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I finally made a start on the floor tiling this afternoon I really could do with a week off to get on with it ut paid work has to come first

I think there are a few young self-builders on here. I'm 32 (if that's young!) and wanted to self build for the last ten years. We were fortunate in having a piece of agricultural land available but we had to spend money to make it into a plot (access/levelling off/utilities). Since we graduated we have saved every penny towards this dream. Even before starting anything we had to invest all our money into converting a loft into accommodation at my wife's parents. This has provided the base for us to live for five years and save, save, save. We started with zero savings and will hopefully when finished have a mortgage that will be around £250 a month. We are not building to a passive house standard but we have used triple glazing etc and a good standard of materials. The sacrifices we have made during these ten years will pay dividends for hopefully the rest of our life. We had some days where we just thought it wouldn't be possible at our age, but as I've mentioned before, this forum and ebuild have been great for the occasional question, but mostly for providing me with the confidence that I could do this. The blogs are the best bit. A lot of my generation just don't save hard enough. Spend money on phones, running multiple cars etc. Or just mortgage themselves to the eye balls in a cheap poorly constructed developer house.

Shouldn't this have been hived off to a separate thread? Crushing concrete excites me, the rest of it bores me silly tbh.

Just some info that may be useful to someone. Went up to the new house. It was absolutely bucketing down, torrential. It was the first real test of the floor to ceiling velux windows in the bedrooms. I couldn't believe how quiet it was. We have a velux windows in our cottage, they are very noisy in heavy rain. Well worth the extra for triple glazing & noise reduction. Very pleased.

Hi all - a few photos showing the house 95% plaster boarded and some plastering started. Just the cloakroom and plant room off the utility room to complete. Somewhat frustratingly, we will have to wait a full week before the plasterer returns, which holds up the decorating and second fix joinery. The ceilings for the first floor have had two layers of plaster boards fitted, which helps with sound proofing. Whilst this has been going on, the stone ,an and his labourer have really cracked on and finished the front of the house. The stone has been taken up to just above head height around the rest of the house. they just need to build up from there and to do the external chimney. The kitchen fitter came out to do final measurements and noted that the external waste pipe in the utility room was a bit snug to allow both the washing machine and tumble dryer to fit in, so has recommended a breakfast bar type work top which is 665mm as opposed to 600mm deep. This will allow sufficient room at the back for the appliances and removes the hassle of having to adjust the pipework / drainage. The next phase will see the plastering completed and the second fixes started. Outside I hope to see the house fully stoned and the chimney started. We'll see.

I remember going into my local with a load of mates, the landlord asked what’s the occasion? It was my 18th, I’d already been a regular there for about four years!

Yep, and energy use will, for example, vary according to the number of inhabitants, their lifestyle, etc, but I merely think that the one number almost everyone will understand is one that gives them an indication of the money it will cost for the energy one home will use when compared to the next. That's what EPCs are supposed to do, but very few people even read them. As for my own motivation for projecting this cost per m2 per annum, it came in part out of a conversation in the pub with mates, trying to explain how much cheaper our house is to run than our previous property. That was a circa 190m2 house built in the late 80's. Our total energy costs there equated to more than double the kWh/m2a of the new house. There's still only two of us living in it, so it follows that the major difference in cost will largely have been due to the space heating cost (due to the relatively poor air-tightness and insulation). As for the AECB standard you mention, thank you (I think) but like the vast majority of Joe Public, certificates are of no particular interest to me, the piece of paper (virtual or otherwise) that matters is the energy bill. In short, I personally feel (and this is not a dig at any of you who strive for one standard or another) that the way to encourage more energy efficient homes is to sell the cost saving potential to buyers, not that it has passed some (to them) meaningless standard.

Yep, 15 kWh/m2/year or 10W/m2 peak demand (AIUI you can choose either criteria, but they typically come out pretty close to one another) are the delivered heating values, measured as heat. Essentially they're the "comfort" side of the equation - if you're that low (roughly) you won't have any problems with cold draughts, variable temperatures, etc. The 10W/m2 is also set by the practical limit for heat delivery via the MVHR system at no more than 50°C (the burning smell limit) from resistance heat - a cheap way of doing things but I'm not convinced that it's a particularly good one. The 120 kWh/m2/year primary energy in the older version of the standard is the environmental impact side of the equation - they've now essentially translated it into electricity (sorta) from primary energy and revised the targets to be quite a bit lower to match the earlier standard, more or less: PER is essentially a way of trying to match supply and demand of renewable energy by penalising use when there isn't renewable generation available. If you're using it at the time of generation it counts as 1 unit of power used for 1 generated. If it's in short term storage (heat, battery) it's a bit less, if in long term storage (electricity to gas) it's a lot less. They then add in country-specific factors to allow for when demand is likely to occur versus what resources are available (so Norway will be just fine with all the hydro - the UK will be worse with lots of wind, and somewhere relying only on PV will be hit very badly I suspect).

I'm in that age bracket (37) and there are a whole bunch of interlocking impediments: Cost - unless you're very well paid and have support from your family (I'm fortunate on both counts) you're going to be in a shared ownership flat or at best terraced house. That's a reflection of the ratio of house prices to earnings, and of the fact that young people start out with minimal savings, relatively low salaries (compared to later in their working life) and often a lot of student debt. Self-building an individual flat is rather hard. Related to this is deposit size - getting a 100% or 95% mortgage is hard, getting one for a self-build project is much harder. If you're not living in a caravan on site (may not be possible for a small site), the rent requirements will bring down what you can borrow further. Refurbishing somewhere is much easier financially - the houses that need it (typically where an older person has lived for decades without doing anything, and has now died or moved into care) are easily found at the bottom of the price range, and the work required can be done incrementally on a DIY basis. We originally planned to do this with our current house. Finding time to work on it is hard - it wasn't too hard on our first refurbishment, but now I've got a bit more money and can contemplate something a bit more ambitious I'm married with two young kids (2 and 4). They, of course, also soak up a lot of my income for childcare. The reality is that we can't do very much of the work ourselves because of this - and that pushes the price up further. Young people tend to be quite geographically mobile, and will follow the work far more than older people who are settled with families. Problem is, that means you're likely to relocate every ~5 years (i.e. about the time it takes for the full self-build process), and you're also disproportionately likely to be working in London or the South East where land is much harder to obtain.

Don't you find that effort on someone's part is the most engaging thing? We had a delivery driver who - with me - had to handball several tonnes of blocks off his lorry. (His pallet truck went u/s) " 'S awright mate , 's a bit of chance to work me beer-belly off " I made sure I rang the the company and asked for the MD, and told him how pleased I was. Top bloke. But humble.

I have our 10mm softener drain pipe running for around 2m at a guess, it flows into an open bit of 32mm vertical waste pipe that is at the side of a cupboard downstairs, mainly so that I can check it's flowing freely. The overflow pipe is a larger diameter and probably needs a low flow resistance drain, as, unlike the drain pipe, the head is very low, just a few mm or so. I have mine connected a bit like @PeterStarck above, into a waste pipe (above a trap) but I do have some slight concerns about this. One of the known failure points on the Harvey-type twin cylinder softeners is the water fill valve letting by, which causes the brine level to rise and flow out the overflow. It's an easy to fix fault (just clean the fill valve usually, from what I've read) but I'd like to have some visible indication that there is flow from the overflow, rather than the indirect indication of high salt consumption. I may fit clear pipe to mine as a way of checking easily, without needing to lift the lid and have a look. The only other thing I can think of with mounting the softener higher up, is that you may need a way to bleed air out of it, depending on the pipe runs. When I was having problems with the ultrasonic flow sensor in the Sunamp PV shutting the unit down, I found it was as a consequence of having a lot of very tiny bubbles of air in the incoming water supply, and some of that was traced to air pockets in the softener. I re-arranged the pipework on the outlet side so that it was higher than the softener and that seemed to help.

Steady on! I'm going to start small with a coffee table! Been looking on eBay at getting some resin...not sure what!

Like that - I have made lots of compromises but have stuck out for some things - bifolds over sliders for example. The island lighting will be more obvious than the island itself

I’ll add myself to the borderline under 40’s. No passive house build here, just a big returb. But trying to make it sensible cost to run. I was 6 weeks past the post when we moved in last year. Is the mortgage big, yes! Did we make a bit of money, yes! Will I care in 10 years once we’ve broken the back of it? Probably not.

I have a foul drain coming up in the corner of my insulated slab. Doing my final checks ready for concreting next week I realised that the pipe coming up out of the floor was too short and once the concrete was laid it did not leave enough room to slide the next coupling onto it. So I found a longer peice of pipe, pulled the short one out of the hole and slid the longer peice into place. Then doubt set in! As the coupling was hidden below the insulation how could I be sure it has stated properly? I shon a tourch down the pipe, but couldn’t see the joint, do what next? I decided the tie a peice of string to my phone and turn the video on and lower it down the pipe, after a bit of trial and error and with the aid of a small tourch tied a few inches about the phone, I had confirmation, the joint was OK. If only I could share the video, it’s a sight to behold.

We’ve got secondhand granite and a custom made oak section for the breakfast bar. Whole lot cost about 750quid or so. Plus a fair amount of faff... the Oak was from worktop express as it happens. For what it’s worth the stone is lovely, exquisite. But functionally equivalent to a bit of 40quid laminate ?

I really don't get the fashion for stone worktops at all. Every house we've ever owned, bar our old house and the new one, has had laminate work tops. I can't ever remember having any significant problem with them over the years, with the exception of the worktops originally fitted in our old house, where the person that fitted them failed to seal the joints and positioned one joint right next to the sink. Needless to say water got in and made it swell. In terms of the surface, all seemed easy to clean, durable and generally fit for purpose. I replaced the laminate in our old house with some laminated together double layer 18mm MDF, topped with ceramic floor tiles, and that's worked OK, but was a lot of work. The new house has Silestone, but it cost well over £7k, and frankly I don't think it's good value, but it wasn't my decision...

Thanks - it must be available elsewhere back to back is a considered idea that floats my boat - make a feature of it. I am definitely following this up Thanks

Buy it. It is the mutt's nuts. It's the one I bought for work. Smoother than a fresh jar of Skippy as Bruno Mars would say. So quiet you can have a normal conversation whilst welding.

Think when Dave goes out for a day in the new boat the wife and daughter will have it cranked up to 55 and be enjoying hot water that would take the skin off a man.

You start by making energy reflect its true costs. It doesn't. A carbon tax is the way of achieving this, and pretty much all economists agree it's the right thing to do.

I'm afraid this pace is darn sarf - http://www.mitchellsworktops.co.uk/laminate-worktops.php - but have a flick through the brochures they link to - it lists all the stock sizes they come in, then find somewhere local to get it.

I did the "loose fit" insulation and I suppose it took me 5 - 6 days - a steady pace with plenty of tea breaks ! The plaster boarding upstairs took two guys probably two weeks [10 - 12 days maybe] and they have managed the downstairs in a week due to the nature of the rooms - fewer angles and corners than upstairs I suppose.

I think you are right that the present system has no trust. Look at @JSHarris house. He had accurately modeled the structure of the house and determined it would warrant a C, but the assessor had his own ideas, made sweeping assumptions ignoring the facts he was given and gave a poorer rating. But people still buy old houses with an EPC of F or G, and then complain they are cold, damp, and cost a fortune to heat.

As always it looks fantastic and super clean but what on earth is that big dividing line in the front stonework! . Please don’t take offence I am sure there is a rational explanation (expansion gap) but as a guy who has worked stone most of his life I am a little shocked ! Maybe I need to read earlier bogs to find out what’s going on. As i said it all looks amazing but I am baffled by that joint.. the family are away and I had a very very rare glass of wine so maybe it’s me overreacting on alcohol.

Yes, what a shame we got distracted before she reached our bedroom! The kids' bedrooms are virtually squeal free!

I don't believe MBC timberframe houses are any more susceptible to noise transmission then any other manufacturer, or even traditionally built houses. It's a key element of design that has to be be carefully managed in all house builds and most of the areas to be addressed are identified in the contributions above. It's an element of the build that requires more attention and a budget. Unfortunately, it's an element of the build that nearly most of us failed to recognise as a potential issue, when we were grappling with all the things that were of a higher priority at the time. I had the advantage of seeing a several timberframe builds and did address some of the design issues, as detailed above, but I could have done more at minimal extra cost and had better performance. Just like @jack and others , we have some minor squeaking of the floor in the master bedroom ( though I think it is not a bouncy floor, but the UFH system I used is a floating system and was not laid, as well as it could have been) and the impact noise transmission is not great ( but luckily, we don't have teenage children, only occasional younger grand kids ).

Teenagers of either gender try to look older, I think. I remember going on holiday with some friends when I was around 17 and us all having a competition to grow the best moustache (droopy moustaches were fashionable at the time). Our main motivation for wanting facial hair was so we'd more easily pass for 18 in a pub...

They are sold to you on the basis that you will save energy. But ONLY if you watch the display like a hawk, realise how much is being used, and turn something off. The hidden agenda, is smart meters have half hourly metering built in, so have the ability (only 1 supplier implements it so far) to charge different rates at different times of day. Are you happy to pay much more if you want to cook your dinner in the normal early evening "meal time"?

Aren’t there still issues with switching suppliers if you have a smart meter? I’m avoiding having one forever if I can. No interest in it. Just want them to get my bills correct using the current system first!

I built my first house in my early 20's, primarily on the basis that having looked at a couple of terraced developer starter homes (I distinctly remember going into the first one and asking where the lounge was - the sales woman said your in it - a glorified corridor with staircase!) I worked out I could build something bigger, and detached by self building. I started out with precisely zero savings, borrowed to fund everything. I (and my wife) made the decision to forgo holidays and material items to get the house we wanted. It was a choice. Scoffed at by others over the course of the years for being tight fisted and not having the latest mod cons, new car etc, the same people moan when it all comes together and you have a really nice house, and little or no mortgage. I could have built my current house for a lot less if I had made different choices, but they were my choices. I'll relate these in my blog in due course.

Only if you WANT a smart meter? What reason can you give me that a smart meter will be a benefit to YOU?

Same here, it’s my preferred choice. It’s not for everyone that’s for sure and I don’t push it but for me I love being resourceful and tracking down second hand kit and materials. I have been in both camps, once I ran a company that made a lot of money and I had less time to do the whole up-cycling, but that money enabled me to buy my place for cash. I now have VERY little money but I have an amazing property and am really enjoying the challenges of doing things well on a very small budget. Yes it’s taking an age....but I love the journey so it’s all good.

various people have detailed breakdowns on their blogs, but you will have to look. I can give you one ? Finishing : everything left + available card balances + 10%. F

I'd be very interested too, to see how it stacks up with what my builder told me. I suppose a lot depends on the quantity of material that can be processed per hour, and the quality of said concrete... I had a lot of rotten rock on my site, and top soil / sub soil riddled with stone. It did cross my mind to riddle it, but I thought the cost would be prohibitive. It really would be interesting to find out how it would have stacked up vs the cost of buying in and transporting aggregate to site. @epsilonGreedy I was looking back at your intro post. Am I right in thinking this is your 1st self build? I've built 6 now, and have learnt on all of them, not least how damn exhausting it is and the trade off between time / cost / sanity. There are many different ways to skin a cat...

Exactly the same remit I had so as I said, come and have a look

Noooo, there were discussions about not having the loos back to back!

I love this house. Really looking forward to seeing it emerge like a phoenix into something amazing.

Good luck with the build and hope it all goes smoothly

Wow! That is a house I would have loved to build - If I had the sort of money to throw at someone who came with personal recommendations to do everything for me - ready to just walk into at the end

Bloody Hell, someone's switched on as to where they're going! Welcome & good luck!

WOW - a great looking house and I shall look forward to seeing this unfold - good luck.

Looking to be a great project - good luck with it all.

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.

@Pete currently I am glad that the windows have a 12 week lead time because they are what is going to delay us getting wind and water tight. The timber frame kit was going to be up 2 - 3 weeks before the windows arrive. However I have since changed the first floor layout which is now delaying the timber frame. We should get wind and water tight on the same date but it helps me justify to the wife that the first floor changes aren't delaying the build.

As I have said before you will look back with pride one day when you see all the hard work you have done to build the house of your dreams. Happy building!! ( Don't mention windows!)

Exciting times!

Fantastic! Brilliant photos, too. It must be a very exciting time for you.

Must be exciting to finally start! How come there was plot available on its own seemingly surrounded by developer built houses?

Que?