Leaderboard

Finally (well about two years after the conversion was completed) I've managed (to find someone else) to trawl through the hours of video to create a 12 minute time lapse of an old barn on our family farm to holiday cottage conversion! See here https://youtu.be/xJuw4Q1SYrs We remain indebted to BuildHub for the support (mainly with the Sunamps) - thanks all

So you have a 3 phase supply. Good. Use a 4 core cable (Neutral, L1 , L2 and L3) And feed a 3 phase 6 way distribution board to split it to the 17 units 6 each on 2 phases and 5 on the third phase. 35mm will do for current carrying capacity but will still not be big enough to keep voltage drop within allowable limits. At full load of 16A per unit I am coming up with 85 square mm cable to keep voltage drop to no more than 5%. It would be even bigger if you were trying to keep voltage drop to the lower limit for lighting circuits. Your ONLY hope of getting it smaller is to do some diversity calculations to get the total load down to a LOT lower than 16A per unit.

The problems is, you are now never going to unsee this. ☹️

Ok I am an idiot. It turns out the calibrated and curved depth locking is marked in big centimeters that look like inches. The reason for this is that scale on the lock is twice the distance of the blade from the depth adjustment pivot, so 1 big cm on the scale = 1 normal cm of blade below the base plate. Over the years I have become alert to mail order outfits substituting non UK stock, I once bought a Sebo vacuUm from Amazon that arrived with a euro to UK plug adaptor and for the next 10 years the adaptor used to get wedged in the flex recoil mechanism. Then last year a dodgy Welsh power tool retailer sold me a few Makita items in a plain cardboard box with no Makita paperwork.

On my floor ones ? I agree - but it’s still out . If I grouted it - would look sh*t Managed to get through to tileflair - boss is going to call me !

Hello and welome, Are you building yourself, project managing, or using contractors? The go to book is as always The Housebuilder's Bible. Another is the recently published Self-build Simplified by Barry Sutcliffe. I found Self-build simplified more hands than the Housebulder's Bible, and has some really good info on project managing. Both these will give you masses of food for thought to begin with. HTH

Hi Download from Dropbox here. Andy

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.

I used the green coat plx but brought it pre folded, I got it from a co called metal solutions in Bolton easy to deal with, like the product glad I had agro with Tata as I wouldn’t have found these. Nicer product in my opinion. Been on a winter and summer, very little distortion.

Trepidation. 200 sqm, 2 floors. Wiltshire. Grateful others have done this before. Any tips on what preliminary reading is advisable?

£1k + VAT!!? It would seem they might not have assessed the liability properly...

Sad to see (but not unexpected) the lack of satisfaction here with warranty providers. Historically the NHBC was set up to improve the housing stock in the UK and more recently other providers have come to the market as it has moved from more research and development to a more fiscal (insurance) set up / model. The system in my view is more than ready for an overhaul. In other European countries a lot of folk don't buy from large developers as they do in the UK, their model is different as many folk "build their own" Hopefully things will change, swing back to favour the self builder, small local builder while improving on the quality of the build.

I’ll put a man on it shortly. ??

Yup ?

Nice soundtrack too??????

Drowning my sorrows now - Chablis style ??

I feel like I should have done a practice bathroom first! ? Learnt loads mind. I remember being just really unsure about the tiling. Worst job of the whole bathroom refurb for me. How quick will this stuff set I was thinking and rushing it. I put too much adhesive on for a start and got in a right mess. I should have relaxed, stood back and viewed the bigger picture. What about a really contrasting grout...like black to take the eye off the offset grout lines?

We bought our plot with an existing planning permission and initially just wanted to tweak that design. Spoke to the architect who did the design for the planning application and found him defensive (why do you want to change my brilliant design?) and worst of all he enjoyed speaking much more than listening. We then spoke to a local architectural technician who I found on the MCIAT website who was the polar opposite. He convinced us to put in a new application for a design closer to what we really wanted (which I’m really grateful he did), he listened to our brief carefully and pretty much hit it out the park on his first attempt. We only used him for planning and building regs and cost was about 2.5% of build cost, which is great value. He’s been really helpful through the build offering input and advice to tricky areas - he even came out one Saturday to check something out and give an opinion. I told him to bill me for the time, but he wouldn’t send one. In the end I think it’s about finding someone on your wavelength who you can communicate effectively with. In my view, It doesn’t matter if they are an architect or a architectural technician, as long as they are willing to engage on your terms. Maybe we were just lucky but I definitely think you need to trust your instincts at the first meeting and if you don’t click then sack them off. You may need to kiss a few frogs along the way!

That’s just the joy of doing the job yourself... you always see the errors, and look for them. Whereas if you get a ‘professional’ in you just look at the bigger picture and don’t notice the crap bits so much.

In all seriousness I found it hugely annoying to look back and see some of my grout lines. Htf did I miss and not correct them? Inexperience I'm sure. At least you used a tile levelling system!

at eye level at least.

Perhaps a bit late, but is this a help? And this is the pricing structure we used.

I was thinking a collection of camping pods or glamping or whatever todays trendy work is.

@Gus Potterthank you for your extensive reply. Distilling your post down to the essentials my takeaway is that local vortices above parts of a roof are the most likely source of roof wind damage and in this case the damage will be to the cover. Looking more broadly at wind stresses on the whole roof structure, a large proportion of the roof should not be subject to simultaneous uplift strong enough to cause trusses to tear off their wall plate clips. True in part, however a correctly trimmed sail should have a laminar airflow like an aircraft wing. The winning edge on a racing yacht is obtained through encouraging just a hint of a vortex along the leading vertical edge of a sail but not enough to develop a large volume of turbulence behind the sail. I can see some similarity between the cross section of a low pitch roof, yacht sail and aircraft wing. Unfortunately my house will not come equipped with a mainsheet that can be released during a storm force gust to spill the wind hence my interest. The power in a sail is ultimately derived from slowing down the airflow and extracting kinetic energy from the moving airflow. Going back to O level physics and E = Mass * Velocity squared * 0.5 then at 80 mph the forces get disconcerting i.e. a routine 40 mph gale force gust has 4 times less energy than a winter storm 80mph gust. In 80 mph a yacht will be running under a bear mast at a surprising speed whereas 40 mph is just a nasty gale where some sail is left up for control. Getting back to my 30 degree roof after some further reading I understand that 10 to 15 degrees is the pitch most likely to start behaving like an aircraft wing with associated lift. 30 degrees is still a concern.

17 times 16 is 272 Amps. No 1: That lot will not be powered from a typical domestic 100A single phase supply. No 2: It will be voltage drop that determines the cable size over that distance, and it will be a BIG cable. No 3 you would not normally export an earth over that distance so it would be 2 core cable and probably a local earth. This is a serious design issue and as a very minimum it sounds like you want a new DNO installed 3 phase supply as close tothese 17 units as possible.

Maybe Uncle Nick tiled the showroom? If they don't work either way, take them back and get something else.

I have to agree with the majority, something just aint right and it would annoy my OCD. Take them all off and clean off the adhesive, then play around to see if they can be made to line up.

The tiles have double and single width stripes. They need to butt up to the same width stripes, then you know it is the correct way round.

Nice way to watch and eat my dinner. Great job, looks lovely

Some tiles the wrong way up? (That would annoy my OCD).

Pat On The Back time.

I did it all myself.

I had a similar issue with getting some Ikea bookcases flush against the wall - they have a skirting profile cut into them but it was shorter that our skirting. I used a round file to enlarge the profile on the Ikea - it did crumble a lot internally but looked fine externally. Suggest you remove the whole run of skirting and if you want, make a single straight cut so it sits flush with the bed leg. If the bed comes out later you can glue / nail the cut piece back and smear some caulk or filler between the two cut edges.

Doesn't the further away bed leg also clash with the skirting? If not, either the bed or the room is out of square...

I'd try to remove the piece of skirting first. If it is attached by some glue, prying with moderate force is all that is needed. When the layout changes in the future (or you don't like the idea or figure something different) you stick the same piece back again. If it doesn't give up, than decnet nails or screws were used and it won't work so easily I had a similar situation (new build, all held together with snots) although with the piece removed betweeen inner corners, so no sharp edges of the remiaining skirting boards sticking out. I pried away (with a screwdriver, but a table knife would do the job if no better tools) from the wall to break the glue, then 'walked' up prying from the bottom at the corners to free from the remaining profiles and done. Frankly cutting the bed leg, being made of proper wood might be more tedious job (even if the access is easier) than removing/cutting the skirting board and also reduces value of the piece of furniture (to zero?) in case of reselling.

It is possible, would take a bit of work to show you how, though I could probably do it in 10mins when I have spare time if you wanted. Let me know.

to cut the skirting neatly without removing it you'd need an oscillating saw. If you aren't an avid DIY'er then this would be a fairly expensive tool to buy for a one off job. If you know someone who might have one then borrowing might be an option. But without one it will be impossible to cut a neat notch out of the skirting without taking it off the wall and cutting with a saw, and re-fitting either side of the bed leg. Easier and with a hand saw would be doing what Steamy says and cuting a notch out of the leg.

+1 How did you do the waste? On the few I've done its easier if the waste can move around a bit so it can be pulled to the underside of the tray when you screw the top part into it. So I left a channel for the pipe and trap to move around in rather than encasing it in the sand and cement. I just put a small block of wood under the trap so it wouldn't drop down so far the threaded top part couldn't reach.

Would it not be better to shave part of the bed leg down.

To me that looks pricey, bit depends on the scope. Can the tree survey be done by the ecologist in one package?

ASHPs take heat from the air and move it to water so wet is the only option using ashp. Electric underfloor heating is very expensive to run unless you only use it when sunny and have a massive solar array. Not really viable in the UK unless you have money to burn

I left a rectangular hole in my screed, used 3*2 to form the opening, to allow my finished floor to go down. Once I had my tiles picked out I could work out my final height and used a strong dry mix of sand and cement to fill the hole up to the height it needed to be. My tray was also the same size and it's heavy so it's not the sort of thing you would move when you stub your toe on it. The weight of the surrounding slab keeps the insulation from moving plus with the gap round the outside of the tray filled in once you where happy with how it set it can't move so was solid.

I did this first thing Saturday and followed up Sunday with a polite but firm email. No contact Monday at all from him and he must be telling staff to avoid my calls. I've got another Mereway agent pricing up replacement items so I know the cost of buying them. The kitchen was in great condition when we viewed, it's been soley damaged from removal. We did a thorough inspection prior to removal. I'm not sure what's reasonable cost but it seemed reasonable to us. We know a similar kitchen (even without appliances) would have cost a lot more. We actually got another Mereway agent to design us a kitchen almost identical so we knew how much it would have been to purchase and we had compared against some of the ex display kitchen sites (newandused, kitchen exchange etc) too. We also had priced a DIY kitchen so had a rough idea of unit cost (albeit we didn't like any of the DIY kitchen ones) so we did our homework on unit cost. The appliances, sink, pop up plug socket, led lighting etc were all included so I guess this is where the real value is. We have Quooker tap & cube, and all Siemens top of the range appliances. Hob, fridge, dishwasher, a single oven, steam oven and coffee machine.

I bought the Purenit from Construction Fixing Systems, was used for thermally separating cold steel from warm walls. If you're near Bristol I have a few boards of GG700 lying around getting dusty

You will need one in the kitchen. TOP TIP: Aico make a combined heat and CO alarm in one package, perfect for the kitchen.

I’ve been watching some videos on YouTube of a guy who builds garden rooms professionally. For foundations he’s developed a system whereby he’s created a DIY pile system much cheaper than the ground screws I was on about. He pours cement into holes & encases M24 rods, with big square washers near the bottom. Then he bolts a u channel onto the top of the rod. may be worth a look maybes not for your project.

I am always amazed to hear from Architects and self builders who automatically assume a Metal Roof is a One Fits All Solution. Metals behave differently, whether it's expansion, colour, formability aging and patination or risk from corrosion, external environment or underside from a wrong build up. Architects cannot always be relied upon to know everything, and Manufacturers can be guilty of being blinkered to their product sale. There are good Independent sources of information. It's important not to have a single product mindset, if however you are set on a particular metal take advice willingly. Huge price differential is possible, this doesn't mean expensive is best or cheapest is worse. Media hike and Marketing drives the price these days. Be open with your design and stay flexible

It is a difficult one. When i had my kitchen company. I would spend a good few days designing a kitchen that would look stunning, and perform the tasks, and needs, and wants of the client. They were high end hand built, and generally in excess of 50k. I stopped giving out my drawings when i designed a kitchen that was £127k +vat. The client loved it. I never got the job, and found out later that the celeb client did'nt think i would be able to do the kitchen for that price. They gave my design to another company, who copied it exactly, right down to the personalised engraving on some of the wood, and charged £200k. I was miffed, so i would say, go to the company who did the design. You never know, they might even have built it and have some real world ideas of how it could be even better.

I concur - it's the quick and easy solution that causes more problems than it solves. They do that on sandstone tenements up here to stop moisture penetrating, but it always gets in and if it's been waterproofed, never gets back out causing more untold misery. The other sin is to re-point the walls using cement (rather than a lime mix) - which does the same - moisture in never gets out. Def worth finding out if it's the pots holding water (very likely) - when we got ours fixed they guy put a 'Chinaman's bunnet' on it to let most of the water run off before it even got to the pot - but might not be the look you want!