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So, I know I promised tales of cladding and roofing in the last instalment, but I have reviewed my photo stream and in fact realised that the window install was the next thing. At the end of November (as we all know, winter is prime building time), we finally retrieved our bargain basement windows from storage and brought them to site. Ah, the bargain basement windows, a tale of joy, horror, stress, fury, confusion and eventual revenge all in one. I should explain. When we had secured the plot and had initial drawings from the architect and were waiting for engineering/calcs/building control drawings/services/everything else, we passed the time by getting hilariously large quotes for every aspect of the design. It kept us amused. So, after reading a lot on fabric first design and passive homes, off we trotted to our local Internorm dealer. Lovely showroom, excellent coffee, charming, if slightly oily salesperson. There was much discussion about our options - I asked about passive standard 3G timber aluclad. After a while, a large figure was mentioned. A very large figure. So large, in fact, that I actually was convinced that the salesperson was having a little joke with me. He wasn't. No further coffee was offered. We gathered our coats, emptied the complimentary biscuits into my handbag and prepared to leave shamefacedly, and preferably without admitting that we were FAR TOO POOR to afford these lovely windows. On the way out, the salesman commented off handedly and rather insincerely "Sorry we couldn't help you today. Unless you want to buy the ones in the basement, ha ha ha." Reader, I have little-to-no shame when it comes to sniffing out a bargain. I cannot be humiliated. So, I was accompanied to the basement of the showroom, whereupon I was greeted with a £100,000 wonderland of window-related (expletive deleted)-ups. Results of inaccurate measuring, bankruptcy of developers, incorrect specifying, just general inefficiency. Of absolutely (expletive deleted)-all use to anyone, of course. Apart from someone who had not fully finalised their house plans. And a salesperson who is uncommonly keen on crystallising some value from said (expletive deleted)-ups. It was a partnership written in the stars. Details of hard-nosed negotiating aside (and there was someone in the room close to tears, and it wasn't me), we came away with 15 brand new windows (including 3 large sliders), a fully biometric ex display front door with side lights, a utility door, and a large panel of glass. All pretty much passive standard, some with built in blinds, some alu-clad timber, some Alu clad UPVC. For not much money. At all. A very satisfyingly small amount of money. The architect was somewhat perturbed by this moderately unconventional approach of designing the house around already purchased windows, to say the least. For a while, I had a Quooker tap and approx £80,000 of windows as my only purchases for the house. However, he came up trumps and designed the house in such a way as you would never know that he had any design restrictions at all. The man is a quiet genius. We had cherry picked the best stuff - so all our sliders for the bedrooms are approximately (but not quite) the same size, they vary by about 30mm here and there, but they are all on different elevations of the house so you never see them right next to each other. We wanted to use one particular window in the bathroom as it had built in blinds, but it was a little too big, so we sank the bath into the floor to allow the window to have opening clearance. It looks amazing and like an intended "design feature". So, we purchased the bargain basement windows, and following our cynical, but realistic architects advice - we got a trailer and got them the hell out of that warehouse. They stayed wrapped up and palletised for approx 2 years until that fateful day in November. Now, what we should have done was quit while we were ahead, taken note of the surpassingly large number of (expletive deleted)-ups and run like the wind away from that warehouse. You will not be surprised to learn that this did not happen. We still needed our large feature window - a 5m wide, 2.7m high alu clad timber lift and slide window and matching fixed panels above. This was not cheap. Very very not cheap. But it was lovely. We decided that as we'd saved so much money with the rest of the windows, we could justify this lovely thing. We got a good, although still bloody expensive price on it, paid a 50% deposit, and were instructed to let them know when we were ready to have the window produced - as we hadn't been through building control fully yet, so didn't want to press "Go" just then. So, all well. We got on with what we needed to do, engineering, building control, life etc and gave no more thought to it. We get our building warrant. We phone up the showroom to say "yay! please make our very highly priced window!". Only, there's a disconnected tone. Odd, we think - must have misdialled. We try again, same thing. We google. Website down, emails bounce. A light sweat breaks out. The insufferable shits went bust. No one told us. It may or may not be directly related to the basement of (expletive deleted)-ups. Internorm had never heard of our order and had not received our deposit, so couldn't help. Now, thank christ that I am naturally untrusting of salespeople and INSISTED on paying £101 of the VERY LARGE deposit on a credit card. Section 75, how I love thee. We got the whole lot back. Eventually. After a lot of paperwork and phonecalls. But now we have a load of second hand windows, some with bits missing and no-one to fit them. And no-one to order our lovely slider from Help was on the way from an unexpected quarter though. Our house build is being filmed for TV, and we happened to have a filming day a couple of weeks later. Someone on the crew gave us the details of a helpful person within Internorm, who passed us on to another dealer who honoured the original price for the sliders, came up from England to fit the windows, supplied all our missing bits and were generally wonderful. So, we come to November. There are two access points to our site - one at the rear, which we can just about fit an articulated lorry up, and one at the front, on the extremely busy main street, that is cobbled and 2cm narrower than a transit with the wing mirrors folded, and only just as tall. The Internorm dealer had already made a site visit to review the access and made many sucky-teeth noises, but said "it's ok, we'll get a robot handler up from Leeds that can hold the window at 45 degrees while we drive it up." "Ooooh", we think, "A robot! Technology will save this whole scenario". The day started relatively badly when it transpired that the artic driver, instead of turning right when he should have, so he could drive straight down the street and have the windows on the correct side for unloading, had in fact, turned left and was now in the middle of fully reversing down a medieval street so long that it takes approx 8 minutes to walk from one end to the other. At 9am. Also, he was (I think) Romanian, with no English, and there were no Romanian speakers amongst the installation crew. So, when he finally arrived, after monumentally pissing off approximately 14 million local residents, the windows were on the wrong side and no room to turn. So we had to unload the rest of his lorry, stack it up on the street, taking up virtually every parking space in the place and drive the telehandler across the street, blocking all the traffic to get the window off. It is massive. Securing it on the tele handler is not a quick process. There was a lot of shouting. Also, did I mention I'm 6 months pregnant at this point? So, once unloaded, we look around eagerly for the promised technology laden robot. Looking a bit sheepish, the install crew confessed that it hadn't been available, but "don't worry, we brought something else". Great, I think! No problemo. The "something else" appeared, to my untrained eye, to be a couple of skateboards. So, we ended up with our massive window being rolled up the close on a couple of skateboards, being held at 45 degrees by a telehandler and 10 or so guys not all of whom shared a common language. To be honest, it went better than it should have done. The only hairy moment was when the tyre of the telehandler hit a drainpipe and it cracked with a noise EXACTLY like breaking glass. I was at the street end and couldn't see the window, just heard the cracking noise and a lot of a shouting. I was pretty convinced I was about to HAVE the baby. Terrifying. But, all in all ... TADAHHH! Over the next couple of days, all the windows were fitted and we were (nearly) watertight. Exciting progress.

So, I just remembered that I actually had this blog. I'm killing time waiting for a phonecall, so, updates! Over a year later! Stuff has happened. Lots of stuff. Lots of money. Many tears. Some moments of "FFS, what?!", many moments of "HOW MUCH?" and "how the feck does this bloody shower fit together?" and a few, rare, beautiful moments of "woah, that looks awesome". The last entry ended on a lovely "woah" moment of the successful pouring of our beautiful concrete floor throughout the ground floor plan. It pissed down the next day, obviously. Then MBC went away, laden with cakes, pies and phone numbers of eligible single ladies from the area. A week later, they came back. My new job is a long commute away, and I had to work that day. On my way to the station (hideously early), I saw a truck drive past, laden with bits of house. "That's our house", I thought to myself, I just knew it. I text my husband to share the momentous culmination of our wonderful joint enterprise and was mercilessly mocked that it probably wasn't our house, as it was far too early. Ha! How I laughed when the driver called him approximately 10 minutes later to say he was stuck in the narrow road outside our site, couldn't turn the lorry sharp enough to get into the access point and was blocking every single (extremely angry) person in our medieval town from getting to work. That was a brisk drive to site for him. There were many people in hi-viz, a lot of shouting and gesturing, a lot of sharp intakes of breath, a few calls to the police to track down owners of badly parked cars and a huge amount of car horn tooting. Oh, and a LOT of apologising. But, the truck made it into the site. Just. To the never-ending delight of my small son, there was also an absolutely ENORMOUS crane. I was later informed this in fact this is an embarrassingly tiny crane, the smallest one that you can possibly hire and really hardly worth the bother. I feel like the driver may have had some adequacy issues with his crane size. So, whilst I was in a meeting, they just wacked the house together. At lunchtime, I called for a catchup FaceTime and the ground floor was pretty much finished! I mean, WHAT? The speed was insane. By the time I got to site later that evening (about 7.30pm), all the ground floor panels and internal partitions were in. My husband and I just walked around rooms, giggling insanely to ourselves at the ridiculousness of the whole thing. The next day, second storey on. Unbelievable. By the end of the week (in fact, I don't even think it was full week) the whole frame was up. We were a little shellshocked, to be honest. There was a lot of head scratching about how to run the falls on the roof. This had been discussed and obviously designed in, but our roofer had some input whilst MBC were on site. They were very good and spent a lot of time working out the best way to make it work for what we needed (singly ply membrane roof, adequate falls, hidden box gutters) and did a lot of extra work in conjunction with the other trades. Our roofer also risked the wrath of his wife by coming to a site meeting on a saturday and was subsequently late for a family BBQ oops. Oddly, once the frame was up and see could feel the room sizes in 3D, they suddenly felt absolutely massive again. Such a convincing illusion - it's very hard to visualise 3D space from a 2D footprint. Next up? The joys of roofing and zinc cladding And winter

@lizzie You could install one of @pocster's roof windows and a periscope in the hall?

It just infuriates me. With no more FIT there should not be any need for MCS installers, and the way forward is cheap packaged PV systems for either DIY instalation, or instalation by ANY electrician. That will lower end user prices and perhaps make it viable? Adding VAT and / or new schemes that force the installation to be done by MCS contractors is just putting "vested interests" above any real desire do drive an uptake in renewable energy.

Finally got my Hetas Cert through today So BC can sign us off this afternoon Our infumous disabled ramp can now go No more jokes about skateboarding

Why do they want one? Its usually to justify the foundation design. For example there could be clay soil or made up ground etc. He may also have said "soil condition report" when he meant "percolation test" to justify the soakaways design. Sometimes these two are done together. We needed a soil condition report because we had a clay and trees (but it proved we didn't need especially deep foundations so potentially we saved money) and a round feature on old maps which might have been a pond (it had been filled with rubbish and showed we needed piled foundations under the garage).

My wife has made good progress 17 filled

@Christine Walker is in Scotland. We have different regs here so wouldn't get away with something like that. Congrats on the award scheme though!

Who does the cooking in your house? *innocent face*

I have!

TBH it’s the way I always start clearing a blockage as to be blunt there are not many things that aren’t softened or dissolved in really hot water ..!! Glad it has worked for you @lizzie..!

Update.......third round of hot water has produced really good results. I reckon I am 85% of the way there. Have emptied the entire hot water tank now so no more hot water for a while. Will do another round with the hw and buckets in the morning but think I’ve cracked it. Thank you @PeterW for that brilliant suggestion.

Good idea ! Did I mention I have some walk on glazing at a give away price .

Keep updating! Loving the photos. I totally get what you mean about the 2D => 3D effect. When I first saw the foundations of my old house I thought it looked tiny but it transformed into an average sized house when finished. When I wandered round the ones here I thought the room sizes looked fairly average but now that the house is up it's bigger than average. Strange how the brain works.

Used this in my last house, sons were too "enthusiastic" with toilet paper. Messy job but did the trick. Not too expensive from Screwfix.

You can get a special plunger for toilets. It's hollow with a bellows-type arrangement, and is far more effective than rubber plungers designed for sinks.

I was recently told by a Powerwall installer that, after Elon got kicked off the board following a couple of silly tweets, there was a change of policy. Before, the aim was market share growth, even if it meant little or no profit. The new policy is to increase profits.

I notice a lot of cladding going very close to ground IMHO that is not good idea when it rains you get the splashing of water and muck on to the boarding think you need a good 12"of stone or something at bottom or your cladding will get dirty and discoloured over time , maybe a grass edging next to house of something soft that will stop the bounce back,certainly paving or anything hard will make it worse very common in scotland to have 3 courses at least of "fyfestone stone" before render starts and that will be over hanging the stone work i think that is why they do it -rendering stays nice and clean old stone cottages the bottom of the wall is always discoloured when they render to ground ,not quite as bad if a border of chips or something

Which is why I have to do both roles: PM and low-level skill stuff. But most of all I have to teach myself and learn fast - really fast . Thats the real delight in self building : the discomfort involved in (all) learning.

Our boards were designed by Kingspan, arrived neatly packaged. We had to 'build' the roof on the floor first. Once done it was easy to lay: took a morning.

There's a thread here might assist:

@nod, these two walls in this cupboard I've to plaster, roughly an area 3.5m2. Now I know I shouldn't even ask but I've half a bag of multi left over from when I did the ceiling and half wall back in August...2018. Stored inside with the bag folded over then shoved in a black bin liner. Could I use it? Would adding some cream of tartar work on "old" plaster? I just HATE waste and LOVE pushing boundaries of what's possible! As the answer is probably NO, I've already bought a new bag! If no good I'll sprinkle on the over site of a neighbour's shed base to get rid. Cheers

Quite normal with no heating on Bit of bleach in warm water Wipe off and re paint

Add in double incontinence for the full experience!

If a bucket of water does not help, then a bucket of water standing on a stool (step stool not the other sort) might help if the blockage is close to the loo end. Have you asked the user whether they use flushable medical wipes, which are usually not flushable, or dropping .. er .. logs? Take care to watch for annoyed anacondas. F