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It seems that quite a few of us have had our turf laid this week. My wife loves it, it is so nice looking out on grass and not mud. The guys have done a lovely job. There are just a couple of snagging points left to do and we are done. We also need to have the garden walls rendered and copes put on. We also had a local company round to put various granite and marble shelves on, I was reticent as I thought it would be a pain to organise, but they were a pleasure to deal with. Finally this means that my built in barbecue is in, very excited for barbecue season, actually it is very nice today, we could probably have had one. Front of house Front coming in the driveway Back of house, looking towards pool Terrace off the kitchen Built in barbecue(Still a bit dusty) They used a Dekton top as they said this is the most heat resistant material Marble around Optimyst fire Back of house looking out from kitchen Front looking from kitchen Dressing room Furniture finally delivered for our bedroom, just waiting on a new bed now Decided to frame the hole in the wall fire as it looked too plain just sitting in the wall on its own

I hate to try and sleep in that temp - though have to sometimes in summer. I easily get overheated in bed (I think the memory foam has a hand in that) but once I wake up, if I don't get up straight away then I need more covers It's whatever suits the individual. I just think it's wrong to make out that sleeping in a cold room, so long as sufficient covers are available, is not healthy

Took some pictures I love that there are no hinges or latch plates visible when the door is closed

I remember running from the bathroom to the lounge where Mum would be warming a towel in front of a 3 bar electric fire. Same getting up in the morning, getting ready for school where she'd be warming my school clothes. And that was with coal fired central heating. To be fair the boiler would have gone out overnight. No insulation in the house, single glazed wooden windows. In heavy snow we'd have to dig our way to the coal bunkers then break up the first bit of coal that'd be all frozen and stuck together. Baked spuds in the ash pan was about the only good bit!

I can't tell you how disappointed I am to learn this @Ferdinand. You'd have been my "phone a friend" on a question like this.

We had only one objection. The approval deadline was Friday, we have heard nothing one way or the other from the council which is very strange. It has changed on the planning portal from awaiting assessment to awaiting decision. The architect is hopeful that they are just going to approve it as otherwise they would have contacted him by now to ask for changes, but it isn't clear.

That looks amazing! The finishing touches turn a great house into a fabulous one.

First job is clean the patch. Rake out any loose material then hit it with a hose to rinse any dust off. Let it dry slightly then apply your prime coat. Do as was mentioned above using pva and some cement. Let it dry. Mix your batch up. Lightly wet the wall. This will help with suction plus stops it drying out quick. Lime is just used as a plasterciser to help you work with it. If you have it fine if not a tiny squirt of fairy liquid will work. I mean a tiny squirt or it will have to much air in it and go to fluff. Don't try to do it in one pass. If it needs 2 coats then scratch the first coat before it goes of. A series of grooves cut into the motar using a nail. Let it harden. Then damp it down again mix another batch and do the top coat. Don't try to overwork it. Put it on and smooth it using a long piece of timber long enough to stretch across the hole. Let it sit 20 mins then use your float to finish it.

I can recommend getting a cheap trail cam to see what visits when you're not there.

It's so nice to see them. We have a group of three that visit the plot quite a lot. In the summer you can see "doe rings" around the trees, where the bucks have been chasing the doe.

Today the Chinese inverter arrived. I think that is a record for an ebay purchase from China, getting here in just 9 days. So of course today's job was to install it in the shed with it's big brother. I have still got the clamp meter on there to assess it's performance, it only has the most basic of a display. So far it is looking good. It was mid morning before I got it connected and I was then getting 150W from the E facing panel, even though the sun was well on it's way towards south. And this afternoon as it is moving round to the west, I have seen up to 200W from that panel Sadly the sunny day has become cloudy and somewhat hazy so that's probably it's peak for today. But it shows the principle that these 2 otherwise spare panels should add some useful extra generation at the ends of the day.

Wonderful place - looks fantastic, well done. As for the turf, we too have ours laid this past week and it is due to be completed on Tuesday [2nd April] What has gone done really does make a difference.

Wowsers fabulous home, well done old boy!

Send me your PayPal address and we’ll crowdfund the £7 ok

The drive slopes towards the house so I wasn’t keen to build up the front But BC said I have a choice between front and side No chance for either back door I’m not sure if that was just mine

Gary... you've got rid of the urinal? Bit mean that innit? ?

me too @PeterStarck

The whole point of these types of construction methods is to not require huge amounts of energy in the first place Agree the thermal retention is lessened re the walls, but who looks at storing and releasing energy to reduce heating costs in the context you suggest ( "quickly enough" )? In a Durisol / other ICF build, the mass you're referring to for energy stability is typically retained in all of the internal finish / fixtures / fabric layers not the core of the ICF. The 24 / 48 hr time period is what's important, so lets remember that heating up all that concrete in the first place, and then retaining the heat, takes equally huge amounts of energy ( which has to come from somewhere ). Having no requirement to inject that amount of heat in the first place = a low energy home. Add "mass" to add "thermal stability", but you still have to heat it and keep it there against it's will. Whatever kW of heat it emits will have required a greater amount to inject and retain it in order to facilitate that transaction, so concrete may be of benefit in certain targeted instances, but not in general, the same way an insulated passive standard UFH heated slab takes X amount of energy to stabilise it to ambient, then X amount more to keep it at ambint. To get the house heated from it then requires that original energy input plus whatever you require on top to maintain a comfortable temperature, plus losses.

I'm well into OAP territory and can remember the ice inside and am thankful things have moved on, and I can sleep in a bedroom at 22C without having to worry about draughts or the electricity bill.

So do we. I wish you every success - admire the fizz of your creativity. Try it small first. See what works, what breaks, what can be improved. I have very clear memories of my father supervising concrete shutter builds during the M5 and M6 construction (last century). He was one of the bridging engineers. The shuttering installations he helped design were massive. Working with the architect, he used to run small trials with different shuttering material. Mostly WBP or planking. I remember one trial with raw planks of rough cut timber. Even the trial installations were (relatively) massive. To keep me busy he made me help shovel concrete into the 'mould' . H+S would have a seizure if that were to happen now...

JA 305W Mono £0.293p pW (£89.50 per module) From Wagner Renewables this week.

I've never had a problem with the Philmac ones either. They always seem to be as reliable as the Plasson ones to me, but then again pretty much every MDPE fitting I've used has been OK, with the single exception of one pale blue one that I think may have come from Screwfix.

couple of things I think will make your idea fail. The product you use as the base coat, Portland cement won’t work, mix up a bag on its own and see how in workable it is, you will need a bagged render product that has additional stuff to make it useable. Your mould size, there is no way you will be able to do an area bigger than a couple of m at a time. You will need to make 3-4 stamps and alternate them to get your pattern you will need a team of 3, 1 applying 1 stamping and 1 rushing around i think the idea is feasible but I personaly would do a feature wall not the whole house, it will look overpowering.

using the numbers you have posted and using a bulb tariff of SC 20.44p and 14.543p per KWH which is what i am on having recently switched from SSE to bulb, and a bit of fag packet maths and extrapolation, not counting seasonal variations on usage you will save £237.75 per year by just switching away from SSE to bulb that is a saving of 65p a day before you even look at changing any usage

@TempI severely underestimated concrete before working with it but still surprised with that figure! Have a look at the basement expert website for DIY timber shuttering.

If we assume each pour is 0.7m high (about 2ft) the average pressure is.. H*Rho*g/2 Where H is the depth and Rho the density of concrete = 0.7*2400*9.81/2= 8,240 N/sqm. That's a force equivalent to 840kg per square metre pushing out sideways. If it moves or bends then the concrete pours out of the bottom. Make sure the shuttering is well designed. Your carpenter might not be the best person to do this.

You could have expanding metal mesh strips acting like ties. https://www.screwfix.com/p/sabrefix-reinforcing-coil-galvanised-dx275-65mm-x-20m/94846 Build strips of these into your wall as you go up.

You could build in some threaded bar into your icf. Do your pour so they are solid. Then use these to hold your mould or shuttering to the wall. It will take a fair bit of work making them all the same distance apart in height so your mould slips over the bars easily each time. Most shuttered walls have holes in them anyway like can be seen in your pics so once the wall is finished you could grind them of as close as you can get without hitting the concrete and then drill them out so they sit below the surface. Will look like a normal shuttered wall. Not sure you could patch the hole in and make it look good unless you are going to paint the concrete.

Totally agree, none of us over about 50/60ish, grew up in centrally heated homes. As a child in winter there was always ice on the inside of the window in the morning. (Cold damp air in a cold damp house I do suspect isn't the best for health) None of us would be here anyway if that was the case - in the days before anything but a single fire in a draughty house, the house was never warm as warm as 18 in winter except right in front of the fire or stove. Scandinavians wrap their babies up and put them outside to sleep in sub zero temps. - they have a tendency to be pretty healthy. My preferred sleeping temp is around 13 or 14 degrees and my bedroom temp in my old house last year was as low as 11 on a number of occasions. And I still kept my windows open. It's lovely now that I can have a cold bedroom and a warm dressing room

Given your lack of experience and the fact that this requires a very high level of skill and knowledge together with a great deal of time and materials I think you could be setting yourself up for failure.

Cheers - one of my NI mates asked why the front looks like a fancy version of an army sangar - obviously subconscious influence there!

We have 14 x 280 panels split over 3 roof areas (east, south and west) and also suffer some slight shading. We have SolarEdge inverter and it is noticeable how some panels on the part-shaded sections perform far better than others. If we had not gone for SE then I estimate energy generation could be down by as much as 10% on some days.

The driveway has been laid and I think they have done a fantastic job. I have also finally got around to putting up a postbox and a doorbell. I got the doorbell from a company called Metzler Trade that sells on Amazon and its own website, a lovely quality item. It always disappoints me when people have little plastic doorbells. I forgot to include power for the bell so put a Grothe wireless bell behind it. All the gutters, soffits and fascias are finished. We also framed around the garage doors in matching aluminium. This is an area that is usually just painted wood and starts to blow after a while. The builder just has a smallish list of things to finish off. Finally we can get the walls and doors washed down, I didn't see any point before the drive was down. The landscapers want to start in a couple of weeks now also which is good.