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Just an update on the concealed hinges. Took some working out to avoid any costly mishaps but got going now. I have used the Ceam hinges and they do feel quality. Just another 40 hinges to do!j

Who’s a bad boy ! No leaks !!

Wasn't going to post this one, as in the grand scheme of things its fairly regular and a bit boring, but there is a few interesting points which may be of use to others... The photos are panoramic, don't worry the floor isn't bent! ? This was a before photo once all the fitted furniture was removed Everything stripped out, and underfloor fully cleaned and hoovered New timber put in which has been post-delivery treated (bloody builders merchants delivered wrong stuff and then couldn't get hold of them to complain!). All plug sockets also rewired. Majority of insulation in, and foamed with flexible FM330 foam. Airtight membrane and floorboards installed. Perimeter plastered to cover where the skirting board pulled old plaster off during removal. Everything decorated, and curtain rail reinstalled. Job complete! And the reason behind stripped all of this out! A couple of days later I found this crawling up the fridge unit in the kitchen!! Pretty sure its an adult woodworm beetle.

Hello Epsilon and Peter and all. Here is a bit of an over view, my stab at things, no spell checking, for a bit of fun and so on. Say you have a sail on a yacht. On one side the wind blows against it (pressure) and the wind has to move around this blockage. On the other side of the sail there is a negative pressure before the air flow returns / stabalises to normal further down stream. This causes a suction force on the back of the sail. The two forces combine to create an overall wind force and as the sail is at an angle to the wind it drives the boat as you get a roughly perpendicular component to these forces. .. or you can capsize it... hence the lift jacket. The same happens to a house. I'll leave this for now but the wind forces on a roof (not just the walls) can move the house from side to side horizontally too and that is where we look at building stability. But for the sailors here, you'll notice that at the edge of the sail there are some really high forces, hence why often the sail rips. Here the wind vortices are significant, forces can be two possibly three and a bit times more. The same principles applies to a roof. However, unlike a boat a house is static, it has a roof and as the wind moves about in direction it can cause both a downward force and an uplift force on the windward side ( depending on the roof angle and obstructions like chimneys) and an uplift force on the leeward side. A roof is a bit like a tilted sail on it's side? To turn to the holding down straps. you need to start at the top surface of a roof. At the edges say and round chimneys you have high wind forces. That is why you often see tiles sucked off here, hence the tile fixing specification. Once you go through the depth of the roof you have battens / wind bracing / sarking and so on. These all spread / shead the localised loads. Now you have the roof timbers etc. these too load share / spread the load and this load ends up at the wall head where the roof rests. You also have an effect called " non simultaneous action.. wow! this means (good for you) that the whole of the worst wind does not act on the roof at the same time, and this depends on the size of the roof and orientation. Most roofs are designed to be stiff, like floors. They (roofs) act like deep beams and tie all the walls together. In other words the holding down straps take a more general load rather than a concentrated load that occurs over small areas of the roof. So there is an element of Engineering judgement applied. This needs a leap of faith here. We know roofs lift off so you need to hold them down. We need to connect the roof to something heavy, or to a timber frame that will be connected to something else that is heavy or stiff and we can use holding down straps to do this. Follow the load path. The first connection is between the straps and the roof timbers say. The next between the strap and the masonry, which is the point here. But.. before you get to the strap fixings, it's worth havng a look at some of the generally accepted norms for say 1960's standard housing. There were no holding down straps. The wall plate was just nailed essentially down into the brick. There are some quirky bits in the design codes that allow you to to take into to account a masonry height (for wind uplift) that can contribute to a counter weight to hold things down, although the mortar in in some respects acts in tension which is often not recommended when designing masonry for other purposes. But now we often have lighter roofs, lightweight blocks and timber frames. With timber frame life is fairly simple, you make the truss clips do the work and transfer the wind uplift down the studs and couple this with the sheeting and spread the load further into the structure. Previously for standard housing a brick cavity wall was common. The walls are often too cold nowadays. Here, you can calculate the weight of three courses of masonry / or more ~ 3 vertical feet and design for that. Actually, I don't think anyone bothered! they just knew it would be ok for standard housing. But for lightweight blocks the simplest way (if you have a concern) is to buy a twisted strap. The top of the twist connects to the truss say. You have two choices here and this is about the cost of procurement. You can site bend a 5mm thick the strap at the bottom, drill out a bit of mortar bed and turn the leg back into the light weight block buy 80mm , takes a couple of minutes. Fix this to the block with 5 x 80mm screws and plugs, 2 fixings per block vertically, these are to hold the strap to the wall so you don't need to calculate the shear capacity of these fixings. They also build in reduncancy / robustness. Or you can you do the full calc route.. which will require a lot of effort. Or you can just just nail / use any plugs you want and not turn them back into the lightweight block. Some inspectors just like to see the straps and don't look at the fixing type and compatibility with the masonry etc. For me I would do it the right way and turn the strap back into the masonry if light weight block. It's not that much work, a few quid. Lastly, well nearly, as a caveat.. what you want to look out for is things like canopy roofs and say wrap around bifolds on corners of buildings, anything that looks a bit out of the normal. Oz .. think your job is safe. Holding downstraps are hard to get your head around as the manufacture's only give you part of the data. Often it's easier to skin the cat in a different way and look forward to spending the time and money else where. Peter if you want some pointers on how to calculate wind loads then..

Morning To introduce ourselves, we have just received planning permission to demolish our residential bungalow and replace with a house, we hope to do this in around 2 years time. At this stage its all about discharging our conditions, research and planning. I have picked up lots of helpful information from this forum already - thank you.

not for uk --as lowest normal temp can be handled by ASHP if in Canada or nothern europe where months of -20c --then GSHP will be the way to go due to better COP from ground which temp is more more stable than air

Are you staying on site during the works or living elsewhere? Electric Your electric will need disconnected from the house and relocated to a temp site supply for the workers to use. You need to pay the local DNO for this, much cheaper if you expose the cable and dig the jointing pit, dig the trench & lay duct for the new route. You will need to prepare the temp kiosk and have your sparky prepare the DB board, sockets etc.. as the DNO only moves the meter and company fuse. If it's genuinely temp, you need to pay again to move it all back into your finished house. Now, many of us have only done the move once by putting in a more substantial kiosk and making that the final home for the meter. You then run armoured cable from there to your new build. In our case, we did the meter move early on, and ran temps to the old house (so we could stay in it for a bit longer), to the caravan (that we subsequently moved into) and to a site office. Plan was to try and reuse a lot of that cable but most of it got damaged and needed to be replaced, shame but only a few £100 in the grand scheme. Water This one is easiest - just chop the supply after the meter or stopcock into your site and put in a standpipe. If you're living onsite during the build then you'll need to run a supply to your caravan. As soon as required, groundworkers can run the new feed to the house - I was surprised that practically the last thing that happened - I.e. days before moving in, was the live water being connected to the plumbing system (there were pressure tests etc during first fix). Fouls If you're living on site then you'll need to connect your accommodation to the mains sewage (assuming this is what's present today). Otherwise you let your GW grub up all the old sewage, typically back to the IC before the main connection and build out the new set of ICs and ducts etc.. Any fouls and other ducts for power, telecom, ASHP etc need to be in situ before the slab is completed. Some GWs don't like putting in too much foul too early as it often gets damaged (i.e. driven over) by other site activity. Rainwater normally goes in later too as it sits relatively close to the surface and does not touch the main sewer but will go to a RWH tank or straight to soakaway. Gas Gas needs capped off by the network at the site boundary ahead of demolition. After this the meter can be disconnected and collected (or stored safely on site) by your provider. There is a fixed fee for this and it's not cheap. Some GWs will 'arrange' it to happen for cash in hand but this is at your own risk. It took the team who did mine about 20 mins. Located pipe, dug hole, capped it off, filled hole. Re-instating gas is cheaper as the new connection is subsidises and it was a much more involved process - proper days work for a 4 person team. Your GW will have installed the yellow perforated pipe that they will expect to be there. Telco If you're staying on site then you'll probably want to keep DSL and phone services. Not as easy as it sounds as you need to facilitate a 'move' which can mean loosing service for a week. A more common approach is to just get one of your crew to disconnect the cable from the house pre demo and if possible, run it near the new location. Then you call BT, and get them to 'fix it'. You then reverse this or ask for a new connection when you move back in. We ducted the telecoms into the house to avoid an overhead wire, we bought and pulled the BT cable ourselves and left one end at the bottom of the pole and the other inside the house where the master socket was required. I think this is it. Remember, ducts are easy to put in during the build, hard after. Think about external power (garden, garage or shed), lighting, gate controls, access systems etc. Put in a duct and one or two poly rope drawstrings and you'll be grateful later.

This might be worth reading.....https://www.petercox.com/blog/top-ten-tips-for-dealing-with-woodworm/

Looks beautiful! ? can’t wait to see them in situ

My house used about 85% on the cheap rate. The price difference is 12p/kWh. So in my usual usage of about 11 kWh/day, upping that by 13% would save me a whopping 13p/day. If all my power came in free, then I would save £1.3/day, £465/year. Sometimes it pays to use more.

Yeah its a horrible thing, and not covered by normal house insurance. The people who had the house clearly knew about it, as there were sections of timber which had been replaced in the bathroom, but of course nothing was said. Its not the end of the world I suppose, at least I can sort it myself, and having done the loft, those timbers are all OK thankfully! I too have fallen through the floor in the existing kitchen, one of the floorboards was so bad. We never paid for a survey, i've lived on the street all my life, so I know the houses well, and my dad was a builder, so we just had standard valuation, i don't think we would have found anything else out having paid for a survey to be honest, all the bad things have been covered up which i'm now uncovering and fixing.

TBH it doesn't look like dry rot or wet rot to me but more like woodworm. Your pictures, of the timber surfaces, show lots of little dots of what looks like wood dust caused by woodworm chewing their way out of the wood.

Thankfully its not listed. Never considered point 3 like that. I suppose its had modern repairs through out its entire existence. Just what 'modern' is varies depending on time. After looking more closely at pictures of dry rot, what ever this is does look different (to my un-trained eye) to dry rot.

I'm surprised this house hasn't taken itself down yet!

That'll do nicely, thanks very much. Ingenious, though I doubt those hinges fill fit in amongst the double rebates Nice solution, very discrete. Touch over budget though! Thanks @Temp, top googling!

Highly UNlikely. They haven't the time or resource. But neighbours, axe grinders, bored local weasels, curtain twitchers might. And they could rattle the bush telegraph that wakes a somnolent planner. Who has to react.

What about getting and SE in right at the beginning even before you ask a builder, employ a QS, get an Architect. SE's know a lot more about this process than the common perception that they just just "provide calcs" A few rakes about on build hub say etc will get you on the ball re your budget. Work out if you have the money, can borrow it etc first . Much of the cost lies in the ground. Then spend £300 - 500 quid on getting an SE. Yes..you maybe don't want to put your money where you mouth is at the moment but it's a bit like site investigation.. if you skimp on this you end up paying for it later and often more. This is a known statistical fact in the industry and you are more vulnerable to this as a domestic client. Maybe it's worth getting and SE in early who will take you under their wing and guide you. A good one (SE) who has experience will do a desk stop study on the QT before they meet you and this can really go along way towards identifying real potential issues that need investigated/ designed around. This will also help you get provisional prices from builders by way say of an A4 spec on a page or two and you can access their contact list. They will also help you prepare a brief for the Architect. Also a lot of "SE's" are pretty good Arctitectural designers themselves so you may not need an Architect at all. You get two birds for one stone. You'll need an SE for a lot of basements so I think you could be missing trick and often wasting your money. It will do you no harm to just ask an SE right at the start?

Induction type for power locks.. https://doorentrydirect.com/securitron-icpt-powerjump-inductive-coupling-power-transfer?ppc_keyword=&gclid=Cj0KCQjwxNT8BRD9ARIsAJ8S5xaUfFJXskhmzCNRRnLRuT9lisxoJLZVqbxTaamj6DcEI91DTsTLLBsaAkcEEALw_wcB Time for bed.

Hinge type but expensive.. https://accesshardware.com/product/command-access-eth4w-4-5-x-4-5-605-energy-transfer-hinge/ 24v dc only. Google electric transfer hinge.

Here is one in black.. https://smart-home-group.co.uk/products/asec-concealed-door-loop?variant=35868023980190&dfw_tracker=89646-35868023980190&utm_campaign=gs-2020-09-07&utm_source=google&utm_medium=smart_campaign&gclid=Cj0KCQjwxNT8BRD9ARIsAJ8S5xZgrOO1YP4SYDbo05kUMI74q13ez7XxthRwiT2mqmtsR_Bsvd8mP2EaAkyUEALw_wcB Same one here i think.. https://www.randrsecurity.com/Concealed-Door-Loop

I only mentioned the issue I had with condensation as in the original post they stated that it was too be sited in a cold loft. Was more of a warning to be careful with the room extract ducts as these aren't usually insulated. Never had any issues with the insulated ducts leaving the unit heading to the tile vents.

Yes was from my utility room so of all the extracts this air would have been the warmest.

I appreciate that you have identified yourself as an Interior Designer trying to understand the market up front. Thank-you - that gives the basis for a useful conversation. My comments relate to my use of an ID on a recent project as a small LL. I hope they are helpeful to you and also to other SBs. As an ID you need to pattern your engagement very individually, and IMO the key things will be understanding the requirements, and educating people as to what is possible. Each self-builder is very different, and the market is perhaps well-desribed as "micro-segmented into units of one", which you *may* find ways to aggregate *a little*. ? The example of upfront guidance and material provided by the Architectural Practice Allan Corfield may be a good parallel example you could learn from. I used an Interior Designer for the design and refurb of a student rental in the last 2 years, so my comments are 'notes for a customer' and relate to a customer view, not following the question structure. You need to look at the other side of this view to find your routes to market. The key aspect for me was that I as given advice by a professional lettings agent I already respected. It was left-field for me, and I had to do some work to appreciate the possibilities. - For an established ID with a proven track record the costs per day will not be that different to hiring an architect. - Proving experience is likely to be more difficult, but it needs the same due diligence as you are hiring an artistic skillset, which is more personal than a trade skillset. But IDs do not have a standard training route as well established as an Architect. Past portfolio is critical. - I treated PM as a separate skillset. Not all Architects are good PMs; the same applies to IDs. Needs a separate segment of due diligence. - £250 will honestly not get very much, unless using eg a student or getting a favour / loss leader. £250 is less than one day if you are only buying one day, which may not even be enough properly to understand your requirements - but £800-1200 plus expenses may be one week. You may get a few sketch ideas, or perhaps a piggyback off another project. - Like an architect, you get out what your put in. The only way to judge the outcome is if you have defined and communicated your requirements / expectations / scope well. If you have not, then your ID, as your architect would be, has nothing to go on except their own opinions and guesses about your needs. You need to have enough knowledge and self-knowledge to ask questions pertinent to both. - You need the skills to distinguish between style and fashion, and to communicate the your aspirations to the ID. - It is important to have enough creativity remaining in the project to give satisfaction to the ID. IDs and Architects are rightly not happy if they are reduced to a monkey dancing for the organ grinder. It needs to be a continuous collaboration, and it will not come down like a spaceship from the sky. - Cost control is probably best as much by adjusting scope and time taken plus looking for synergy, not by *excessive* arguing about rate. It is a rather different ballgame if your role is as a developer, when you are looking for perceived value, rather than personal value. In my case I was approached by my (excellent) lettings agent with a proposal to update, using an ID that they had used for previous projects which I could see. The PM was handled by the agent managing the ID who did all the purchasing and nitty gritty, and me giving detailed input in response to a detailed proposal which involved a certain amount of re-scoping then touch-bases throughout. ID was looking after all the purchasing and implementation. Project was a big success. I'm not talking about numbers online, but you could PM me. My comments. HTH. F

1. Yes, but not on my current build. I have some fixed plans for this one and a lot of things are now set in stone (well, wood in this case) or are things that I am going to be strongly against changing so there isn't much flexibility! SWMBO, the architect and I sorted much of the details out prior to planning. If I do another build, or a renovation in a few years then it makes sense to consider including interior design as another service at the early stage since it's one of those things that may prove to be close to cost neutral. 2. "Common" parts - kitchen, bathrooms, lounge etc. to ensure good use of space, compliance with regs and ensuring the spaces fit our needs. 3. I would expect good knowledge of appropriate regulations/best practice etc and currently available materials/products/processes to enable everything from lighting design to laying out kitchens and achieving a good fit and finish to budget as appropriate to the client's brief. If it were "full service" I would expect project management and either recomendations for trades or fully organising subcontractors. Probably lots of nice 3D rendered pictures too! 4. No idea. Would assume it starts from a few hundred for a basic package to provide a plan to several thousand for sorting out all the work from beginning to end. 5. If my muse lets me down while looking at a space with constraints that makes it difficult to achieve my desires. (Blank slates are rather easier to deal with.) 6. Internet searches and probably asking for advice here, noting the no advertising rules. 7. It depends on how hard the problem is. Smaller than a single room is probably not worthwhile, all things considered. 8a. It depends on the ceiling sale price of the street or house to a large extent. I would be motivated to pay more for maximising value (from a good interior design of course) on a £700k+ house than a £200k house. This would obviously be reflected in the scope of work - details matter a lot more when the buyers are more limited. Sadly even in self build land, house prices are important because situations change and we need to plan for this. 8b. In the low hundreds, depending on the brief. Finally, what's with everything being battleship grey in houses these days? I see enough of this at work!

Original one was a cheapo-sack-o-shit, new one is a tidy Triton, hence the better flow rate. Adjust the shower head itself maybe for a spray vs jet ? The heads usually rotate to change settings ( the actual head where the water sprays from. Above triumph says otherwise

I had 2.5p per kWh as a normal average figure for the unit rate on a decent tariff, but standing charge adds to that depending on usage. It is my current rule of thumb for comparisons in my head. eg for one list (example not recommendation) https://www.theenergyshop.com/guides/energy-prices-per-kwh F

Yes definitely an improvement, we had a few problems before with cold spots , downstairs bedroom was one of them that never seemed to get to its required temperature but all sorted now, don’t know about running costs we’ll see how it performs over the winter.

Well you have a lot more than 1kg of air to get rid of, but that also means it does not get so hot. But if you do fit a very large fan, and grow mullets, you can make so old school video. The only people that say they don't understand today's music, are the ones that don't get it. I don't get it.

Thank you Uncle Nick . I tried to tell the big boys but they wouldn’t listen !!

I have seen cases where, for example, the mortar mix for a brick / block house was 18 sand to 1 cement. The "remedy" was to repoint the outside!