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And so almost another month has gone by but progress is still being made on the build and, just as importantly, hubby and I got away for a week's holiday in northern France just as the warm weather hit. After our abject failure at R&R over Christmas, it was wonderful to have a really relaxing break without illness or stress and come back refreshed for the final push on the build, which is just as well as there's a busy time to be had over the coming weeks. In the last blog entry, I detailed some of the painting and kitchen fitting that had been going on and there's been more of this recently. I've been getting the colour coats onto the walls upstairs but haven't managed to complete a room yet apart from the kitchen, but I'm generally pleased with the neutral colour choice. I say generally, though, because in the lounge, the different light in there makes the wall colour bring out the warm tones of the internal window frame finish which makes them look a slightly odd peach colour. It's not awful and I'm not going to change it now, but if we ever redecorate (hah!) it will be something I check before committing. For the more vertiginously challenged amongst you, you may wish to look away now, as here's a view from the top of my internal scaffold tower when I was putting the colour coat on up to the vaulted ceiling above the gable window in the guest bedroom. And here are the colour choices. The purple will be on one wall only. It looks a bit garish at the moment but once the room has its furniture and soft furnishings in, it should tone well and add a bit of life to the room. Cutting in and painting up to the high vault was a bit of a challenge, but I got there. I really didn't want to get any colour spatter onto the white ceiling so opted to use paint pads rather than a roller and I was pleased with the outcome. They give a good finish over the sprayed mist coat and are far less physically demanding than a roller. I was painting upstairs as the flooring guys were in downstairs putting in the karndean (same choice as upstairs) and it kept me productive but out of the way. Given all the work that went into making the dropped section of the ceiling in the lounge area, I wanted the floor to echo this but not in too obvious a fashion and so the team took a laser reference from the inner square of the lounge feature and reversed the direction of the planks, using a feature strip to create a subtle border. First, though, they had to screed the floor with a latex self levelling compound. In preparation for this, I needed to turn off the UFH a few days before they arrived to make sure the screed didn't go off too quickly due to the heat of the slab. I turned it off on a Friday afternoon and they started work on the following Tuesday and it was just about perfect. Once the screed was down, the floor was scraped to make sure it was completely level and then primed. After the priming, the planks were put down. Here is the snug - I went in the weekend before the flooring guys arrived to get the mist coats and ceiling painted as it's far easier to do when you only have to mask the windows and not worry about any other area. Here's the long view of the kitchen/lounge area: And here's a close up of the feature border underneath the ceiling feature: Moving on from the flooring and painting, my joiner, Harry has been busy at work on the kitchen. In particular, he was working on the large walnut work surface for the island. I decided months ago that I wanted solid walnut for the island but then, as I'm sure happens to many, I had a last minute dither and started looking at other materials instead. In the end, I decided that granite or other stones really didn't give the colour tones that I wanted and laminates weren't wide enough. I sourced the walnut from Worktop Express as they were very competitively priced for what I wanted, and delivery was quick. I looked at using their online template service, but it was just too tricky to get the different profiles right and, in the end, decided to get Harry to make up the island top on site. It was absolutely the right choice as he's done a lovely job on it. Here's a photo of the finished top with the induction hob surface mounted into it. A word on the hob. You can recess the work surface so that the hob is flush, but I preferred it to be surface mounted, sitting proud of the walnut, purely from a cleaning point of view and so I don't have to spend ages digging out crumbs and bits of food debris from around a flush recess. These are the two worktops as they arrived from the supplier, waiting to be joined together. Harry routed along their length, used a biscuit join and then glued and clamped. The worktops being clamped. They look and, indeed, are lighter in shade than the first photo as they come treated with one coat of Danish oil. Harry put a further two coats on once he had sanded the finished surface. The area where there appears to be a base unit missing and where the surface projects beyond is intended as a breakfast bar area. There will be a supporting leg on the near right hand corner. Because the kitchen and island are large, I didn't want anything to be too matchy-matchy and wanted to break up any monotonous areas. Also, I didn't fancy walnut as the worksurface leading off the sink as I think that's asking for trouble in the long run. So, I went hunting through laminate choices. Way back when I was first considering the kitchen, I had been thinking about using large format tiles with a metallic type finish as the splashback, but it was proving to be a gruelling and not very fruitful search. When I eventually revisited this part of the kitchen a couple of months ago, I came across some laminates with exactly that type of finish, nice long runs (I need a 4m run for the back work surface) and with matching splashbacks. I also wanted to line the recessed area under the island with the same material to make it more durable and give a contrast in materials and textures. I sourced the laminates from a firm called Rearo and dealt with their Newport branch. They were lovely to deal with and very helpful. Here's the splashback applied to the breakfast bar recess. Harry beefed it up and packed it out with some ply and then put the laminate edging onto the ends to give a substantial look. Whilst we were away on holiday, my splendid general builder and neighbour, Drew, got on with putting the rainwater goods up. I'd ordered in soffits and fascias from Fascia.com as they had the width I needed in anthracite grey to match the slates and windows, as well as vented soffits, which save a lot of bother and look much neater. The guttering is all deepflow and was mounted onto black fascia board. I looked at other colours of guttering, but none of them were quite right and black guttering is so ubiquitous that the eye kind of slides past it. Having it mounted on the fascia board also reduces the visual impact of the brackets that can look a bit clunky. Whilst he was up there, Drew also mounted our swift boxes and bat boxes. We were required as part of our bat licence conditions to put a bat box somewhere on site, but this is something that we had planned to do all along. Also, there has been a dramatic loss of habitat for swifts that migrate to the UK to breed in the summer and we wanted to make provision for these too, in the hope that we're lucky enough to attract them to our site. These fabulous birds migrate 6,000 miles to reach their summer breeding grounds and are the fastest birds in level flight. Once they have fledged, the only time they ever land again is to sleep and recover from their migration flight and to feed their young. They are the most fabulous birds and I would urge anyone to make provision for them wherever possible. If anyone wants details of where to buy some brilliant swift boxes, PM me and I'll send you the details. Here are the boxes, all sited on the western corner of the north facing wall. Finally, today marked a milestone in the house progress - the scaffolding is coming down. Our foul and surface water drainage works start on Wednesday and the site needs to be clear to allow access for that. Any remaining work at height can be done from ladders apart from the cladding, but I will hire a separate mobile tower of some sort for that work once I've had a chance to identify what will be most suitable. The stone cladding arrived a couple of weeks ago, ready to go up once the drainage work is done, more details of which will follow in the next post. Here's the south face gradually being revealed. The crates to the right of the picture are the stone cladding. Here's the east face slowly coming into view. And another view of the same. Work planned for this week is more plastering, more painting (if I get the chance as I'm the plasterer's labourer this week), groundworks and starting to move some young trees to the site that we've been nursing in pots at home for 12 months. Next week, the en-suite bathroom will be started, the kitchen finished and the utility room kitted out. Plenty to do yet. TTFN.

Tonight I ventured back into the bathroom and had another crack at the silicone! As @Construction Channel wisely said "less is more". 5mm is thus my go to size now and imho it looks infinitely better. Simply put there's less silicone to screw up, mistakes are smaller etc: There's nothing that'll cover up sh!t tiling though, it is what it is.

Most of the internal work to date has focused on insulating the suspended timber floor and with this completed our joiners could come back and put down the sub floor. We considered two different materials for the subfloor: 22mm OSB or 22mm Chipboard. We decided to use chipboard as it was 25% cheaper then OSB. Plywood would have been another option but this would have been more expensive than the chipboard as well. To do this job we needed just over hundred sheets of chipboard, 2800 Spax screws and 6 bottles of expanding PU foam glue. Whilst our joiners were on site they also attached some ply and osb boards to the internal load bearing walls. This will provide additional racking strength to the house. As I can walk around all part of the house here are some photos: The porch and utility room The kitchen/dining room Living room which has a part vaulted ceiling and the eventually the French doors will lead onto a decked area. When this is framed it will be a bathroom, hall & stairs Master bedroom and en-suite And upstairs: Two bedrooms on the gable ends. A key feature of these rooms is a PK10 top hung velux. The middle sections between the gable bedrooms will be a wardrobe, WC and a storage cupboard. This area has three PK10 veluxs. Having a floor down feels like a big step forward for us. One of the benefits for me is that I now have space to store materials within the house, as previously it was very awkward as often these had to be shifted around numerous times to complete a single job. The next job is back to insulating, this time in the rafters.

I don't think it's getting in around the windows, it's hard to see how it can given the good job that's been done around them. I suspect that water is tracking in from the edges somewhere, and it just happens to collect on the underside corners of the window apertures, perhaps because there is a very slight fall on the underside along those track lines, with the corners of the window aperture being the lowest points. The weakest points, from your photos, would seem to be around the periphery, perhaps water is actually getting in through the wall, from the other side? @Onoff's suggestion of dye testing is a good one. I've done some dye testing, looking to see where underground streams came out on the surface, back when I used to do a bit of caving, and it's pretty easy to do. You can either use fluorescein, or you can use OBAs (optical brightening agents, used in washing powder to make things look whiter). OBAs can't be seen with the naked eye; we used to use tampons as detectors (they are pure cotton, with no additives, and come with a handy bit of string to tie them to sticks or branches so they can dangle into the stream) together with a UV light (one of the cheap fake banknote lights works well). Fluorescein is harder to use, as it needs to be diluted a great deal, but perhaps easier to get hold of (sadly I threw out a whole box of dye packs when we moved, scrounged from aircraft survival packs). Pity, as I could have sent a couple up to you. One small dinghy dye pack will dye acres of ocean green (and it'll dye your hands and anything else too), so you only need a tiny bit. Applied with a watering can in one area at a time, or perhaps painted on so that it will wash in with the rain, might be the best approach.

I have 2 section ones that are 3.7m closed and 6.24m extended. Light enough for me to handle and fully extended they just skirt the border of new underwear required.

Having originally planned then dropped the idea of Solar PV (a combination of budget constraints and drop in FiT rates) I recently acquired a number of Solar PV panels (a pallet bought in conjunction with @ProDave from Bimble Solar via Ebay). Having recently collected the panels, lengths of mounting rail and various other bits and bobs @ProDave had kindly sourced, I fitted the system over the last two Saturdays. First off was mounting the rails on my rear, SW facing garage wall. I decided to mount the panels vertically simply for ease - a ready made structure to fix the rails to, and easy access to a consumer unit for the grid connection. There is a penalty in terms of a reduction in annual generation compared to a sloped array, however simplicity won out. The following picture shows the garage wall with rails fixed; To start I nailed packers to the cladding to ensure I had a drainage gap behind the rails. I then fixed the rails (Unistrut - a tip from @Onoff) through the cladding, cladding battens into the timber frame of the garage using timber drive bolts I happened to have. As the lengths of Unistrut I had were offcuts (only way I could transport them) I used joiners secured to the channel with bolts/channel nuts. Finally, I added hanging brackets for each panels to help carry the weight of each panel / so I wasn't reliant purely on bolts clamping the panels in position. I fitted the panels, sitting them on the hanging bracket and bolting them around 300mm from top and bottom as pictured; The ends were secured using Z brackets I cut down using a grinder (thanks @JSHarris) so that they clamped only the frame and did not overhang the panel itself; Long M6 bolts with large washers were used to secure the panels into the rails where they met with each other; The channel nuts (also known as Zebedees) into which the long M6 bolts were secured; I used M8 bolts and channel nuts for the joiners, end and hanging brackets. My electrician connected the system up, wiring the panels to a DC isolator, into the Inverter which in turn is wired into the garage CU via a meter and AC isolator. 2 hours work for him. Switched on, the Inverter ran through all its self tests and everything okay. Sadly at that point it clouded over and the heavens opened so only a few watts being generated. Fortunately, today has been a bright and sunny day (albeit a bit hazy) and my 1.5 kWp system is as we speak, generating 1.2kW. The following shot was taken yesterday just before the rain came on, but all in all, I'm pleased with the way it looks (panels mounted so they read visually with house windows). Cost wise the system (1.5kWp plus a spare panel), mounting rails, nuts, bolts, brackets, isolators, meter and electrician (@Prodave was kind enough to give me the DC cable he had left over which was just enough for the job) total £550. I already had the inverter. Final job within the next 28 days is to notify the DNO of the installation.

I always wanted a complete Price list of different Insulation Materials based on SQM prices. I did not find anything other than general remarks like "Glasswool is cheapest" "Kingspan(or similar) is (more) expensive than EPS insulation , but has/gives greater U value (even though this levels itself out after a few years apparently) So I tried to start on a table, but it is difficult to compare it all . It does not start with installation costs comparison - like which material is easiest to install (sqm/hour) . If anybody has anything similar to add, please send it to me. Prices are always a bit difficult (how long is a string>), but i'm still trying to figure it out .INSULATION MATERIAL VALUE:MONEY.pdf

He muttered something about we are already paying council tax for the caravan so it is not urgent, and he has enough paperwork at the moment. I am tempted to fit my upstairs doors, but leave the downstairs ones off, at least until after June......

I hadnt looked at their LED lighting as the OH would get it from his usual suppier and £59 is a silly price - He'd laugh if I told him that. yes, the trims do seem a little expensive but as anything, the price will come down as more manufactures sell them. Will let you know if we decide to encorporate them. ?

44 boards came in at £836 I spent at least £600 on trim!

I can't find all the paperwork ; and I know I ordered a few extra but! 3.6m x 0.184 44 planks so 30m sq approx ( probably more like 40 inc the front bit) It's the trim that costs though!!!

Most likely your issue then ... it’s tracking the inside of the block to to stone cavity and then under the stone and out. How big is that stone wall ..?? I would take down this side and get the water proofing taken to the blockwork and then build the stone back on top. Sorry ...

That’s not going to be fun recutting with an angle grinder..... smoke and gunked up blade....... good luck

@pocster your cladding looks very smart indeed.

Having services on site will save about £10K. I assumed you would have to strip out everything above the top of your ground floor walls. I also assume replacement or thermal upgrade to ground floor. You will not be able to occupy until works are almost complete. If this was a loft conversion and extension it would be possible to stay while works were carried out as much of it can be isolated until the new stair opening is made or the new opening from the existing house.

This post is not flippant or self-congratulatory. The best Value Engineering any self-builder can do is what appears to be waste time on Build Hub. Doing that is the opposite of wasting time. I haven't tracked the amount of time online against the money we have saved. But when your wife says " We couldn't have done this without the money saved by BH " - not a lot else needs to be said. So, ............. just read.

I investigated it some detail for retrofit in the cavity in my old house. Couldn't convince myself of any other system, especially has the bricks were rock hard, so much more likely that drivng rain would come through the mortar joints. I seen to remember it was £8K to do the whole house up to the roof. The other spinoff was air tightness improvement on an old house. The worry i had though was where the joists went through the wall, there were gaps. Lots of them. Realistically, they would need filling/taping before doing it otherwise loads of the stuff would fill up under you floor! Much easier on a new house where that problem wont exist. Ive toyed with doing it at my new please as there is a degree of flood risk, but the front half of the house is solid 9 inch wall, so probably wasting my time as that will fillup with water anyway! Just going to concetrate on re-plastering with lime, so it can just dry out again.

That is the budget that I am aiming for. I have been doing a LOT of the work myself to achieve that. When it comes to buying stuff, it always involves a LOT of searching to find materials at the best price, often on line, sometimes from abroad as UK prices can sometimes be silly. It also forces a choice sometimes to do things differently, or defer some less important things until later on. The cost of getting thin gs cheap, is it can sometimes take a lot longer to find where to source them from. Plenty of knowledgeable folk on here so when you get stuck looking for something, just ask.

Need to think this one through. Hummm. I feel a conversation with Jeremy coming on ?

Why keep the circuits separate? Cost of the PHE and an extra pump vs the cost of a few more litres of antifreeze.

Assuming all new plumbing, heating, ventilation, electrics, windows, doors, joinery, kitchens, bathrooms, flooring wall and ceiling finishes I would budget £1,200-£1,800 per sqm, so £240-£360k plus the garage. Allow 18 months and for it to be unoccupied.

Demolishing the chimney would not count as commencement unless you are in a conservation area. You can demolish a chimney (or even a house) without permission. To fully secure your planning permission in perpetuity you would need to commence works actually related the permission. E.g lay foundations etc

For us Bulb has a slight edge over all the others for E7, at 15.729p/kWh day rate, 8.148p/kWh off-peak rate and 20.44p/day standing charge. Octopus Go offers a much cheaper off-peak rate but needs a smart meter plus only has a 4 hour off peak rate, which isn't really long enough for us, a it can take 5 to 6 hours to charge the slab up with heat overnight in cold weather. Not sure if/when Bulb will be putting up their prices, though. If they do then Economy Seven Energy look to be the next best, at 17.903p/kWh day rate, 8.76p/kWh off-peak rate and 20.11p/day standing charge.

Our plant room is within the footprint of the house but only accessible from the garage. This meant the walls between it and the living accommodation could be well insulated acoustically but also form an additional vapour seal as almost all penetrations to/from the outside world come in/out of the plant room.

For ceiling APs, such as the Unifi ones, you can paint them (with not metallic paint). The cover comes off easily. You can even buy sticker skins for them. Ubiquiti's getting in on the game too. The new Unfi Nano has skins available made by Ubiquiti.

Hey Cost was just over 2K + vat. So that's the rear (as in the photo) and also some fixed vertically ( nightmare! ) at the front. As I said I spent a fortune on the nice trim. Cheers

We have triangular blinds for the triangular gable at the front of our house. Not cheap, but they look very neat when I either up or down. Ours are the duette pleated ones, and came from these people: https://www.conservatoryblinds.co.uk/gable-blinds/#

@laurenco The membrane itself makes the building watertight, however you are always going to get some water ingress if you have driving rain particularly at weak points such as studs. The cladding provides the first layer of defence and the membrane then just acts as a secondary barrier. I don't really know enough to make a comment about how the render board works with cladding. Our house will be rendered as well, but I decided on certain elevations where we are blasted with weather we have build a single course of dense concrete block which will have a render added on top.

Velux don't do unvented, Fakro do. Infuriatingly this drives the price up considerably. Beers Building Supplies have offered a decent discount off Fakro RRP, so perhaps try them. I'm afraid the lead-in time won't change though. They suggested 21 days for unvented as this is a special order product, whereas they have thousands of vented ones on the shelf, which can be dispatched immediately. For the u-value debate (if this is of any use to anyone) on 118x78cm rooflights we're looking at a u-value of 0.97w/m2k (centre pane value 0.5w/m2k) for triple glazed and 1.3w2K (glass u-value 1.0W.m2K) on double glazed, the latter of which is probably the option we'll end up with. I don't know what they're like, but have just come across YARDLITE unvented off the peg rooflights with delivery in 3-5 days and a next day option available. https://www.yarddirect.com/yardlite-aax-centre-pivot-unvented-white-pine-roof-window I wonder if anyone has used this brand before and can vouch for it?