Leaderboard

Our hedge that runs parallel with the lane needs pruning this winter so I made a small early start. Not wanting anything to go to waste, I channeled a bit of Scandi chic, grabbed my spray snow and baubles and set to. Eat your heart out, Pinterest!

Finally a bit more insight into a MVHR install, I've done most of mine but it would have been handy to have seen this 6 months back. Link (Hope he's going to lag the inlet\outlet pipes to fresh air.)

I’ve used brick hunter online a couple of times for matching up Of it exists he has it

One of the more onerous (read expensive) planning conditions related to the driveway design and protection of tree roots. We were required to install a "no dig" foundation layer using Core geocells (or similar) after the planners were happy with the site fencing, but before the old bungalow was demolished. Typically the planners said "no" the first time we applied for discharge for no readily apparent reason. I re-applied having done more work for an unrelated condition and they said "yes". Braced fencing and signage seemed really important to the planners. So I have lots, all bought for bargain price second hand. We didn't spend much time on site in 2018 or the early part of 2019 because of a perfect storm of family things and working away from home. The winter of 2018 was not kind to the bungalow. there was a lot of rain and several periods of extremely high wind. This redistributed the roofing felt over the lawn and caused the very rotten parts of the structure to collapse. Everybody needs a site office! A bargain £250 caravan will do nicely for a while. Getting a good start on the driveway. Wooden sleeper edging in place and the first couple of geocell panels pinned down. The first (of many) loads of stone. And my old, but perfectly formed digger. (called Digby) A little while later we have most of a driveway. The other entrance is waiting for the land drains to be completed and for the small swamp to become less swampy. This is however enough access for the next stage of proceedings.

It's a bit overdue but this is the first post of our build. The start was a long time coming, the idea to do a self-build struck in May 2017 when I spotted a plot on Rightmove which happened to be exactly equidistant between my family and my wife's family. With a young child and ageing grandparents the idea of relocating to be nearer to family appealed, as did the idea of building a house. Purchasing the plot was not without challenges and the legal side took about 9 months. Most of this was down to the useless solicitor we had instructed but we got there in the end. That took us to early 2018. The plot had detailed planning permission (won on appeal) for a 5 bed very traditional looking house. We knew it wasn't what we wanted but thought we could get by with a few amendments to the planning permission. We spoke the architect the vendor of the plot had used for the original planning application but he was very old school and liked to do a lot more talking than listening. Instinctively we knew he wasn't for us. After a search on the internet and telephone calls with a few other architects and architectural technicians found the practice that seemed right for us. They listened to our ideas and seemed on our wavelength. They convinced us that a new scheme, taking into account our needs and wants was the way forward so we worked with them through early 2018 to put a design together. This was submitted to planning in June 2018 and took until December 2018 to get approval. The council did ask for a couple of amendments to the design which we largely complied with and extra ecological reports which were supplied. There were a number of pre-commencement conditions attached to the approval. So in January 2019 we engaged a structural engineer, energy assessors and noise surveyors to do the work required to discharge the conditions and get in position to start on site. We also started the work of selecting a timber frame supplier. After speaking to half a dozen and getting quotes, a localish timber frame company came out on top. Their quote was competitive but more than anything they were on the right wavelength and seemed very open to listening to our concerns and questions. We hoped to get started on site in the spring / summer but unfortunately our planning condition for surface water drainage (SUDS) resulted in the council asking for a land drainage consent. This particular piece of bureaucracy was relevant as we want to discharge surface water and treated foul water into a brook adjacent to the plot. In addition to a further ecological report regarding voles and otters which I commissioned, they also needed design details of the headwalls we were using and discharge calcs for the roof run off. Reluctant to spend any more money on consultants I used the building regs info to do the calcs myself and submitted. Deafening silence followed for 8 weeks until I reminded them of their statutory obligation to respond within 8 weeks. Soon after this reminder the approved consents arrived. Discharge of the planning conditions followed shortly and we were free to get started. Unfortunately by the time this happened in early September our groundworkers were on another job and didn't become free again until early November. We did look around but couldn't find anyone who could start sooner that didn't want significantly more money for the job. So they started on site on 20th November 2019, two and half years after I spotted the plot on Rightmove. Since starting they've cleared and levelled the site, although there's still some spoil to be taken away. We have difficult ground conditions with clay / sand soil and a low bearing capacity. Due to this the SE has specified piled foundations, a ground beam to link them all together and suspended block and beam floor. I've had a piling contractor lined up since the spring and they visited site for the first time after it had been cleared and levelled and proclaimed there's no way that dug trenches would suffice and that the ground beam would need to be shuttered (another £4k). That means the ground workers needed to excavate to underneath ground beam level which they've done and also have provided the piling contractor with a bed of stone as a rudimentary piling mat. This was completed last week and the nice man with the total station has been out and precisely marked the position of each of the 50 piles. The piling contractor was due on site yesterday. However they have been delayed by a couple of days and are meant to be starting tomorrow. It'll be a big day as they have quoted to pile down to 4m, after which it's £30 / pile / metre - fingers crossed we don't have to go down too deep.

Dig it all up, chuck it through a small mobile crusher then spread it all back on the ground then when you mark out your footprint you just dig through it. It seams a bit of a waste but it pays for itself over and over with having a nice working platform and no mud.

Whatever you go for I would try and actually build a sample wall about 1m x 1m in a corner of your plot somewhere as bricks can look very different with mortar between them. It also useful to have as a quality reference. eg contract your brick layers to build your house as per as per the sample wall.

Google also found this place offering new handmade soft red bricks in both metric and imperial but perhaps a bit too red rather than salmon colour? https://ammaaristones.co.uk/product-category/bricks/new-bricks/

Not sure what budget you have but perhaps try "Old Clamp" or "Hambleton" from.. https://www.yorkhandmade.co.uk/self-build-bricks Another picture of Old Clamp here... http://www.ukbricks.co.uk/bricks/2686-york-handmade-old-clamp-65mm-handmade-stock-red-heavy-texture-clay-brick.html

We all like different things, I have deliberately never put up my floor plans as I know some people wouldn’t like them, so what I’m building it for me not them. If you like your lindab gutters then that’s great. I personally don’t it’s not that you have crap taste, just different to me.

Build aviator were great, it was the best £250 spent so far! They have listed everything and I mean everything on the build. Whats even more useful though is all of the quantities of the materials, as you can ask different suppliers to quote for x amount of bricks, timber etc. The savings we potentially have made (damn brexit uncertainty) by shopping around is phenomenal! We have sent the build aviator quote to jewsons, covers and alsford timber who I think are literally fighting over our business! They do all the leg work as well as they take the whole quote and work on it. One supplier also noted that their timber costs were the same as the others but theirs was c24 and not c16 timber which I might not have noticed.

So, ethanol it was - quite happy with the effect with the rain lashing down the river outside and a medicinal glass of Fursty Ferret to hand... FullSizeRender.mov

This is what's generally known as a ground source heat pump. It extracts heat from water, instead of from air. Arguably they are more efficient and don't need to defrost like an air source heat pump has to sometimes. The downside usually is they use a lot of pipes laid in the ground circulating brine as their source, or a borehole, both of which are expensive to install making them a lot more expensive than an air source heat pump so probably less good value for money. The well may work as a heat source, providing the water is refreshed somehow, otherwise you might just end up with a frozen well in the winter. I thought about using our burn as a heat source but to do it legally would require an extraction licence.

-20 degrees from south (SSE). With PVGIS I just kept increasing the degree incline one by one and seeing what the outcome for the November was. At 42 it peaked and declined again at 43.

Power will usually be fed to the unit from a switched fused connection unit. Check first the fuse in that is okay and it is getting power.

If in the heated envelope they need to be lagged, the incoming / outgoing air will chill the pipes more than the building air will heat them and condensation will form on the outside of them - I have one un-insulated filter enclosure and I see condensation on the outside of it on a cold day, it will get lagged soon. If his pipes are going to get encased in insulation then that might mitigate it.

I just produced a spreadsheet with tabs in build order for each aspect of the build and a breakdown of estimated costs and actual costs for each tab.

The weather was really cold this week but the guys cracked on and removed the shuttering from the first pour of the walls and moved it ready for the second pour. Luckily the weather warmed up and they were able to pour the final structural walls on Friday so this should be the last of the waterproof concrete. As you can see where the shuttering has come off we are left with really neat concrete with just the shutter panel marks. The waterproofing guy inspected these and was really happy: in his words 'near perfect'! He will do a detailed inspection when all the shuttering is off and if there are any cracks (and he couldn't see any so far) they will get filled and sealed with some sort of waterproof compound. The next step will be to remove all the shuttering and then we will see the real space for the basement and houses . Its odd how sometimes the space seems huge and at other times it gets much smaller. Following the clean-up its external tanking/waterproofing and backfill and internal masonry walls. Also you can see the opening for the garage window which has been pre-cast, its the only opening we can actually measure before we order the windows which is a scary thought! Sadly the temperature really went down with one of our main suppliers this week. Firstly they missed some details in their quote and the (agreed price) contract,and came back with an extra price to fix this. This is really annoying since we pointed out several time at the quote stage that there was a really odd detail in the Architects plans and were they OK with it; we were assured that this was OK so we went forward on that basis, only now do we find that they missed the complexity and extra work it will take. They have had the drawings for this detail, which has never changed, for at least 6 months and we released final Architects drawing to them about 3 months ago - so its taken them a very long time to figure this out, though they do apologise and acknowledge its their cock up. From our point of view, and we are confident from a contractual standpoint, we are in the right and its their cost, obviously they have their view on it which is somewhat different. Eventually they did come down 30% but they refused to meet us half way. So what do you do at this point? They are adamant that without the extra payment they are not prepared to do the work. We could take it to arbitration and we are reasonably confident we would win, or at least end up at the 50/50 point we were reluctantly prepared to go to. However if were to go down that route then its pretty certain they would stop work and we would be facing a huge delay, and certainly it would be very difficult to work with them going forward. To some extent we can see their point of view - its extra work and materials they hadn't costed and it does need to be done. Annoyingly though, if we had know about this when we were negotiating Non Material Amendments with Planning we might have been able to design it out and go to their zero cost standard detail - but going back to Planning at this stage is not really an option (or one fraught with risk and delay, and a huge history!). We had not quite decided what to do, but seemed to be between a rock and a hard place when they came back with some more elements they had missed and wanted to reduce window sizes, add more steel, take out the Pocket Doors and charge us more money. At this point I have to say I lost it a bit and voiced my dissatisfaction! Things have improved a bit and they looked at the design with some more care and it seems they can solve most of the problems and all we need to do is compromise some room sizes to accommodate them. If this had happened when they first got the drawings, or when we gave them 'final' Architect drawings we would have been much happier, but really this is very late in the day to uncover issues like this. The really worrying bit is what else is there that they have not found yet! So with the relationship temperature still below freezing we seem to have little choice but to carry on - but we are still really unhappy and as its a major reputable supplier it make our position really difficult. Perhaps we are being unreasonable, or naive, in our expectations, but its probably a lesson learnt - regardless of the contract when you reach a certain point going back becomes an almost impossible option and your supplier has you in a corner (to put it politely!). See https://www.dropbox.com/sh/th9f6e3cel5dm1q/AAAfsWdAH184J75bCNUUtzVra?dl=0 for the weekly videos.

It’s a good job I’ve got skin like a rhino or I might get offended.

Interesting video, but what awful guttering