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Hot-press plumbing done, give or take. Just need to bring some cables up to a wiring centre on the wall and that'll be it for now.

Supperjohmg I know exactly what you mean tearing my hair out

It won't matter...as long as its all covered...but jesus that would drive me insane. Who doesn't do something straight...that would send me OCD wild. ?

ha, still had time to edit it and correct my mistake luckily?

It think @LA3222 means ON the membrane.

I sent mine ‘next day delivery before noon’ and that cost a reasonable amount. I couldn’t insure it for the amount needed (circa 25k) and even a fraction of that was £££. I assume that they may accept copies if the whole thing goes missing. Might be worth doing a decent scan of all the documents so that pretty decent colour copies can be printed if needed. Same here! The courier system took a while to update and I was getting peed off that I couldn’t see that it had arrived for several hours after it had been delivered. I would aim to have it delivered on a working day rather than the weekend.

Welcome MiriPiri, I’m from and building in Aberdeenshire (AB32) though nearing the end of my build and it’s not quite as Eco as your project. Though I suspect others here can advise better on 100% eco houses, I’m happy to offer you any help I can. As your plot doesn’t have PP have you spoken to Aberdeenshire Council planning dept yet - they are very helpful.

@wozza mentioned it the other week. Local BM has it so thought I'd try it. The white is supposed to not yellow. Smells different to CT1. More like regular silicone in its application imo. Tooled fine with the Fugi tools and excess cleaned off with baby wipes. https://www.ct1.com/our-products/bt1/

Hi I have a site and am working out my wish list at the moment. I haven’t approached any professionals yet as the opportunity to do this only arose 2 weeks ago. I would like to be completely off grid, but am concerned it will be beyond my budget. I’m envisioning a timber house with waney edge larch cladding and either a zinc or turf roof. I’m thinking single storey with 2 bedrooms plus 1 office/bedroom. I’m tempted by a Klover Smart 120 for cooking, hot water, heating and solar panels for electricity, but don’t know how feasible this is. I would love my own water supply but think this will be way out of my budget. I would also like a covered verandah so I can sit out and enjoy the rain. I keep looking for wish list ideas online but get pretty bamboozled by it all. Ultimately I would like a house that merges with the landscape, that is eco as possible and is suitable for old age.

In a similar situation I ended up with a hybrid. I had a Flopast pan connector where the bit on the pan fell apart. I replaced it with the McAlpine, which has a much better pan part, but was too long, so I cut it and used the rubber finned part from the dud flopast connector.

It came from flue-pipes.com

Something like this https://www.screwfix.com/p/diall-insulation-board-tape-silver-45m-x-50mm/4806v

The first obvious thing to try is foaming or taping between the rafters and insulation and also the joints between the boards. Other wise cold air all be blowing in those small gaps between the boards and the rafters. Looking at it they fit pretty tightly so you probably just need to tape them. Do you think cold air is coming in elsewhere, like at the bottom or tope edges of the insulation or through the floorboards?

Both of these McAlpine flange bits are a bitch to get in to the 100mm, now round, hole even. Going to get a Floplast one and try that.

That's rather a disingenuous comparison. Characterising "traditional build" by building regs minimum is a little naughty. But yes they have shown that it can meet the values.

Reliance ones are good as you can change the cartridges on them as they are serviceable. Others you end up binning the whole valve and invariably they are different sizes.

Yes you get them all returned

If it’s like mine then that grill is not a vent, it just has holes in it as a pattern to make it look pretty, as Dave said it is more a spacer to keep the pipe a set distance from any flammable surfaces. As dave said again you probably have a poor install with gaps around the flue which is allowing the cold to travel through the grill.

Welcome.

The "issue" will be further up. A flue pipe like that cannot touch flamable materials, typically it must be kept 50mm away from anything flamable, so that grille is covering an over size hole in the ceiling. At some point, the flue will pass into a cold loft, or straight out through the roof. The same applies. You cannot let any flamable material touch the flue. What i suspect has been done here is the installer has just left big gaps so cold air from the loft or outside the roof can get in and down the space around the flue and down into your room. There is a solution. the manufacturer of my flue make an insulating sleeve to go around the flue pipe which is a tight fit to the flue pipe. It is obviously made of a non flamable material. With that you can then make the opening through a celing or roof sealed and air tight and no cold air will get in. Who built the house and when or who installed the stove? EDIT: reading the above, I very much doubt this is the intended air intake. It might be doing that by accident, but the intentional air intake is usually low down near the stove.

Hi Christine, we are in Hull now but hoping to eventually find ourselves in Northumberland or the Borders area.

So I had a 500 tall cabinet delivered that should have been a 300 tall, and that was my error. They said to just return the door for credit and keep the rest and it’s been used for all sorts of trimming up etc and additional shelves. For damaged stuff they left behind the old ones on another job - I think it’s more hassle for them to take it back

I thought I'd post a bit of an update as this is proving a useful thread to capture people's experience of DIY Kitchens. We had ours delivered a couple of days ago - was given a 48hr window and promise of an hour's advanced text message notification which ordinarily would've been a bit of an issue but as I am working from home during lockdown it was a non-issue. In actual fact they text me at lunchtime asking if it'd be okay to aim to arrive for 7:30pm-ish so this meant I could relax a bit and get things ready, and they turned up on the dot and delivered without issue: The drivers were really friendly and most obliging about where to put things. I'd made them a ramp to ease getting up our front step and I always feel little things like that can help things go smoothly. Really impressed with the packaging too - carefully wrapped doors and panels, and carcasses wrapped simply (but very effectively) in cardboard and PP strapping. The quality of the units, drawers and paint seems spot on too. I spent the whole of the next day unwrapping and checking everything... I do love the way the original order, invoice and delivery sheet all have a completely different order and subtly different part numbers just to make things take twice as long as they need to! Such is the forced intimate familiarity with each and every item there's a very real risk I'll end up referring to the 'pan drawers' as P2ID1-6 forvever more... ? There were unfortunately a few issues: - Wrong internal drawers (6 of) sent (I'd paid for the glass-sided Tandembox Intivo/Antaro drawers but got the basic Tandembox Plus ones) - A crack on one of the drawer fronts (it's on the rear but as it appears to be in the timber itself - not just the paint - I think it is only a matter of time before it comes through to the front) - A chip in the corner on one of the large doors (on an edge that's on the end of a run so unfortunately likely to be visible) - A permanent(?) marker mark where the writing on a piece of tape with my order number had gone beyond the edge of the tape (it might well come off easily but haven't yet dared try anything other than a damp cloth until it's been discussed as I don't want to risk damaging the paint/finish) - Insufficient soft-close buffers - only one fitted per pair of hinges which isn't enough for these heavy doors (20mm timber) - surely this can't be right? (The Blum technical manual advises one per hinge for 'normal door sizes' and I'd hope/expect them to follow this) - A larder unit supplied with drawer runners fitted and fully glued despite requesting no fittings and dry-assembly (to allow me to experiment with shelf and drawer positioning which now I can't really do without leaving visible fitment marks/holes and I'll also have to drill my own hinge holes for no reason) - Hinges missing for those doors requested to be supplied undrilled (soft-close zero protrusion ones so not cheap) It's just my luck really to have these issues and so whilst I do feel some disappointment I am not the slightest bit surprised! We're fortunate that we're not in any rush: this is a new kitchen in a new room (still got the functioning old one), I'm DIYing so there are no fitters and/or other trades to rearrange and our extension is already many many months beyond how long we thought it would take so 'a bit longer' is something we've learnt to live with! I've raised a ticket and finger's crossed it'll get sorted without too much issue - I've been really impressed with their pre-sales support so hopefully they won't be giving up on me now they've got my money. Incidentally, does anyone know what happens with damaged items? Do they get collected when replacements are delivered? If they're going to end up chucking them I wondered if I could keep them as whilst they're not acceptable for a 1-day old kitchen they well find some purpose years down the line as spares.

It's as supplied, but I'll look into a copy of the MIs for the valve itself, thanks. OK for completeness it's a Reliance tempering valve and good to 99c

F*** yeah, stands out like a sore thumb! ? P.S There is a God! Seriously...I don't think you do tbh? Not my finest hour doing the silicone there, I hadn't yet mastered the Cramer Fugi tools. Pan was bolted to the wall but not fully. The tiles were then masked with Frog Tape. Pan was slackened off with a gap which was filled with copious clear CT1. Cleaned up the excess with (Lidl) baby wipes and left to set for 36hrs. The silicone bead was then done in Forever White. It's a bit too thick imo.

My choice was budget driven. I live in what is now quite a large 1930s house which we will likely extend again at which point we are going to be 220 sq m at least, so need a unit that can ultimately handle that. On the other hand - it is still a 1930s house, so I don't kid myself that I'm going to get brilliant heat recovery performance. So I need a big unit, but not a brilliant one. I like a bit of science and I am big into energy efficiency, so I am openly doing this in part to satisfy my own curiosity. I'll be the first to admit that I am doing this in part as a hobby, just to prove to myself that I can. If we can get stale air out of the house and make it a more pleasant place to be, I will be happy. If the energy bill is materially the same before and after, I won't be disappointed. BPC pushed the one you are looking at and I am sure it is superior, but they couldn't explain how or why, other than it being newer. So with all that in mind, a unit for under £800 that can cater for the house we are (slowly) renovating/extending was the obvious choice. I've not got it running yet so I cannot comment on its pros and cons, but I will say this: it is absolutely massive. Smaller than a washing machine, but not much. Fortunately it is very easy to strip down into its components, which is vital: it was too big to get into the loft in one piece but took 20-30 mins to dismantle and move. As regards installing the plenums: this is a first fix job, it would have been infinitely easier to do it when we were renovating the house (remember - mine is a renovation not a new build). We over-boarded the old lath and plaster ceilings throughout, because I like the sound insulation properties of the old ceilings and frankly it is cleaner to over-board them than tear them down. Also they had wallpaper or lining paper on them- in the last house we stripped it off so they could skim the original ceilings, but it is a truly miserable job and we vowed never to do that again. And we did the renovation 2 years before I'd even heard of domestic air ventilation systems. However if I'd always have intended to install the MVHR at the point we reovated, I'd still have cut the holes and installed plenums after having the ceilings skimmed because my plasterer doesnt like plastering ceilings with cut outs. But if I would certainly do it long before you have any finishing work done. If your ceilings are coming down then I don't imagine the mess created by cutting a hole with a 130mm diameter in new plasterboard is going to cause you much of a concern to be honest though. btw, the plenum itself can easily be cut to length with a hand saw or a mitre saw: just mark it; remove it and cut it. I'd find that cleaner and easier than using a multi-tool, but each installation will differ I am sure and there will be good reasons for using a multi-tool in other cases. A hand saw is also better at cutting the semi-rigid ducting than using a stanley knife, in my opinion. On loft height: your unit may be smaller than mine and the ability to duct out of the side may well mean that 0.8m is enough - but it does sound very tight, especially as you are actually going to need some space to work in. Just ask BPC- they should be able to tell you if it is practically possible.

I agree Definitely can be done We built 258m2 for 200 We could have easily shaved 30 off that

The kitchen is huge but with the majority of units facing walls, so person in there will mainly have back to windows/view outside/guests & family in dining area. The C shaped bit (garage wall) could be quite dark. Utility could feel like a never ending corridor and appears excessively big/long. If you moved the utility between kitchen & garage, you could create a panty and a smaller utility room (noting you intend to have a laundry room upstairs). Your kitchen therefore could consist of a bank of mainly higher units and a massive double depth seating island. Whoever cooks therefore would be mainly facing into a fantastic spacious dining kitchen with the windows / views. Probably would be cheaper to do as would need less kitchen units. very rough sketch attached just to provoke an alternative idea.

@Jilly yes, SEs over-engineering is an understatement! I get it, their primary driving factor is to avoid getting sued but still, c'mon.... Good luck with yours, I am just keen to know exactly how the buck-passing would play out, if it came to that...and also how acrimonious said buck-passing would be (ie would we have to lawyer up to get one of them to step up...)

Before During Finished! Spot the birdy Now just two more planters and a catio (google it!) to do and I might get my promise?

You mean a dick ?

Christ don't eat it, I tried and it sets inside you. Had to have an op to sort it...

Mate of mine built an extension and decided to make a small hole at joists level to find the level of the old house joists so he could match the new ones. He did not want to open up to the old house until as late in the build as possible to avoid all the mess/dust in the old bit. He asked his Mrs to make a mark on the other side of the wall to fix his joists to, only trouble was he was working to the bottom of the level and she was working to the top so when he knocked through the new joist was approx 50mm higher than the old joists!

@Nickfromwales can comment on how to lay the boards but I’d want it to go firm which is only a couple of days.

I've got the perfect solution to this. Live on your own then you have no idea how any sound transmits ?