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Since we did the cost exercise we've been much more comfortable in making decisions on how money is spent. We know when we're going over our budgeted amount and by how much. Every grand we overspend we've got to either accept as an increase in total cost or rake it back by reducing some other line item. It's really helped keep perspective and makes managing the funds much easier. We also go with the fabric first approach, whereby we prioritise costs going into the fabric of the house where they'll last 50+ yrs (we hope), rather than items which can be easily replaced down the line such as kitchens, bathrooms, joinery and landscaping. This is very much in line with our plan for this to be a forever home, however your priorities my be different. Regarding the contractor; be on top of them and get those details for why costs are spiralling. Communicate the limits of your budget and the consequences for going over. Refer to contractual items if need be. If they provided a fixed price, then they accepted the risk of material and labour costs. If not, then unfortunately the risk is yours to bear. Get a dialogue going and try to identify where you can cut costs or what parts of the project can be de-scoped with the contractor. Worst comes to worst, try to get the project to a place whereby it can be neatly paused as you re-evaluate the financial situation and what it'd take to finish the project. That should hopefully give you the breathing-room to think clearly.

@zoothorn you need to oil the worktops when they are fitted BUT you need to fix them first with something waterproof. My go to glue for anything like this is Titebond - you can’t beat it for this sort of job. The bolts need you to rout a minimum 22mm depth groove and hole and you will have 8mm or less left - that will crack and shear and you will break it. I’ve just done 5 sections of this stuff with under mount sinks and 3 joins along both mitre joints and straight joints. I got it to 1/2mm or so and any filling was done using a mix of sanding dust and Titebond. (I have sanded these and refinished them using Osmo Top Oil for reference) All the joints are glued with Titebond, the straight joint was biscuit jointed. All joints are patched from below with 150mm glued and screwed ply panels. You can see a joint in the bottom left of this picture.

Thanks for comms JSH! you've helped alot yourself. Satisfying 2 days (no www)..

Just to add that you're very far from being alone - going unexpectedly over-budget seems to be something that hits a lot of self-builders, even some of the most prepared. In our case we managed to afford to get the house built so it was secure, we weren't prepared to cut corners on what we wanted (this is planned to be our last ever home), so I ended up doing far more work myself than originally planned and we still ran out of money. I've spent the last two years only doing work when I've been able to save some money from my pension, so it's been very slow going, and that delay has cost us a lot of money in interest payments, council tax on two houses, etc. All I can say is that you will get over this, and with luck you will get the house you want. As a final point, I would like to add that I think that some of the TV shows about self-build have a lot to answer for, in that they often seem to play down the true cost, and make self-build look like a more affordable option than it often is. My personal view is that they rarely, if ever, give the true cost of most of the builds they show, and that may well mislead a lot of people.

Ok take a breather and have a sit down with the builder and explain to him that as costs are starting to spiral you want to be more involved in this aspect. From now on you want prices for each part that is to be completed. As in for a basic finish, a med quality finish and a top quality finish. Then you pick the winner. You can't always go for the top quality no matter how much you want it if the budget is tight. Nothing is too be done without you signing of on it. This esp applies to all the lovely extras that the builder might be suggesting. Thing's like your plug sockets for example are easy changed further down the line. Same goes with light fittings, internal doors and handles, tiles, flooring etc. Loads of jobs can be done cheap and revisited in a few years Do out a spreadsheet of the list of jobs that need done and how much you have left out of the budget to do these tasks. I would also be asking how he was so much out on the costings for the garage. What has caused this near double in price difference?? It doesn't really matter if your husband doesn't want to hear it but you are going to have to explain it to him and both of you pull together to get the house finished. A simple look listen the build costs are starting to spiral but I reckon if we use the costings in this spreadsheet and make a few sacrifices on a few things I still believe we can do it. Don't be all doom and gloom.

I took your approach. I designed the house to have window sizes appropriate to the room sizes and the local vernacular. And included as much insulation as reasonably practical. However I did add on the "sun room" (not yet finished so I can't yet comment if it will work as I expect) The sun room has large windows on 3 sides but a proper well insulated roof (so not a conservatory) It is connected to the main family room via proper quality exterior double glazed doors (even though they are really internal doors) The theory is, if we need some additional solar gain, open the internal doors to let some heat in from the sun room. If we don't need the solar gain, keep the internal doors shut, and also open windows in the sun room to cross ventilate it and cool it down.

I managed to get a full day tiling the kitchen floor I’m working tomorrow so won’t be able to get there to grout till next weekend

In my day job I'm a mechanical engineer, and one of the big themes is how you work low cost (be that build or continued operation) into the design from the very first concepts. Some of it is well known (the Toyota Production System, Kaizen, Just In Time, etc.), but other aspects not so much - for instance each bolt is assumed to cost £1 in lost time, etc. so you should design out fasteners whenever possible. Some of you may be familiar with this graph: It doesn't quite apply to buildings, but the fundamental concept that cost is committed to extremely early in the design cycle, far earlier than 90% of people normally realise does apply. Since it directly applies to what I'm hoping to do in a year or two, I thought it would be interesting to apply these principles to the Passivhaus standard, and see where the logic takes me. Please feel free to jump in and rip this to shreds - I'm trying to ensure that I have a good grasp of the fundamentals driving cost when talking to my architect in the near future, since cost is one of the major hurdles for us. Fundamentally the Passivhaus standard has two requirements - one for heating (15 kWh/m2/year OR 10W/m2 at the design condition) and what is effectively a limit on imported energy. Historically the limit on imported energy has been very hard to meet, leading people to follow the 15 kWh/m2/year criterion and this has led to very well insulated houses where high performance glazing is used to provide a lot of the required supplemental heating. However, with heat pump performance having drastically increased in the past few years and PV becoming very cheap I'm not at all convinced that concentrating on this requirement is still sensible: PV and a heat pump can essentially be used as a controllable diode, shifting solar heat into the building when needed, while the improved heat pump COP means that the penalty from no longer using "free" solar heat from the windows is smaller. Interestingly, the 10W/m2 is much closer to a comfort criterion - achieving this means everything has to be well insulated with no drafts or cold surfaces anywhere. In cost terms the two approaches are quite different however - the energy criteria encourages the use of (expensive) high performance windows with increased area, while the power criteria encourages the use of relatively cheap, thicker insulation with less glazing. Heating system capital costs are also dominated by the peak heating power, while at anywhere close to 15 kWh/m2/year unless you're burning banknotes you won't be spending a lot to keep warm. From this I think a number of conclusions follow: The use of the alternative 10W/m2 criteria should be the starting point unless other design criteria (e.g. wanting large south facing patio doors onto a rear garden) mean that a lot of solar gain has to be inherent to the design. Wall, roof, and underfloor insulation need to be as thick as possible without affecting the cost very much. When the current aircraft carriers were being built the RN followed the mantra "steel is cheap and air is free". Cellulose insulation costs about £10/m2 of wall area to increase the thickness by 100mm and depending on the timber frame system used the associated timber costs should be quite modest. If I'm interpreting the PHPP modelling done when we were hoping just to extend and refurbish our house correctly, the energy impact of going from 300mm to 400mm is about the same as shifting from Part L minimum glazing to quite nice triple glazing. Use glazing to provide light and make a room a nice place to be, not to provide heating. This is likely to reduce total glazing area (and hence cost), and possibly help slightly with overheating. If going this route, the requirement for heating will be increased. To avoid this turning into a wall-of-text, I'll address this in a subsequent post if there is any interest.

It will go over the top - only reason I sanded it was there were a few ripples in the width and I was making a couple of right angle joins so I wanted it perfectly flat. It also gives a fine finish as it’s had 120 and 360 grit across it on a DA sander so it’s smooth

You could camouflage that tap to make it stand out less:

Have a look on eBay and see if you can get some fitted wardrobes locally. They are the sort of items that don't go for much as people don't want to collect large items generally so you may get a bargain even if it's something temporary until you can afford what you really want.

I think it's just that the relevant permitted development rights apply to a “dwellinghouse”. (Class E in http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2015/596/schedule/2/made). The Interpretation section (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2015/596/article/2/made) isn't overly helpful here but presumably a house isn't a “dwellinghouse” until you can dwell in it, which you shouldn't until you've got a completion certificate. Had this discussion with a planning officer on Orkney saying I might or might not want a wind turbine but it'd be PD anyway. Her reply: not until you're complete, better to put it in the application from the start.

That looks really good! Wood worktop looks so much better than the old tiled thing, and I wouldn't worry about the tap because it only looks out of place as it's new. It will soon become just part of your kitchen and large taps are pretty usual these days. Hopefully someone else will come along soon and help with the plumbing bits.

That's right, you only get PD rights after a completion certificate has been issued, normally, or unless the planners consider that the house is complete (for the case where a completion certificate is delayed - essentially similar requirements to the point where the LA will want to start to charge you Council Tax).

EIC = Electrical Installation Certificate Our supplier wanted one for the consumer side installation before they would fit the meter.

The exhaust filter won't change the indoor air quality, but will make the MVHR run more efficiently, as there will be less flow resistance on the exhaust side, Measuring air quality is pretty complex, and hard to do properly. A simple particulate counter, that measures particulates in two dimensional bins (say, PM10 and PM2.5) doesn't really tell you much on it's own. You can be pretty certain that a well-fitted F7 intake filter will keep out most particulate allergens and harmful stuff from vehicle exhausts, combustion devices etc, but there are loads of harmless particulate sources inside the home, from all those tens of thousands of skin cells being shed all the time, through fragments of fibres from clothing and furnishings, to dust mites and particulates created when cooking food. The harmful small particulates tend to come from combustion, so vehicle exhaust, burning coal, wood and oil, etc. There are also gases emitted from combustion sources that are harmful, like nitrogen oxides etc, which you cannot filter out. Finally, any new house will take time for all the volatiles used in its construction to evaporate out of the structure. There are loads of these, from adhesives used in lots of materials, through to the paint used in the house, and they can take several months to evaporate away. The MVHR will help a great deal, by guaranteeing regular air changes, so the concentration of volatiles should drop steadily over the months, but it can be a slow process before the majority of the volatiles have evaporated off, plus there will always be new volatiles coming in, on everything from packaging to printed media.

1) No, ours is right on the boundary with next door. 2) some DNO's get uppity if you take up space in "their" meter box. Use a small mini CU right in the top right corner of the meter box and you will probably get away with it with little more than a grunt of discontent. What happens next is highly regional dependant. I would suggest the TBS CU is present with meter tails already connected so the meter monkey can connect them to the meter. Having an EIC might smooth the waters if there is any uncertainty. In our case SSE supply a meter with a built in isolator and the electrician makes the final connection.

All the above is good advice, particularly The one thing that is not clear to me is whether you have a clear account of your total costs to date? How have you been paying the main contractor for work completed to date - has he recovered more than the cost work completed to date - was the payment method agreed based on a positive or negative cash flow basis to the main contractor,? Was it based on a % measured completion or on stage payments against agreed physically completed elements Your main contractor should now be required to detail the actual costs to date by each build element in your estimate. From this data, you should be able to look at fully completed elements - for example, foundations.. You can build then a detailed estimate of costs to go for each element - for foundations if 100% complete, cost to go is zero - and this will give you; A much more accurate estimate of final cost- you are now only dealing with cost to go. A much better idea of which elements you can influence by reducing quality, eliminating or postponing - you can no longer costs on anything finished or close to completion - you can no longer costs on anything finished or close to completion A basis for having a detailed discussion with your main contractor,- element by element - what work has to be completed on each element and when, cost estimate to complete and also the reasons for any overun on both completed and incomplete elements, so

I think before doing anything else you need to look at the contract you have with the main contractor. Can you explain to us why you have to pay the additional 9k for the garage? Has he simply bid really low for the work so he would win it, but is now going to hit you with additional costs for every aspect for the build? from my perspective to only unknowns in a build should really be the groundwork’s unless extensive surveys have been carried out before hand. For example on my build the builder gave costs for 3 courses of under build for the foundations but said any additional courses would be additional which was fair enough. Likewise he didn’t know exactly how much excavated earth would need to be transported off site so gave us a cost per m3, which again I was happy with. However once you are out of the ground I really fail to see how trades can’t estimate costs precisely if they are building a fairly standard design house with standard materials that they have experience building with. In in terms of saving costs, we are saving 7-8k by getting our kitchen units and worktop from DIY-Kitchens instead of one of the high street kitchen retailers. All appliances will be bought from eBay (have set up alerts on eBay when specific appliances appear).

@Jude1234 Can't really add much more than has been said already, but the main thing is you have identified the issue and at least can do something about it. Conversation with your OH is essential and not to be delayed.

Join the queue, Jude, join the long line. It's so long in fact I can't see you way down there at the back. Let's keep it simple. Turn the guilt into determined useful behaviour ; that was then, now is now. Forgive yourself. Move on. Take cost control into your hands. That means hard work on both your your parts; OH and you. Break the job down into chunks that are meaningful to you. Get a price for those. Make sure the price is agreed. Take notes, and share them with the trades person. Do not allow the trades to ' .... It'll be Ok, I'll get you a better price for that ... ' find out how much before mandating the work. You hate your rental . Move. Caravan? You won't be the first or last to do that. Communication; Very brave of you to be that honest and open. It's not an option to load one party with appropriate levels of responsibility. Being over-stressed at work is normal. Face it, own it, do something about it. Take control. Keep coming back to us all. Ian

Good luck to all selfbuilders, hope you will make even better controller... for those who want help Im available always by personal message.

And me too. Different budget same scale. I'm doing it all alone though , so no one to blame and no one share. From believing budget covered everything except things down to personal taste to discover it didn't - basically just the shell. And my budget was small and to be paid for from the sale of this house with the left over to cover retirement. Already retired but no pension to speak of for another 3 years (when it all went *&*( up. Builder wanted another 46k just to finish and that didn't include any personal choice fittings at all. That money just did not exist. I felt constantly for a month - which was the time it took to get the absolute walls finished and roof on and then sacked him. I've cut back all over the place, taken on the project management, with plenty of support from here. (Practical and emotional). And it's going to come in at about the cost he said - but now to include the windows, doors, kitchen, bathrooms, electrical fittings and flooring. I will have less than half what I had planned for for my retirement and I have regretted starting so many times BUT for all I am regretting it now, I do know that, in the long run, I would have regretted it more if I hadn't done it. My finished house may be small and certainly won't be high end but it will be plenty big enough for me, with much lower energy bills and very low maintenance . I'd also echo @newhome keep talking. We can be our own biggest critics but it won't undo what is done. You aren't the first and you certainly won't be the last.

Really sorry to hear this but it must be a relief to start discussing the issue with someone even if only on here for now. Hopefully the support you will get here will help you to put everything into perspective and understand how you can tackle the issue going forward. Then when you have everything straight in your head you can sit down with the hubby, explain the problem clearly and have some idea how you can move forward and take back some control. Some good advice above and I can't add much to it other than to say that I think the majority of self builders go through a budget wobble (or 2!) sometime during the build and have to take action to address so you are not alone by any means so don't go beating yourself up over it. The good thing is that you are tackling this before you get in any deeper. As others have said look for areas where you can economise and use this forum to seek advice on where to obtain the best prices for x and y. There are plenty of people on here with experience who will be able to advise how you can cut costs in specific areas without ending up with something not fit for purpose. Also don't rule out scanning the selling sites on Facebook, Gumtree or eBay for materials. You won't be able to claim the VAT back unless they are a VAT registered seller of course but if people have items left over from a project for example it can be much cheaper to source them that way anyway. The most important thing is to try to stay positive and to do what you need to take back control. You will feel much better having done so and it won't help anyone at all if you keep things to yourself and remain stressed to death. Keep talking, it helps x

I so know how you feel. I had the same although we did not use a main contractor but a project manager and trades. PM was in charge of budgets. Costs spiralled out of control and by the time we realised we were too far in to stop a lot of it........I say we I kept it to myself too, nearly caused me a breakdown by the time I eventually did come clean to OH situation was even worse. he was an absolute angel about it all, didn't change the horror of it but at least he didn't blame me. We got there in the end massively over budget and not all from over spending on items a huge amount was waste and mistakes and doing things over again....I didn't know most of what was going on.......like you we are useless at practical things and health does not permit either. He never wanted to build the house it was all me. Its a very hard lesson and I came out of it feeling broken by the experience. No one to blame but me. If you are at a stage you can pull back on some things then look closely, I was afraid of PM due to my ignorance, don't be afraid to confront your builder, I should have done it...and sacked him. Take back control you will feel better for it lots of helpful people to support you here. Good luck.

Sorry to hear that. At this point you need to find out where you are (ie evidence as to whether your fear is in reality justified, and to what degree are you howling at the moon on the basis of things you do not really know), and you need to identify potential savings amongst costs which are not sunk (sunk costs are things you cannot affect as they are already committed, though sometimes you can agree eg to a contract variation once and only once you know what you need to do). Sunk costs are spilt milk. Bit you need to work on a detailed level. If you are at second fix stage, then there is a lot you can still do - as finishes and furniture are where we spend a lot of our cash. And there are a lot of things for which you can get less expensive alternatives with a plan to replace in a few years or a decade eg laminate worktop not granite, 1.2k range cooker or £250 5 burner hob, not 5k range cooker etc. There will also be some things you *can* do eg painting the first coats or gardening, sweeping up or humping (metaphorically) bricks. Find them. This thread by @Visti is a fairly thorough 'reducing the budget' exercise, in search of something like iirc a 30% reduction. There are a huge number of good ideas. I think you also need to address this with the other half - you will both need a prop to lean on if you are making serious changes or hard decisions. What did Churchill say? "Action this Day", and then built his own brickwork. Best of luck, Ferdinand

@Matjaz, I'd be very interested to see your LV Directive and EMC Directive approvals, too, as I used to be a UK Head of Type Approval and an EU Notified Body, accredited to allow the use of the CE mark, some years ago. Selling a product in the EU that does not carry the appropriate approvals is a serious matter.

I checked the building regs for England and Scotland and the 40dB reduction only applies if the room can be used for sleeping, our gym could be classed as a bedroom. The regs also do not apply between an en suite and a bedroom and in England a wall which also has a door in it.

4mm² butyl should be fine, it's rated at 35A in free air and it's reasonable to assume some diversity on that 7.4 kW max that the hob could draw. IMHO. The one potential gotcha that slightly concerns me with our installation is that our supply voltage is always over 240 VAC, and with the PV generating on a nice sunny day we're often sat with the inverter limiting output because it's hit the 253 VAC limit. It seems our inverter soft limits and just reduces output when it hits 253 VAC, rather than shut down, which is a nice feature, but it does mean that the house is often operating with a supply that's around 250 VAC in nice weather. It probably doesn't effect a load like an induction hob, which almost certainly controls the true power to the coils, anyway, but it does impact on simple loads, like the resistive heater in the Sunamp, which runs at around over 8% above it's nominal power rating, and consequently draws over 8% more current than it's nominal current rating. I'm still trying to get the DNO to drop the tap on the local transformer, as even in mid-winter we never see less than about 240 VAC on the supply. I'm sure they could knock the supply voltage down by at least one 2.5% tap step and still stay well within tolerance. I'm pretty sure they could drop two steps and still stay within tolerance, as we're almost at the end of the cable (there's only one house beyond us) and two steps would only drop the mid-winter, max load, voltage down to about 228 VAC, still well inside the 216.2 VAC to 253 VAC allowable tolerance band, yet would allow us to export more in summer and reduce the max voltage we see by a few volts.

I very much like your approach @pdf27 . The equivalent to your £1/bolt metric I use is £30/watt - a rough estimate of the cost of provision of energy off-grid in winter. E.g., for calculation of how high grade windows and doors are worthwhile. There should be an equivalent metric for on-grid. Not just the p/kWh but for the marginal cost of generation capacity: how much does an extra watt of wind turbine cost or an extra watt of gas power (including the well in Qatar, the LNG plants, the ships, etc). I got rather mocked and dismissed by some Passivhaus worthies on Twitter for mentioning this approach. While Passivhaus has a lot to recommend it (it's probably the best standard currently available for, say, a design/build contract) I don't like the way it allows solar gain via windows but not by PV [¹]. Similarly some on GBF have argued for a “fabric first” approach which encourages bigger windows but doesn't allow for “eco-bling” (PV panels) which might actually bring in more net watts per pound. [¹] Yes, I know that more recent iterations of the standard do take on-site generation into account but I think it's still rather indirect. Much better, IMHO, to include expected generation (and variation of generation) directly in the modelling of the house's performance.

Good advice but sadly I'm not as good sawing with my bum.... Needed my eyes and hands outside the window. Ha ha... What I should have done is wait until the tall ladder wasn't being used and do it from outside but you know... I'm a get it done now person.

I hate trying to find other people's screw ups and then trying to fix them. That outside light cockup really had me going, especially as we'd been living with a switch that had a clipped live cable just tucked in the back box for over 18 years, I can understand hating domestics, there are always going to be bodged DIY stuff in any house that's a decade or more old, I suspect. Worst I've ever seen was when I was still lecturing. Over 90% of the students were South West Electricity Board apprentices, so I was known to SWEB. They had a case of meter fiddling, uncovered by the police during a drugs raid on a cottage. I was asked to assess the meter bypass method the druggies had used, as the SWEB guy hadn't seen it before. The usual method was to break the seal and lift the test link there used to be on old meters, which just stopped them recording energy. These guys had gone one step beyond and come up with a way of reversing current through the meter, using a modified Radiospares 50VA transformer. They rewound the secondary with two or three turns of heavy gauge wire, connected to one side of the primary and with both the heavy cables coming out and soldered to two insulated brass spikes. The other side of the primary was connected to a lead with a croc clip to connect to earth. It worked by poking the brass spikes up under the meter line connections, and when they were the right way around there was enough reverse current through the meter to make it go backwards, even when current was being drawn to feed the house. It was damned clever, but bloody dangerous, all the same.

Hey.... Today I feel amazing. Having a day off from the house as yesterday myself and my builder shifted 200 breeze blocks, 1 tonne of sand and a tonne of cement from the front to the back of the house and BOY do my muscles feel a bit zingy today. Mentally though I would like to be there progressing. I'm researching lead filters for the water mains as the cost of digging it all up and replacing and the stress is too much for now. I'm hoping I can get something. Yesterday I had the task of cutting a Budlea davidii out of an upstairs window sil ... best way to get to it was from inside, so I squeezed myself and a saw out of the tiny Edwardian Sash window and with awkward difficulty I cut the damn bush out. THEN I GOT STUCK!!!! It was hard enough to squeeze out but once out the girls had hoiked themselves over the frame and that was that.... You ain't getting back in unless you rip us off or grease yourself up like a swimmer! My builder thought it was the funniest thing ever as I shouted "Oh shit, I'm stuck in the window. My bloody boobs!!!" Anyway, with some squishing and squooshing akin to a baker kneading dough and a lot of strange noises I freed myself and am here to tell the tale!! NOW I know why cat's have whiskers. I will grow some post haste!

Have you asked on your local Facebook group? Quite a lot of recommendations seem to come from there these days.

We used full height glazing to the stairs in this open plan room and another stair / landing which works OK. Like @Russell griffiths said, safety glass and this was also laminated for fall protection.

Yep, had my own wobble this week. I tend to have a depressive episode around this time of year (second half of August, first half of September) and sort of know to discount it a bit. Last Sunday (19th) I went up to the site to try to finish off fitting the membrane on the west gable but what with the slight depression and it being the first day I'd been able to work at height for a week I was already feeling a bit frustrated. My safety glasses (needed most of the time for the reading bit on the bottom) kept misting up under the midge net and the scaffold tower was being awkward to put together and I rather lost it - threw a few bits of tower down pretty hard breaking one platform and one top ladder section. Haven't been up to the site since except to check that no other parts of the scaffold tower are damaged and to pick up post. Through the early part of the week I was pretty seriously thinking about giving up on the whole project. On Wednesday I went and had a look at the outside of a cheap ex-council house that's up for sale and started thinking through what I'd do with it, etc. Since then I've been thinking on two separate tracks at the same time: if or if not, while trying to do useful things to get out the depression cycle, which I am but still feeling a bit fragile. E.g., today moved most of my office stuff up from the living room to the small bedroom as that'll be a lot easier to heat in the winter. So, yeah, maybe this forum needs a Mental Health section. Whatever, reading and talking on here has helped. Thanks all. More amusingly, either I'm reading this wrong or you have very well-trained and dexterous dogs…

We have a full width window between our bedroom and the double height space above our kitchen/diner. It was inspired by pics we saw of Trevor Nelson's house a few years back: I think the idea can be very interesting if handled well.

Thanks Lizzie I know that husband will be okay with it but he has this hate of debt and so wants to keep the mortgage as low as possible. As well as the house we have had lots of other bills come in (son starting senior school so uniform shoes new glasses as his prescription had changed, car bill etc) so it is just a bit overwhelming