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A busy November saw all the trades coming good, albeit some were cutting it fine for the moving in day – 30th November – However, we have moved in with all the services up and running. Having said that, BT and Openreach have missed the deadlines and as a result we are without any internet, phone line or TV for at least a week! Also the master bedroom built in wardrobes are still be fitted. The landscapers have finished their work, providing us with a patio area and a driveway area which will see plenty of activity. Look closely and you should see the hedging that has been planted. 330 separate plants in all. This was a planning condition and the hedges are a mixture of Hawthorn, Beech, Holly and Maple. Locally referred to as native hedging. The turf will be laid next Spring. Our Air Tightness test was conducted by a guy from Perth - a good couple of hours away. We never set out to achieve such low levels because we didn’t want the capital outlay of such a system as well as the infrastructure it requires. Our score was 4.9 which in our eyes is very good. There are a number of minor jobs which I need to do such as touching up the paint work here and there; re-oiling some wood in places but all that can wait until we have given the whole place a deep clean. The main external jobs outstanding are the erection of the oak framed porch and the downpipes. Both of which should be completed within the next 10 days or so. Anyway, this was not a self build in the true sense of the words but it was project managed by myself and built using a main contractor and sub contractors after the TF had been erected. I hope you have not only enjoyed reading about our project but have found some useful bits of information within the blogs in order to assist yourselves with your projects, whatever that may be. Overall my experience has been a good one. It hasn’t been without its difficulties, such as additional unforeseen expenditure and additional expenditure as a result of our mistakes, or due to us changing our minds! Such examples include ordering the wrong door frame - we failed to realise we hadn't ordered a threshold suitable for level access - a mistake that cost us £1k. Changing our minds over the 3 toilets we had ordered. They simply looked lost in their respective environments so 3 new ones were ordered at an additional cost of £850. A failure to get a full grip of the scaffolding cost an additional £1k and a failure to budget correctly for the foundations and dwarf wall for the carport cost an additional £4k. Final facts and figures - Build schedule – 6 months from the day the TF arrived. Cost per sq metre - £1850 – includes everything, and I mean everything - from the scaffolding through to the landscaping and it includes the car port and porch [ still to be erected] but not the land or fees. Only two skips were used throughout the build – everything else was removed by us to the local dump or burnt on site – best investment was a £25 oil drum which we used as an incinerator. Thanks for reading - Paul.

But it would still be nice to have an acknowledgement they are aware of the problem and they are working on a solution.

That should be on T-shirts

I had a chat with Kevin from CT1. He covers the Midlands but is happy to talk / help on any CT1 related question. Some interesting comments: "Clear" products like CT1 are generally considered "weaker" than their coloured siblings. They don't add pigments. Apparently you can tell the difference if you pick up a coloured and clear tube of CT1. Early 2019 they are reintroducing their WT1 tanking membrane. Before it had to be trowelled on but they have revamped it to go on with a roller. They do a new Anthracite CT1. If you order a pallet or more (2500 tubes?) they'll do it in a RAL colour of your choice As to my enquiry ref using CT1 Power Grab n Bond to put tiles onto marine ply: If I was going straight onto the ply he said he'd have no issue. The fact I'm tanking he's worried about a reaction between the Aquaseal membrane and Power Grab n Bond. Anyone know what Aquaseal is, polymer, latex etc? He's suggested I stick a tile sample to a piece of tanked ply that has been then primed with tiling primer then another tanked but no primer. Nice bloke anyway if anyone has a CT1 related question: Kevin Cashin C Tec Midlands/ C Tec Ireland Mob: 07943 652135 Ire: 086 0465614 Ph: 0121 439 5823 Fax: 0121 2850253 www.ct1ltd.com

I was joking about the lack of enclosure! Friday eh? Should finish it off nicely. CT1 at the ready? I'm not sure yet whether I'll need a screen / enclosure. I quite fancy some bespoke, hinged glass doors like @Nickfromwales has posted a few times and I think @ProDave has done recently? Guessing £££ though! The hope is that the combination of the eventual UFH and overhead body dryer (both in but not connected) will help dry out my wet floor. It's funny but way, way back I did consider leaving the doorway I blocked up open to create a walk in shower cubicle. Behind this is a corridor hived off of the downstairs master bedroom. The area where the old wc is in the picture below is now the wet room corner. I could have used the other half of the corridor and had a slim, walk in shower/wc off the master bedroom. Never mind! Whatever, looks a bit different now: Hoping to finish off the bath boxing in tonight. Then it's tank it and tile! Still awaiting a call from CT1 about whether I can use their Power Grab n Bond to whack the tiles onto the ply. It'd make it super quick to tile. Bit concerned though if the stuff is instant grab/dry. I like the idea of it only being a relatively thin bonding medium. Give CT1 their due they did email me back asking for my mobile to discuss the issue, I just haven't heard back.

Winter is coming, the White Walkers are on the way and, in the meantime, grey snow arrived in my house on Friday. Allow me to explain. It seems that much of the artificial snow that you see on film sets is, in fact, made from blown cellulose, particularly to cover outdoor areas without damaging flora and fauna. I now know this after having some cellulose insulation inadvertently blown into the garage on Friday when the insulation found a gap in a board and made its way through. No big deal, it was spotted early on and most was re-used, but it struck me that, apart from the colour, it looked a lot like freshly fallen snow. As you can probably guess from all this, the cellulose is being blown into the house at the moment. Gordon and Keith arrived on Friday morning - a pair of very nice Welsh guys who do all the cellulose blowing for MBC and other passive type house builders, a job that keeps them busy as evidenced by the fact that they've been working on my place all over the weekend and will still be there on Monday morning. The cellulose delivery arrived ahead of Gordon and Keith as a palletised delivery. Not surprising, given that there were 570 12kg bags. That's a lot of cellulose. At this stage, Gordon can't say whether it will be too little, too much, or Goldilocks cellulose and just right, as it's ordered in by MBC on his behalf. Here's the delivery with the curtain sides just being opened on the lorry: One of the pallets toppled off the forklift so the driver and I hauled the bags into the house and stacked them inside and I got a couple of photos of the packaging detail for anyone who's interested. The process of putting the cellulose in is pretty straightforward. The bales of compacted cellulose are fed into a machine housed in Gordon's van that fluffs the stuff up. This then blows it along a tube terminating in the metal tube that goes into a hole that's been cut in the airtight board. As he goes along and the sections are filled, numbered cork bungs are put into the holes. The holes are only temporarily sealed with the bungs in case the cellulose settles or takes a little while to work into all the nooks and crannies, but once Gordon's happy that this has been done, the cut out disc of airtight board is put back in place and taped up with airtight tape. Because the cellulose is blown in under pressure, it will find any gaps or holes and do a good impression of fake snow. The leakage in the photo above came into the garage via a loose board right at the top, above the cassette of the twin wall, after it forced the gap open. It looked like loads - the entire floor was covered, there was a fair bit on the walls and a nice pile below the leaky board. it looks like more, but this is barely about 1 bagful. The guys have worked their way around the house, downstairs and up, getting the bulk of the cellulose in and leaving the fiddly bits over to Monday morning when they should be finishing up. One job that absolutely had to be done ahead of the cellulose going in was a bit of first fix work for the brise soleil. The brise soleil is a set of vertically arranged horizontal timber fins. The timber fins are fixed to a steel framework that, in turn, is fixed to the face of the building, around the opening for the window in front of the stairs. There are 6 fixing plates, 3 each side, and these need something behind the board of the frame for the coach screws to bit into and spread the load once they penetrate the frame. Reasonably straightforward, unless the cellulose has already filled those cavities. So come Friday morning, my all-round handyman and builder, Drew, was in cutting holes into the building to pack out the fixing points with some sturdy pieces of timber. Everything was taped back up again and ready for the cellulose and, in a couple of weeks, the steel frame for the brise soleil. Also in on Friday were the flat roof guys, finishing the final part of the garage roof. This is the last part of the flat roof work and I'm glad that it's all finished. I have to admit that I completely underestimated the amount of work involved on the flat roof side of things, not least the parapets that were fiddly. As a result, I've spent a lot more on getting this done than I had estimated before my quote came in and it also edged up with the amount of carpentry work that had to be put in ready to receive the membrane. However, I haven't busted my contingency on it and costs are still comfortable. Here's a photo of the finished garage roof. Skipping back to the beginning of the week, I had my garage door installed on Monday and I'm very pleased with it. I find it hard to get excited by a garage door, but in so far as it functions well and looks quite nice, I'm pleased. The door is made by Ryterna and I dealt with Joe at Dorset Garage Doors Ltd, just up the road from the house in the next village. He is a really nice guy to deal with and his team were very nice, too, so I'd be happy to recommend them. They also offer Hormann doors, but the Ryterna came in at about £1k cheaper, so that was the one for me! Joe reckons the major difference is that the mechanism on the Hormann door is slightly smoother. Personally, I'm not at all fussed if the mechanism on my door makes a little more noise for the sake of £1k. The door itself is a sectional one and the exterior is powder coated in the ubiquitous RAL 7016 to match the windows. We've had a bit of a tidy up on site this week, as well. It was badly in need of it and I knew that I'd need the space in front of the house for the cellulose coming in and, once that's done, all the other deliveries for the internal workings of the house. There's plenty more tidying to be done, but we'll wait for the rain to stop for that. Speaking of rain, it was awful weather here last week, as it was for much of the country, and the storms lashed Dorset. I'm still getting some water ingress via the windows, but it's not the fault of the windows. I understand water ingress much better now having gone through so many different forms of it during the build. The current one is because the south southwest face of the building gets the brunt of the weather and the cladding isn't on yet. As a result, the blue paper membrane is saturated and the water seeps in around the edge of the window frame and the window opening and comes into the building. It's not a vast amount and will dry out quickly enough and I'm not stressing over it as my upstairs slate cladding starts going on Monday. My only concern here is that I need some first fix done for the motorised external roller blind that I'm having on the upstairs south window (this is the one with the worst of the water ingress) and my supplier was caught out by this. I've been telling him for a couple of months that his stuff needed to go on as first fix and before the cladding, but he decided that this wasn't the case and put things off. When he finally came down to measure up, he agreed that it did need to be done as first fix, but I don't think he will have his order from the factory before that wall is ready to be clad. I may have to do a bit of juggling, but it's really annoying when people don't listen to what you're saying because they think they know better, without even having looked properly. So tomorrow sees the site getting really busy again. The (pitched) roofers are back in to do the vertical slate cladding. The slate is the same stuff that's on the roof and will be riveted in. The only part of the upper storey that doesn't have the slate is the surrounding of the brise soleil window, which will be the Tier cladding. Also in is Nick and team who will be working on first fix for all the systems going in. Drew will be helping out with boarding and general carpentry work that needs doing so that equipment can be properly position up in the loft space and elsewhere, and I daresay the alarm system guy may be along at some point, too. My groundworker, Keith, is due in at some point next week and we're aiming to get Paul's pond dug out. This will be an ideal test to see just how well that clay of ours holds water with the winter rains coming in and it will, hopefully, confirm our thoughts that we don't need to line it. Judging by the moat around the house right now, we're feeling reasonably confident. More to follow next week.

I thought you’d been drinking. It’s that time of year again ?

Oh... easily confused I am...I should know better, been following this since the first post.

You can allocate space in the room with the WC or an adjacent room or cupboard that can be reconfigured.

They'll use the address they've agreed with you - they just won't put in on the PAF database without you paying a crazy huge fee that people posting from other LAs in Scotland so far (Borders, South Lanarkshire, Aberdeen) don't have to pay.

So far this winter I am averaging less than £1 per day for space heating. I am not losing sleep at how I will pay the bill. If we were serious about climate change and reducing fuel use, a house like ours would be normal, not just something a few of us strive to build. And this is the Highlands, -9 last night, daytime high today -6, but you would not know it unless you step outside (I guess the frost on the outside of the windows might give a hint)

Nice...looks sturdy!

On a whim I filled in the online form on Monday and have just received an email confirming our address would be live on the database within two days. Nice!

Now be honest, it was the shape that attracted you?

I would have probably discovered that technique after my first attempted coupling started hissing and leaking at mains pressure. ? Anyhow I expect some posh shears to arrive tomorrow for less than the hourly rate a plumber would charge to fix my hacksaw budged joints.

Yes a great question and one Mrs W and I have chatted about. I will answer these points as I think it is important to address them. However I will do so in my next entry as I would like to show the porch in all its glory once it is erected. ?

Ratchet cutters are so clean and easy to use and if you install UFH or use Hep20 type pipe for plumbing later on they will always find a use.

Forgot to say when I used to use a hacksaw you would have to clean the swarf with a Stanley knife.

I used to use a hacksaw but use these now, https://www.screwfix.com/p/rothenberger-rocut-38-0-38mm-manual-plastic-pipe-shears/48561 read the reviews they are good .

Nice thought, but it was an absolute nightmare getting the 150kg UniQ up stairs, and I really don't want to have to get it back down to send off, then haul the ~60kg of Sunamp PV upstairs in its place, unless I really have to. If there is a modification to the Qontroller that fixes the utilisation issue then that's much easier to implement, as in all probability it could be as simple as blowing some new code in via the JTAG port, or just swapping out the control PCB, and maybe the temperature sensing string. Either of those is a ten minute job, that wouldn't need any heavy lifting.

It's in Lancashire so according to Greenpeace you are now an existential-threat-due-to-the-earthquakes area, once they do more fracking. Better make some more holes and put nails in those too !

Ask for the old one back until they’ve addressed this issue ?.

Looks like an Ideal crimper - S’fix sell them as do others.

Skirting and window boards are a long way down the list, somewhere after doors and door liners.

Not sure if this helps with perspective but the picture shows a coil of 32mm MDPE x 50m on top of a pallet of other bits.

Again not quite true. Screws are not nails they are usually of different materials, have a smaller cross section at the root of the thread, and behave differently to nails in this instance and twist nails are not crude screws.

Well ! What a difference proper tools make . This push thru crimper is excellent . Also the new cable tester is great ( display a little poor to read as unlit ). So far out of 5 fitted rj45 ‘s ZERO failures .

The AAV is there to prevent a vacuum build up as a slug of waste and water goes down the foul drain. There's a risk that without it the partial vacuum in the pipe might cause the pan to back up as it refills after the flush.

I have a pretty old pneumatic first fix nail gun that never, ever jams. Stick frame builders in the USA seem to exclusively use pneumatic nailers for some reason, that's where mine originally came from. One the other hand, I noticed that the Paslode gas nailers that the guys fitting our cladding used needed to be cleaned every now and again and would periodically jam. My guess is this is down to the residue from gas combustion, a bit like the muck that builds up in a gun. All the pneumatic nailer needs is a drop of oil now and again and it just keep going.

Just make sure before you nail them home you check and check and check again to make sure they are in the correct position. Them twist nails are easy to hammer in but a real pain in the arse to take out. And just nail every hole.

Superb, well done.

I find that if I stop, I take a long time to start again. Therefore I cannot stop, every night i'm out there doing something for minimum 3 hours it is difficult with 3 kids under 6, to balance work, build and supporting the wife, but If I don't do it, no one else will...

Lovely looking house - moving in is such a great feeling!

The poured walls will be airtight for sure, just concentrate on junctions. Any blockwork, 5mm parge coat and wet plaster if you can, or dot and dab with continuous ribbon of adhesive around edges

I wouldn't fret, the council are unlikely to do anything to you, unless the neighbours complain. But BMBC are enforcing this as a condition with a developer in Barnsley. It does need to be a solid bound material, tarmac, paving etc.

As everybody said you must be so proud. You have built a house while we wait for our windows to be finished, so jealous! The house looks lovely and when the landscaping is finished it will sit nicely in its surroundings.

See how much you have done between those two photos stop being so bloody doom and gloom all the time doing a bloody good job some blokes can’t even change a plug. Crack on son looks smashing ??

THe golden rule is do nothing, or at worst absolute minimum, unless the EA tells you that it will make good value as a mini renovation project, or it makes it easier to sell when it would otherwise be difficult. In this case you may find that 95% of customers would not even notice the changes, unless it makes a material difference to something that aids sellability or is a big benefit to one of ten areas that makes a difference. Or I guess removes a millstone at minimal cost. Your passion is probably now with your new life not the old one, so spend the time and money on that unless there is good reason. GO on holiday instead. F

It is def a desirable place. You should be pleased.

An oldie but a goodie!

Back on the subject of washing...... Consider mounting your washer and dryer higher up if you have the room. Makes it so much easier on the back! You need to design the carcass/units well as it’s subject to a fair amount of vibration if you’ve got your big pants on a 1400 spin Heres mine and I don’t think I could go back to ground mounted.....

+1. There's some proper weirdos on here...

They can indeed! Looking at the (somewhat scarce) data that's available, it seems that a ten year life is a reasonably good bet, so that's probably around 2500 to 3000 cycles in practice (winter not being great). Clearly the sums don't quite add up, as 2500 cycles at a notional 80p per cycle (ignoring round trip losses etc for simplicity, and assuming that electricity prices don't increase over the next 10 years) gives a nominal return through life that's around the same as the capital investment (exc. VAT). However, what are the less tangible benefits worth? For me, having the ability to run some limited stuff during power cuts would be very useful (we had another three hour power cut last Thursday, for example, and will get several more through the winter, I'm sure). Hard to place a value on this, though. There's also the "feel good" factor of using more of the energy you generate yourself. Impossible to pin a value on, but nevertheless something to be considered when making an investment, much like the make, model and colour of car one decides to buy. I think the price of these system is so close to break even as to probably be worth the investment, given that I believe we are likely to see a significant increase in electricity price over the next 10 years. That alone may well tip a battery investment over into being profitable, who knows?

me too - probably with me inside it

Can you not get a broken large compressor and use the tank as a storage vessel im not up on the system but I know on an American garage forum I used to use it was common to have a larger storage unit with a smaller compressor topping it up.

When I decided to go with that system, we had an alternative kit quote from Deeside TF. Although they were cheaper for the same U values, all insulation would have to be fitted on site, and having worked out the time / cost of that, the Supawall wons hands down. Compared to previous kits where tolerances were very elastic, the Supawall kit was mm perfect. A lot of time went into ensuring the soleplate was fixed according to the critical frame dimensions, but when the kit arrived and was craned into place (we had one 10 metre panel) it went like clockwork. Simple quick and effective, with each piece sliding in and interlocking with the next. It certainly persuaded the contractor I was using that such systems were the way forward. It was the first time he had built with it, and had been a little reluctant, but having erected the frame in just over two hours, he came to me and said all houses should be built this way.

Loving this thread! I'm just waiting for the passive house police to come along (and to be frank I've seen a few posts from current and past forum members along these lines). So don't forget some of the important rules: 1. Kill the cat, cat flaps will not be tolerated. 2. Remove or reduce all windows. I know you've bought a plot with a view but seriously saving on your energy bills is way more important than a view. 3. Make sure you go paperless for ALL bills etc. There is no way you are having a postbox. 4. Bury your partner under the patio. Far too risky that they may open a window. 5. Kill the dog. Can't think of a reason why other than enjoying yourself cannot be tolerated. OK, I'm having a bit of fun BUT you are going to drive yourself to the edge of insanity doing this self build lark, nothing is more stressful. SO BUILD YOURSELF A HOME NOT A HAUSE!

I had the same predictable answer from the Royal Mail