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If I had bought a Persimon box, I would be living on an over crowded housing estate, in the same type of box as many other people, complaining about my higher than expected heating bills and complaining about many aspects of a design meant for the average family that are not to my liking and not tailored to the individual plot. Instead I am sat inside my warm, low energy house, looking out at the setting sun, over fields towards the mountains in the distance still with some snow left on them. I like the fact I can only see a few houses from my windows and the house layout and features are exactly what we wanted and designed to work with the plot and it's orientation with respect to sun and views. I love the individual details like the west facing kitchen window specifically to see those snow covered mountains. I like that all the fixtures and fittings like kitchen, worktops, doors, floor coverings, doors, skirting boards and even smaller things like door handles, socket types and exact position, were all individually chosen by us to our liking. I like the fact that the house was built with all the AV and network cabling we needed all built in and hidden in the walls, including hidden cabling for surround sound speakers in both main rooms. I like the fact we have under floor heating from an air source heat pump. You don;t get many, if any of those tailor made details by buying a developer standard design house.

FOOK me sideways with a bent stick. No bloody poles, no sodding bits of pipe. Get a bloody forklift, unless you are in a town I bet there’s a farmer 15 mins down the road who will do it for a nifty. Start as you mean to go on, make connections now and use them throughout. Im all for having a go but some of these ideas leave me bewildered.

Having f***ing annoying neighbours. They objected to building compliance that I had built my house too close to their fence. So I got a visit from the LA compliance officer who measured up and decided that my house was 0.6m closer to their corner boundary than on the plan. Simple, he said: just put in a minor material amendment to record to new position. I talked to my builder about this, and he said: do not submit an MMA under any circumstances, because you are admitting that the house is in the wrong position; what happens if they turn it down? Anyway something seemed off, so I double checked the distance of the front of the house to the road: it was maybe 10cm further from the site boundary at the access, certainly nowhere near 60cm. Then the penny dropped: I have owned the plot for 35years, and I used to have a 1.2m deep laurel hedge running along the back of it. This neighbour property used to back onto my property and my side neighbour's at a T junction, but now there was a 0.5m step in the boundary. I double checked with the guy who used to own the side property 10 years before, but still lives in the village: yup they'd replaced the fence and swung one end around behind the cover of the laurel, so instead of being 0.6m away from the laurel root it was hard against it. Good old adverse possession. I stuck to my guns and told the LPA people that I was submitting an MMA because the property was the right distance from the road, and since the neighbours house hadn't moved any closer to our road, the distance between our house and theirs was according to plan; the problem was that they'd possessed a bit of my land and moved their fence line, which was a civil issue between me and them, and nothing to do with planning. I suggested that they revisit the site and remeasure with me. In the end they backed down. The total area of this pinched wedge was just over 1m2. Annoying as it was, it just wasn't getting into a boundary dispute over it. Morale: Use fence posts attached to concrete spurs to mark your boundary. This makes it a lot harder for neighbours to play silly buggers with fence lines.

Hi All It decision time on roofing at our build and i wonder if anyone had experience of specify the best approach (Warm v's Ventilated) The key constraint is roof depth as we are working to a tight height restriction. Ideally we would like to go with a zinc or Greencoat PLX standing seam finish. Reading around there seems to be various approaches to deliver the roof structure above timber rafters the TF company will leave us with. Any experience in achieving the best mix of cost and depth would be greatly appreciated. Thanks Bob

With Persimmon, you do NOT have to wait years to discover how big a sack-o-shit the house you've just bought actually is. My mate paid £300k for a 5 bed PPoS ( persimmon pile of shit ) and asked me to tile the entire ground flor for him, he was a chippy. I walked around and got to the back garden which was a swamp with some grotty soil and bricks etc mixed in. I asked why it looked like a derelict allotment and he said "turf is an optional extra.....". I chuckled and got my gear out. I went to mix up and no outside tap. I asked where it was so I could get some water....."that's an optional extra too, can you fit one for me and use that please?......." I then ran my laser throughout. The liquid screed had not been 'scrubbed' to remove the laitence, the floor in the kitchen was 13mm off from centre one way ( from the big nasty expansion joint disc'd into the floor ) and 9mm the other way ( this was the kitchen and about 5.5m wide!!!!! ). In comes the screed layers to put it right with self levelling compound, lots of it too......( mates mate did it, and NOT paid for by Persimmon btw!!! ). I get on and get done, and about halfway through a sales rep walks past and asks why I'm using the outside tap of the house next door ( that has not yet sold ). I said I just needed water as the house I was working on did not have one. She shot off, got her keys, let herself into the house next door and shut off the stopcock. I shit you not. My mate told me that the house had not sold, so each week something on the 'optional extras' list got added by Persimmon to try to make it sell. It had turf ( and an outside tap lol ). FFS. When he was bullied into giving the deposit with no notice, he was on holiday. He tried to pay over the phone / BACS etc but they told him he had to sign for the property or risk losing it. He flew home, minus his family, and asked to go into the house. The sales lady was hesitant and he had to insist. She let him in and to his horror the kitchen was in bits and loads of it missing AFTER he had paid for extra units, particular appliances etc to get their own 'tailored kitchen' installed ( which had been done and was finished ). Turns out the house directly opposite had sold, the people wouldn't close the deal if they couldn't move in by a certain date, so Persimmon raped my mates house as a donor so thy could complete the other house. Bathrooms had tiles just where water would splash, and paint everywhere else. The standard of the bathrooms was horrific. Tiles cut past where the tiler should have stopped the cut, grouted to hide it. Trims cut horridly badly, the list just went on, and on, and on, and on etc etc etc. Total and utter bell-ends, paying bad trades next to nothing to turn out sub-standard, over-priced heaps of crap. Stay well clear.

ahh right, so it's the plumbers fault for not putting drain in the middle 😉

Linear wetroom tray Look at the floor, and then the grout line centre of the drain. Grout lines are rising on both axis, so he's done 1000% what I would have done. When grouted there would be very little visual reference to say that back wall was 'off-set'. Job is Tres Bien. Customer is being a dick.

so why not go a 245-300mm i beam wall and build onsite?

I’ve sent someone today to grout it all She seam happy She didn’t like the dark edges of the tiles and didn’t like the edge beads being held on with gaffer tape The builder shouldn’t have let her look at a half finished job Just for reference for those getting tile quotes Average of wall and floors 53m2 My laboure price £1643-1113 for the other tilers for three I tiled the one pictured in two and a half days but I don’t grout anymore 😁 I just had these rates to hand as I thought we would be taking them back up May help forum members with there tiling budgeting Ps Ive had to buy the tiles and adhesive 5% profit on that Unlike Buildhub members The builder will pay me in 8-12 weeks time ☺️

That’s a really useful update as I will need to think about electrics too . thanks

@Andehh I can give you the full persimmon experience … I’ll promise you the earth, charge you a fortune, make you wait 6 months longer than I said to start with and then when I hand over the draughty shed you thought was an executive residence you’ll feel the way a lot of people feel when they do what you’re thinking …. Don’t do it !!

I just used some car anti freeze I had in the garage and tap water. Leave 50mm air gap for expansion. Look on eBay I got 3 off Rand new Termo One 400w elements for £28 delivered.

To echo what @Iceverge says… you need to look quickly at that design as it is barely building regs for insulation ..! What is the purpose of this 140mm block with another skin for the render ..? The mix of TF and blockwork doesn’t make sense, and the blockwork insulation is definitely not enough. Airtightness in this will be a real challenge and there are gaps in the VCL (vapour control layer) that are visible in the plans above. Roof design makes no sense either - they have specced Kingspan NilVent (clue in the name here ….. ) which is a breather membrane requiring no air space below, and then spec a minimum 50mm air gap. I would hazard a guess that they also had lunch with the Kingspan rep last week as I’ve never seen it specced so much on a set of plans ….

Tsk. No imagination.

We have always called it “the Egyptian method” we have rolled and skidded bridges, furnaces and countless lathes and escalators

Hire a small telehandler with a block grab for the day. Will cost you about £200 but life's too short to be hauling 1000s of bricks by hand. You have the bonus of being able to keep the bails wrapped and dropped around the site to make the brickies life easier.

If it was me, I would buy a solar kit of panels, inverter, isolators, safety stickers etc. Buy what you can physically install space wise and what you can afford/want to spend. Install it, in your case through a roofer and then an electrician or just a roofer then you doing the rest yourself (some inverters are wired to a 13A plug - yes you just plug it in!). It will work, it will be fine. The MCS registration is all about FIT payments, I don't want payments, I want to use all my energy because I am not generating energy for them to pay me 3p kWh. I would rather heat my garage than give it to them. The government need to get the DNO's told to cut all the nonsense and let people get on with it, which will encourage a massive shift towards small scale PV install. The DNO doesn't want you to install solar is the blatant truth. There are no structural implications in 99% of the case, the roof has been designed with snow and maintenance load. Maintenance load is 60Kg per metre squared, once the panels are installed you will no longer be able to load that roof with the maintenance load, the lightweight solar panel is about 12Kg and more than a metre. No wonder no one is installing PV when homeowners need to jump through hoops like all of this. A desktop survey? Honestly, in other words they know fine well their service is total nonsense. How any self respecting SE could provide desktop surveys for something like this and claim it to be worth the paper it is written on I do not know. You didn't hear it from me!

we've left 30mm for tiles. I think I got that figure from previous posts from @nod and our architects seemed to think it was a good number too. 🙂

Looks like I have picked a great time to start a project..

Pretty much yes - get an element that is at least 50% of the height of the rail though as they don’t heat well unless there is a decent length of element in the side rail. No real need to use inhibitor - get some cheap antifreeze from the motor factors and water that down.

Hi, would agree to add later, even later in the design process will cost you. Once wall and roof thickness is set so is the installation depth to a large degree. Don't think of passivhaus a distant unachievable thing, a normal build can't do. Some aspects you may not do, but it worth reading up on, as most things make really good sense and can be added to a design for little or no cost at the design stage. Building regulations insulation is far from ideal and so is their airtightness. Would look to have a minimum of a 0.15 u value, for walls floor and roof. If you have UFH go to about 0.1, to save too much downwards heat loss. From your design be wary of overheating from your glazed gable ends. Extending your roof and walls out similar to the rear, could give some shading, when the sun is low in the west can be as much of a problem as midday sun. The architect should be able to model it, you need to know what spring, autumn and summer will do to your internal temperature.

When this gets replaced, which I think your SE will tell you to, check with your builder whether the fabricators need to allow the replacement beam to finish top or bottom flush with the beam its connecting to. It looks like you're running a 203 dp beam into a 254 dp beam so detail A is wrong as it shows a 203 to 203 detail and it all looks nice and flush but in reality you won't get that as the beams are different depths.

If tiles you will need 6 mill for matting most floor tiles are 12-15 mil So Tge adhesive would be 12-15 mil 35-40 mil

If laminate then say 5mm for underlay and 12mm for the laminate/clic etc. engineered or solid timber, 18/20mm for the timber and a couple of mil for the adhesive. tiles, say 12mm for the tiles and 5mm for adhesive. all assuming the screed is flat and level

At worst, the HMRC might ask you to send them a letter from the merchant confirming that the invoices you have are the customer copy. HMRC are stuck in the 19th century. If I were you I wouldn't give it a second thought. They have to be seen to act fairly. It might be a pain in the Botticelli to get them to be fair, but they still have to behave decently.

It is something that has to be done sometime. Many architects consider it someone else's problem, and most builders consider airtightness not in the least important, or a route to condensation. Don't fall into the trap that 'the professionals' actually know what they are talking about. Much of it is sales led.

@TerryE : you swearing. It's like Nadine Dorries saying she doesn't fancy Boris: unbelievable.

The Norwegian state owns 67% of Equinor which used to be Statoil. The state derives its revenue from the oil industry in part through taxation, in part through the state's direct financial interest arrangements and of course dividend. The organisational design is evidently not your typical plc and actually confirms that the company is essentially owned by the state. Yup, the oil and gas companies are definitely coining it in but SSE's Q3 trading statement was hardly gloomy. In fact they're so positive about trading that adjusted earnings per share is now up to at least 90p from 83p. It looks like they're going to be fairly generous with dividend payments too at 81p plus RPI. Not too shabby given the current market. In September reported Earnings per share were up 65% mainly as a result of market volatility. More interestingly the SSE interim results of 30 September 2021 state that while renewable profits were down, this: I also don't think it was intended to malign SSE as such, it was simply that the data used for calculation was from published SSE figures which are broadly representiative of the market. If that is indeed the case, then having it under national public control and ownership makes more financial sense. If margins and returns are indeed tight then investment typically suffers (as we know) and value is extracted for the benefit of shareholders, and surprisingly, a huge buildup of corporate debt. Just look at the debt held by SSE, yet still paying generous dividends. SSE debt in 2021 was over £9.5billion pounds and if I've got it right the servicing of this debt costs about £200 million, operating profit of £376m And that is the pattern what we have seen develop over the last 10-20 years in many large companies, so it does make a difference. It's a pattern of corporate behaviour that doesn't belong anywhere near energy generation as it's unsustainable.

Looks great to me. Floor first afaic. Better detail at wall to floor joint. I did mine like it and just put Correx on the tiled floor afterwards, taped on around the edges. Yes a bit of cleaning up but then I'm time rich

Can’t believe this lady refusing to pay …..so sorry as you have to live and job looks fine

Never do the floor first Certainly not on timber floors One of the main reasons is damage and with these four bathrooms all the floor joints line with the walls Much easier to line up the floor with the walls

@A_L It's likely easy but can you walk through the calc to go from R value of a 50mm board to your figure here? @Nickfromwales Is this just a single set of cables internally to where the inverter is, plus an earth? I'm at minimum going to add these right now. I have ran some final figures now. Going to likely add 50mm PIR to the ceilings internally which works out at 300m2. Cost of this is £2100 plus my labour time which is free. The simple economics of this don't really add up as even considering 33p/kWh, with a COP of 3 on the ASHP, the saving over 20 years is only £1700 and that's allowing for starting point of the 33p compounded out at 3% - however it will remove the thermal bridges in the ceiling which is my main focus there. In stark contrast - given the same 33p/kWh and allowing for the same 20 years and compounded interest with a 4kWp array and getting 50% utilisation from that I would recoup £8k, from generating £14k worth of kWh minus a £6k outlay right now. Which is quite significant. If I up that utilisation to 75%, which shoudl be easily achievable with a PV diverter that £8k increases to £15k which is unreal. I've absolutely no doubt the PV I need to do now, it's just the wrong time from a cash flow perspective in the build stage and definitely reeling from not doing it while slates were going on. but such is life. The plan now is to run in the cables so I can do at end of build if I have cash easily. Also add the 50mm PIR as that just cannot be done later and regardless of the economics it will no doubt have other benefits.

Thanks for the update @S2D2 You've just reminded me to fix up the batten LED I bought for my loft. Had it plugged in under the sofa for 'ground lighting' effect. Nobody else liked it so I unplugged it and forgot about it.

We are not to bad because we are working for the builder and do around 50 bathrooms per year for them As long as they are happy We are ok

I agree with everything said but fir heavens sake get your SE to site to check it, if it is wrong and it fails, his insurance won’t be covering it and no insurance can cure injuries or death! This is way too serious to make assumptions.

I think many suppliers are jumping on the bandwagon If fuel was to drop tomorrow They wouldn’t drop there prices Through lockdown oil prices plummeted I can’t remember haulage companies pass that on to the end user Once the recession kicks in They will all find a way to discount prices

No particular warning on my Titon units. My thoughts are. For what it saves why switch off and risk not switching on when you have closed the windows. Mvhr sucks in moisture from wet rooms, so be definition the extract side is wet or damp. Switching off for a prolonged period would allow these damp areas to generate bugs, mould etc. Neither is healthy for the unit or you.

So bang go many contingency funds then. God, its sh1t at the moment isn't it.

Yup, I've now got twice the number of alerts from both google photos and microsoft one drive photos. I think they're both mocking me. I look at the photos and often wonder what I've done in the last year yet it feels like I haven't stopped! I'm currently at double the anticipated time, probably, and still have no idea when it'll be finished. Yeah, meet a few of them that consider this self-build. It's such a relief when chatting to a couple of friends who have been through the process and understand the challenges beyond, one asking me the other day whether I wasn't overcome with decision fatigue, the other saying frustrating it is when apparently small jobs end up taking days! I've seen a few near us where they've finished and gone. There's one project I drive past regularly however, that still puts me at ease because the developers started building works before we even got planning and it's still going on (and it's only one large georgian style town house new build and one existing cottage renovation). I'm hoping I might just beat them to it 😁 Like you, I've felt like I've been in a miserable hole with the building work for at least the last year and now the sun has come out as I start to make the kitchen and have a functioning bathroom in the house. It's starting to feel real... well almost. Doing it all myself with not a lot of prior experience, the one thing that I did not anticipate was the amount of time I'd have to spend doing research and learning new things. In all honesty, I think this has been the biggest delay factor beyond the supply problems due to covid. Put this together with a tendency to go round in circles a bit and overthink decisions and it's a recipe for slowing progress. I'm also a bit of a perfectionist - so much so the others on a plumbing course I took a while ago were taking the piss out of me for it. However, people I know are now starting to call me for advice and it's so nice to be able to answer the questions knowledgeably off the top of my head, or like the other day help someone out sorting a problem and fixing it with ease - at least someone can benefit from the learning! 😊

this is how we did ours.

All Thank you as ever some great advice. So i think this is what i must do then given my timber frame is specified to a 'warm roof' build-up. Am i right to call this a 'Ventilated warm roof' ? Many thanks

Thanks to everyone for the input so far. We are going with a well known TF provider who will leave us with a vaulted roof as per this picture (hope you can all see it) So the question is if we want to go standing seam (zinc or PLX) what is the best in terms of depth and performance (we are just a bit tight on headroom hence the desire to make the depth as narrow as possible) Thanks again for your thoughts Bob

My rule was top height below a horizontal line from the ridge (planning regulations I think) and 300mm from the roof sides. Loads: well, we just had 120 mile an hour winds a couple of weeks ago and there all still there, and now I wait for the one foot of snow test....

Leave unconnected until night time. Hence my neighbours thinking Santa was early last year.

Just make up a company, or copy the details of one that is MCS registered onto the paperwork. Only checked when it goes wrong, and by then, most companies have vanished. I am sure if the DNO is happy, the problem is solved. The structural element is really for your house insurance.

If you can convince yourself that you will self-consume at least the lions share of what you generate, then do as @ProDave @canalsiderenovation and others have done and DIY for as cheap as you possibly can. Any decent electrician should be able to do this from start to finish. Installing the trays / mountings etc couldn't be easier, but a roofer cannot run DC cabling and make off MC4's so I would not pursue that advice tbh.

Don’t use them ! Look what it’s done to her face !! Poor girl

Anyone, sparky, plunger-monger, data analyst or brain surgeon - caught short will use a composting loo when really necessary. Hissy fit ? - Pah! Tell 'em to clean up after themselves, and only if and when they do, you'll take notice of hissy fits. Until then fill yer boots or fill the bog.

Oh she did tell me the floor should have been tiled first 😂

Yip. Worth noting what we basically received from our suppliers. This gives some indication as to why everyone's costs are increasing. It makes for some grim reading & later this year could be much worse.