draw the line that is important and it’s threads like this that reinforce your point about research - it’s why forums like this exist ! There is every type of self builder on here from the newbies fitting a radiator to the serial self builders on their 6th build, yet at some point each will feel like the world is on their shoulders and a partner who’s in it with them - usually up to the knees in mud - is sometimes not the best places to help through either involvement or just lack of knowledge. And it’s lonely ..!! I doubt there is a question on self building that can’t be answered by one of the 1600 or so members who have decades of experience - neither is there anyone on here who wants to see a single person fail in their self build dream. It’s about providing a network for members to call on when they need it, but also giving back where you can, even if it’s to say “don’t do it like I did....”

There are a multitude of reasons why people self build and a multitude of ways of managing it. The only certainty is that you need to be on the ball and aware whatever route you take. For many it’s the satisfaction of saying I built that and having created a unique house that they wanted rather than having a house designed for the mass market. Plus many will want to oversee the operation and do as much as they can themselves. Just like self build houses we are all unique individuals bonded by a common goal and formed into a community via this forum. Self building can be a lonely place but it’s forums like this that help overcome the feeling of isolation. Whether it’s empathy, advice, hard messages or however you want to badge it, it’s the sense of community that makes this a great place to be.

The lack of trust in a handing over a build to trades is a prevalent theme on BH even though a fairly large percentage here have taken on many (of the non-specialised) tasks themselves. It would be interesting to here how many people have handed over the project to a main contractor and are happy with what they got with regards to costs of goods and sub-contractors and overall service and value for money. Or perhaps a separate thread?

Go low-tech, go local and keep traditional is working for me so far. No one who has worked on my site traveled more than 10 miles.

Search for Bav bucket crushers.

After yesterdays site scrape the ground workers started again at 07:00 this morning (22nd August 2018) to dig the trenches for the foundations. The idea was to dig the trenches today and then pour the concrete tomorrow. However whilst I was at work around 16:00 the local friendly drone guy sent me a couple of photos which looked like there was concrete in the trenches - this was a nice surprise. Tomorrow 1 of the brickies (the other 2 are on holiday) is going to start the under building (foundation walls), they estimate that this will take 3 days.

I have used temporary downpipes to stop the walls getting soaked.

Doing a self build is a massive learning curve no matter what your background is. It will all be chugging along sweet as pie and you will be walking about like a proud peacock thinking you have the job under control and then along comes an issue that you never seen due to your lack on experience. This could be as simple as not having some materials delivered on time to not having the terms of what the job consisted of fully laid out and wham bang your running around like a headless chicken trying to figure out a solution. It happens and will always happen as people make mistakes. Some take the piss and others like what seems here are clearly taking advantage of an inexperienced self builder. Either the contract was for the removal of the demolition spoil or it wasn't. If it was then you would expect it to include everything to be removed. If it wasn't then all the valuable stuff that has been taken then needs to come back. But if there was no actual written contract stating what was and what wasn't too be done then who is right and wrong. The self builder for not providing a list of what was to be done or the demolition company who probably knew they where dealing with a novice and not asking what was expected of them. The answer in my opinion is somewhere in the middle where both parties have to shoulder some of the blame.

The worst contractor we had onsite, and the only one we ended up sacking 10% of the way through their job, was the outfit that did our brick slips. They were recommended by the company that supplied the brick slips and backing system, but in the end the people who did the work were basically labourers rather than the brickies that were promised. I've said on BH before that a bright 8 year old would have done a better job. I broached the subject of quality with them, reasonably forcefully the second time, even going so far as to offer to increase the fixed price to ensure they had the time to do the job properly. Despite assurances that the work would improve, in the end we had to let them go, which we did via text exchange on a Sunday night. They agreed it was the best thing, then in the next text told me how much we owed them (quite a lot, apparently!) for the work to date. Bearing in mind I was going to have to pay someone to undo the pile of shite that they'd left us with, I asked them to give me a breakdown of how they'd come to this amount, only to get a threateningly aggressive text saying that we knew what their day rates were (we didn't - it was a fixed price job), and to pay up immediately. Didn't sleep much that night. Got some advice from a family friend who's an ex builder turned project manager for big projects up in London: pay them and move on. The last thing you want is more stress over a few hundred quid. Even if you get them to reduce their costs slightly, you could still arrive onsite one morning to find a tin of gloss paint slung over your new windows and doors (this had happened to him on a job). Long story short: even owing someone money is no guarantee that you're in the driver's seat. Even if you can avoid paying them, you can still lose money, because you'll need to pay extra to undo the bad work, then possibly pay someone more to come in on an urgent basis to do the job right. Before we started the build, I'd read everything you'd said about yours. I remember feeling that by just following your lead we could avoid making any mistakes. Oh how long ago that feeling seems!

If you're inexperienced in the world of self-build, as I am, then it's very easy to overlook things that simply don't pop up on your radar in time because there are so many other new things to think about. Disposing of stuff from site is, in my experience, a significant cost and one that can alter how a build is approached. My own build is a perfect example of this. Because I'm on clay, I had a choice of how to do the foundations for my house - either a massive (down to nearly 3m) reduced dig, or 800mm reduced dig and piles. At first, I was going to go down the reduced dig route because I could understand this and was terrified of what piles might involve. In the end I went for the latter because the cost of disposing of all the clay from a 3m reduced dig for the entire footprint of my house would have been crippling and around x3 the cost of the piles, let alone the time cost. Likewise, when we had the existing bungalow on the site demolished, the disposal of the debris was a significant part of the bill for that stage of the work. There was little to be salvaged from it, a few bricks and the roof rafters for use in the garden, but the rest of it all had to go to landfill, along with the reinforced concrete panels that had made up the garage block. Even now that we're in the construction phase, there will still be more disposal costs. I'll need at least a couple of skips just to clear away all the general crap, there's left over EPS hanging around that can't be re-used and will need to be chucked. After that, there's all the concrete and hardcore that has gone down to increase the hard standing area for all the works traffic and, finally, the concrete floor of the former garage block that we also use for hard standing and that has the site cabin and portaloo on it. Quite literally, tons of crap, and not to be forgotten about when it comes to totting up the bills.

Yesterday (August 21st 2018) the ground workers arrived at 07:00 to scrape the site, erect some Heras fencing and mark the house out. The engineer did the setting out first of house boundary. Next the digger driver and one ground worker scraped the site. Next the engineer marked out where the foundations should go, ready to be dug tomorrow. The digger also ripped up the old tarmac road that ran through the plot. They finished at 18:00

The flint work .only 150m2 to do in the garden

Lol, when they look really miserable and you give in like we did then they will really have you sussed ?. Mine missed both the company and home comforts too and when the weather was bad they looked pitiful lol.

My dogs were in a run with kennels during the day and then in crates in the awning overnight. That was ok until the really cold weather came and then we felt guilty and had wet soggy dogs in the caravan. Thank god I was only there 2 nights a week!

When we had to check over our timber frame drawings it was like doing a spot the difference puzzle without knowing how many spot the differences there were!! We checked it and checked it and still had some minor errors but missed the main one which was a structural corner post which was designed out by the timber frame manufacturer but left on the drawings sent to the window manufacturer so that created one of the problems we have had with the delay of our window installation. The missing window is hopefully arriving today so we may get the installation finished soon!!

Quite simply, most clients are idiots and most contractors are c**ks. The constant forum retorts for numerous different issues regarding “If it’s not written down...” are a self fulfilling chant to justify the existence of this community. what does @laurenco need to do now? Re-engage the same company to bring their machines back to load up the waste for disposal? Extra unnecessary cost on top of the disposal or pay someone else to do the some wasteful operation when it should have been done all together with some sort of economy of scale or without duplicating effort?

Plumber normally Its normall to put the gutters on and leave the down pipe till the scaffold is down

For me in Aberdeenshire roofers didn't quote for doing this, plumbers did.

Bang on. I often wonder about the extent to which problematic site-based issues are a proxy for other hidden agendas. Something as simple as tiredness can make for unwise emphasis. And the sheer grind of self-building saps every last ounce of energy out of us. There's nothing more engaging and healing than a smile and a bit of kindness - coupled with simple plain speaking. But that takes more courage than I have sometimes. As for unknown unknowns: thats what BH is for innit?

I think if you work in IT like many seem to do on this forum the approach to managing work is much more disciplined than it seems to be in the building industry. Contracts are put in place if using a third party, requirements are gathered and signed off, design documents and test plans are signed off, build is completed etc etc. Does that rigour mean that things go swimmingly? Do they ‘eck as like! Those processes hopefully help drive down the risk of things going wrong but they never remove it completely. Life isn’t a box of chocolates, and sh1t happens and continues to happen. The “unexpected, could realistically never have been expected” things happen. You can’t mitigate every single risk so we have to accept that things will go wrong just as they do in nearly every project. In self building add into the mix the fact that for most people we don’t have full lifecycle experience of building a house yet many of us still decide to manage our own build. Even if you were to plan everything to the nth degree most builders won’t look at such things or even recognise a Gantt chart, so we can only do our best. As @recoveringacademic has found the response is often, ‘nah we don’t do it like that mate’. Sigh. I cover relationship management as part of my day job and one of the things I always say is that if you continually pick at details in the contract and fire those at the other side then something is wrong in that relationship. That’s not to say that never happens even when the relationship is mature and working well, but it’s a sign of issues emerging if contract gazing is the modus operandi. The issue is that it takes a while to build up a relationship and understand how each side operates yet for building there really isn’t a lot of time to mature the relationship as builders are in and out so it’s doubly difficult.

It doesn't say whether that includes taking away the rubble , even in the blurb at the top. So presumably that is considered to be a separate operation.

Good post F. Nudged me into looking it up in SPONS Here's the relevant entry

Hi @laurenco Sorry to hear of this problem. 1 - I am not aware that there is a "norm" - because a lot of self-builders do a lot of different things, and may plan for example for much soil to be left behind to reprofile the site a a way of saving budget. 2 - It is true that "verbal contracts" do exist, they leave a lot of scope even more scope for ambiguity and different interpretations than written contracts, and it is very difficult and/or expensive to resolve these. And, in the end, it comes down to I-said-you-said. 3 - You may have been the victim of their sharp practice plus your inexperience in someone deliberately not pointing out something they suspected you did not know, and you not knowing it. Another example - how many of us think about the value of weighing in the pipes and water tanks from a heating system which is being replaced (can be worth hundreds) or the value of logs from a felled tree. 4 - In the end though, that is a borderline though normal tactic, which we all use at times. I am sure that we are all more enthsiastic in pointing out price-reducing factors in plot prices, than admitting that we have found xyz document in the planning file that will potentially save us £20k, and means we could actually pay more. 5 - There are various ways of helping to deal with it - involving professionals (eg PM), or books, or informal mentors, or going slowly enough to accumulate the experience (or as you are already a Chartered Surveyor with I assume substantial experience so perhaps complementary experience is what you need to be after). I think my most helpful suggestion is at granny-sucking-eggs level. I think there will not be much comeback on this unless you persuade them to do it free or at a reduced price by asking nicely or threats (reduce payment). I think it may be 'make the best of it and sweat the detail all the other times', while focusing on those areas which are outside your existing professional experience. Can you find a buildhubber locally further down the track and offer pub-lunch-and-sanity-check every so often? I think we all like being taken out to lunch. Ferdinand

Add another $20 for shipping & import taxes to the UK: https://www.amazon.com/Multi-Angle-Brick-and-Block-Cutter/dp/B01LR94QNE/ref=sr_1_fkmr2_1?s=hi&ie=UTF8&qid=1535016403&sr=8-1-fkmr2&keywords=marshall+block+cutter (Don't make me make one! )

Just use a tape measure to score a line where it needs broke. Thats all that tool is doing away with. The rest is just a hammer and bolster and a few thumps.

The biggest problem with the domestic construction industry as a whole is that they rarely seem to have much in the way of any formal contractual procedure. Sure, a contract exists, simply because an offer has been made, accepted and a consideration has been exchanged, but it's rare to get a proper written contract, with clear and unambiguous terms and conditions, I think. This lack of any formal specification, terms and conditions, etc, works in the favour of contractors looking to quote the lowest price. They leave out the expensive stuff, like disposal of waste, so their quote looks good value. I know that we've paid out well in excess of £10k for waste disposal during our build, probably closer to £12k. Just getting rid of the spoil from the ground works was well over £9k, then we had at least three skips at around £260 a time, plus another two or three grab lorry loads taken away later at several hundred pounds a load, including land fill tax. The majority of domestic building work seems to be undertaken on the basis of a pretty slap-dash informal quotation and acceptance form of contract, more often than not lacking in pretty much all the key critical detail. I guess this is just the way that the domestic construction sector has evolved, but I know that we've spent thousands with contractors with little more than a very rough and ready outline of the specification of the work, and almost always without enough detail to be able to determine whether any specific item was or was not included in the original quotation. After a while you get to know how some operate; for example the chap we always use to do any landscaping related work has a personal policy of removing all rubbish and waste from the site when he's finished. It's memorable, because he's the ONLY contractor we've ever had on site that has such a policy! It's not written down anywhere, and nine times out of ten specs and quotations from him are verbal, or just a sketch plan and some notes, but we've worked with him enough times to know that we'll get a very good job and he'll leave things very neat and tidy when he's finished.

There is a contract. Offer, acceptance and engagement has taken place and so a contract is in effect. The OP tells us: Did they specifically mention a mountain of bricks would be left onsite? Probably not hence the OP's outrage. In a small claims Court I think it would be possible to construct an argument that it is impossible to "level and site scrape" without removing the a mountain of rubble left over from the demolition. The contractor is clearly a sharp operator who hoped that not mentioning the elephant in the room would result in an unfair commercial win. The court would recognize this and the default contract provides enough linguistic opportunity for a hostile magistrate to find in favour of the OP. p.s. I have no legal training. p.s.2. If the contractor offered "oversite scrape" I think this would sustantially weaken the claim.

Lol @Christine Walker I can tell how annoyed you are and have visions of that annoyance allowing you to overcome your ladder phobia and storming up there to point at the dressing room ceiling and give them a piece of your mind ?.

I think the reason that some of us (well, certainly me) tend to relate cautionary tales that point out that, as a self-builder, you really need to watch everyone and everything all the time, is because we've been caught out ourselves, and are kicking ourselves about it. I really hate to see other people get caught out the same way, and my hope is that by relating cautionary tales the word will get out and more people will be aware of the things they need to watch out for. I doubt anyone here hasn't had a screw up that could have been prevented if they were better informed and had taken the time to learn a bit more about the way things are done. Take my borehole saga as a classic example - I failed miserably in so many areas when overseeing that work that it cost me a load of money and perhaps a year of delay in total. With the benefit of hindsight none of those failings should have happened, I should have been sufficiently on the ball to spot them and stop them happening, but I wasn't. I only acquired the knowledge I needed to oversee a borehole being drilled and cleaned AFTER the work was done and the problem needed fixing. @Triassics comment about being wary of anyone that doesn't come recommended is spot on. On our build the only problems were with contractors/suppliers that didn't come by some form of personal recommendation. I'm not sure how we better improve the way we communicate here - it's made harder because purely written communication in an informal style, like posts here, are always going to be open to interpretation as to the posters true meaning. As @recoveringacademic noted, some of us post here when we are angry, depressed, overjoyed, even "under the weather", so that is bound to colour our phraseology, much as we might wish it didn't.

@ProDave SAP energy rating is based on energy costs and these are normally increased (inflation?) in new versions of SAP so your SAP/EPC will probably remain the same. The big difference is reducing the carbon intensity of electricity (fewer coal fired power stations) so should make Building Reg compliance of all electric houses easier.

If self building was easy, builders were amazing communicators, and everyone lived up to expectations there would be no need for this forum and I would be living in a parallel universe. I don’t think builders are not to blame in any way in these situations but who stands to lose? Not the builder in general so as always it’s a case of let the buyer beware. The only thing we have is the power not to pay them, assuming we didn’t pay up front so maybe that’s the way to negotiate here? The only way we can safeguard ourselves where scope of the work is concerned is to check, check again, and then come on here and ask for advice BEFORE something happens. And put it in writing. Often however that’s not the case and we have many more posters coming on here with issues. If you feel that people are shamed when they do so then that’s your opinion but I’ve had much help from here and never felt shamed. I don’t use the C word in posts either so we are all different ?.

It is very exciting after what has seemed like a long time getting the planning and mortgage arranged. When the NHS sold the site back in 2006 1 developer bought most of the site, however somehow another developer was able to buy the land that my plot and the cottage next to mine is on. Since then they had my plot for sale and the cottage next door but no one bought them. I think if they had cleared the site it would have sold sooner. What's nice as well is that someone else is now buying the old cottage next to our plot. He is going to start refurbishing it next month.

There’s a lot of victim shaming on BH. These c**ks are supposed to know what they’re doing. Self builders, householders and laymen clearly don’t so the onus should be on the c**ks being paid to clearly communicate what is and isn’t covered. JMTPW.

+1 to the wet run disk cutter. If you don’t have an easy source of a hose, you can get a pressure tank for them that is a bit like a garden sprayer. You can’t wet cut with an electric one so dust will be just as bad. I’ve got a 9” electric disk cutter and I still prefer my Stihl saw every time.

I know you all like photos. So here you are...... We now have internal walls in our basement. its all getting very real, the timber frame comes in seven weeks and I’ve not even ordered the windows, or a scaffold, or roof tiles, or rendering, or ASHP, or ventilation kit, or first fix anything! Time to get my finger out!

If anyone would like to visit an MBC frame (finished last week, not air tightness tested) then we would happily welcome fellow Buildhubbers (we are in Henley-on-Thames) It would make a welcome change from mopping the rain off the floors (roof is not watertight) ? Bring back the sunshine!