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Sorry for the absence - moving house is a bit time consuming but the real problem was knocking my pint straight into my laptop and killing it. That gave me 2,200 reasons to remind myself to be more careful! 🙄 Loving the house btw - the combination of the underfloor heating and the MVHR makes for a wonderful balance feel. Having always lived in houses 100+ years old I have never had anything like this! Just landscaping to go - ground is too wet to do anything to it at the moment but the trees should soon suck it all up.

Well done on moving in. Sorry about your "tipsy" beer that ruined the laptop. It's hard to describe to someone who has never experienced it just how nice the constant temperature inside a well insulated house with mvhr is.

Give the driver £50 to move it closer.

We cut ends of rolls of vapour membrane into strips about 50mm wide on the chop saw and then use it stapled to the rafters. Seems to stay put.

Plot 1 done, my plot done apart from kitchen that was waiting for the worktop template completed today. Plot 2 done in 4 weeks. and externals wrapping up in terrible conditions. 15 months - 3 plots - 7,000 sq. ft at £110 psf to a high (London SW1 spec) in Cambs. Have been self censoring on here as I have been critisised as a bit of a Swearey Mary (in the good times of Viz!) which is fair enough for the community. So this post will pretty much wrap it up for me as coming back from site where every other word consists of 4 letters to post here seems pretty much impossible! All the best lads. Tony

You have 20m2. if you allow £50/m materials and £80/m labour, plus £250 muckaway it would cost £2,850. You could do it yourself for half that. It is not like the contractor would think you live somewhere posh. If you are doing this to park in the front garden it needs to be done properly. You will need consent from the council and to install a soakaway or permeable paving, plus a dropped kerb to council spec which would need a streetworks licence plus a lot of public liability insurance.

It´s very hard to work out the embodied carbon in the manufacturer of things. But a good rule of thumb is that most things in their manufacture use 0.3 - 0.4 kgCO2e/£ (Mike Berners Lee is a good source of info on this in his books). The rule is surprisingly accurate. I´ve seen companies and organizations do painstakingly detailed analysis on the carbon footprint of the manufacture of batteries, vehicles, and many other things. It almost always comes out in the range above if it is a good analysis, although it can be lower if they are not counting the full impacts properly. So anything that costs say £9000 will likely have a footprint of about 2.7 - 3.6 tonnes CO2e. It might be lower if it´s produced in UK, or higher if components are shipped from China, so call it 3 at a guess. The heat pump will save according to my calculations 1.5 tonnes after a year, so after two years you are already even, and then it may last 10 or 20 years.

https://www.pavingexpert.com/

Managed to upload a few to Vimeo - https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/690011114 https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/690011150 https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/690011260 Certainly won't be keeping the diary clear for any technical awards come Oscars night....

really? Sure you're not thinking about concentric?

Same as us then! Yes, you are wrong - it needs to be designed in from day one but does not necessarily add much cost, when's all's said and done the structure of your home is about 20% of the overall build cost and making that closer to passive may add on 10-20% to that cost (maybe less). Really it's just more insulation, more focus on airtightness and consideration to over heating etc. If anyone tries to present it as some hair shirt wearing lifestyle strategy then show them the door. We leave doors and windows open year round when we feel like it but our house is warm in winter, cool in summer and we have relatively low energy bills - that's what it's all about. Take a look at MBC Timberframe as an example of the package approach - we used them as did many others here but there are lots of alternative contractors and build systems to get the same result. Lots of ICF builds here and well insulated block also.

I've been tracking with and engaging with self-builders on this forum and the previous eBuild forum for about 8 years. During that time Jan and I split our old plot, built a new energy-efficient low-maintenance home to retire in, and have now lived in it for over 4 years. What I find very interesting is tails of self-builders here and how they fall into a spectrum: At the blue end of the spectrum, you have a lot of builders whose builds seem to go to plan and budget; everything comes good with the final house living up to expectation. OK, many have the odd bump along the way, but they address the issue(s) head-on and overcome or mitigate them. I think that we fell into this category. At the other red end, you have some where their build is a tail of woe; of one disaster after another; of being "unfairly let down" by suppliers and tradesmen; of time and costs spiralling out of control. And you've got all shared in between, but even so spread seems to be more of a double hump than a normal distribution-style bell curve. So I think that a more interesting Q is not "what was the worst mistake" but more: why do some people succeed and some fail so badly? And the corollary: what do I need to do so that I and my build is in the falls in the first category. I would suggest that there are some key success factors: Research, research, research. Understand your issues and risk factors and establish viable solutions well before you start to implement them. If you don't have the skills to do this in any area, then you have to be prepared to hire the expert skills that you need at a realistic commercial price. If someone offers you a deal that sounds too good to be true then 9 times out of 10 that is because it isn't true. Realistic cost and time budgets. If you start out with an infeasible cost plan, then magic doesn't happen; things don't just turn out for the good; you will inevitably make mistakes that just compound and derail the project. You need to scope your build project honestly and include sensible time and cost contingencies. Clearly defined scopes and responsibilities. Every aspect of the build must be "owned" by someone, and both you and they must agree on that. Pay particular attention to three-way interfaces, because these are a hot-spot of failure. Expect that mistakes will happen. We all make mistakes, even the best of us. So you must be continuously on the watch for them. It doesn't matter who is responsible. You and your build will ultimately suffer if they aren't identified and mitigated in a timely manner. This means you (or your PM) must be prepared to do continuous quality assurance on the build. Check and validate each stage before starting on the next(*). When mistakes are found, then agree an action plan to address them and execute it as soon as practical. Respect your tradesmen and subs, and be flexible with your mitigation. (Trust but verify). This is a corollary to the previous point. Most decent tradesmen include some contingency in pricing a job. If the final cost is within that contingency then they will be flexible. Once they've used up the contingency, then they'll start to cut corners. So even if a mistake is down to someone else, then be flexible and try to identify a mitigation that minimises everyone's costs, because next time it might be your mistake. I could add more but I hope that you get my drift. (*) There was a notorious case in the history of the forum where one self builder seemed to have a "magic happens" personal philosophy. The foundation sub screwed up the pour of the slab and one edge slumped by up to 40mm along one wall. No one picked this up and things really started to come apart when the TF arrived and they tried to erect it. Pretty much everything that could go wrong did go wrong. By contrast, when my slab team did ours, I thought that they did a great job, but I still closely monitored sub-base layer compaction, then personally checked and OKed dimensions and diagonals before and after pour; ditto levels across the slab with my Dumpy. We did have a slump of about 3mm in one area of the living room floor, but I decided that this wouldn't compromise frame erection. (I later let the slater know before he started putting down the finished floor.) Was this my job? Not really, but I would have ultimately borne the consequences if the slab had been off-spec, so I still did it. (We had a different cock-up with our rebar design which could have been as bad for us, but I picked it up in time and agreed on a mitigation with the supplier before to pour.)

Not read the rest of the thread, but just took a look at the drawing, notice you have 200mm centres on the rafters, which would mean 153mm wide strips of insulation between. Would the insulation value meet building regs? Is this a typo?

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.

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 ….

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!

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.

I once asked a helical wind-turbine salesman how much power it produced, in practical terms. He answered that it could power the led display that said 'this display is powered by the wind'.

We just had two identical sets of double sliders installed. One on first floor on a steel one on ground floor sat on blocks, the difference in operation is huge, the slider on the steel works so smoothly you can do it with a finger. Amazing how such things can make such a massive difference. Littlevoice, a consideration when deciding on french/bi-folds/sliders, do consider how windy it is where you are - sliders don't bang around like other doors can.

@bob the builder 2 you’ve asked the wrong question and everyone is answering it ..!! If your TF provider is insulating using blown cellulose then you have a warm roof to start with. You can’t change that unless you change the insulation and a whole load of other things. What I think you are asking is whether to ventilate behind the standing seam zinc and the answer there depends on what the supplier requires as some will be happy to go onto your current counterbattens and others may require OSB or fleece backed underlay prior to laying. If you want to ventilate the rafter level space then you have a lot of work to do to join membranes and sort partial fill insulation which will need to be a change to your TF spec.

Don't go. Keep posting and keep swearing. But remember ... you ain't nothing until you get 1 of these!

Cracking job well done ! Fly through would be good too. And the forum profanity filter takes most things out … so feel free to stick around and pass on some of the experience

I won't be sleeping by it and you've done a good job by the looks.

You are (strange) but totally right to be honest - make them tell you to f*ck off! I wasn't sulking but, if I was, sulk over. Happened to me at Audi Sports Net and will probably happen again - who gives a toss! I just don't want to ever be in a situation where I self censor - there is just no point in posting in that environment. Anyways, notice given on my shithole rental today (nice views mind) - move 'planned' (ie I have done f*ck all about booking anything) for w/c 14/2. We are not even going to be wet in the plot until week after next. Should be fine though. Called off the air test for the 11th and the b/c final inspection for the 14th. Sold Plot 1 - largest price achieved in the area ever - shows that people will pay for spec and quality - this was a major call when speccing the thing. I just think that quality sells itself and while the sales agent needs telling the market sets it's own level. Plot 2 will sell this w/e for even more. They are great plots tbh - I would have had an excitable accident in my pants a couple of years ago to have had the opportunity to live in one of those. Carpets in today - no joins. Had to move a 5m x 12m carpet through the plot and around a swerve. The thing weighed over 1/4 tonne. Boomed it up with the forks to get it in over the terrace thing and then 3 of us sweated and swore for an hour moving it in place. Got 1500 sq of carpet done - galleried landing and 4 massive bedrooms with joins under carpet bars only at the door thresholds. I didn't think that could be done tbh. Anyway - for those sensitive souls on here (don't ever go near a site if you are!) I appologise in advance for any upset I will cause ? Blame that Pocster chap - he has probably offended you alreay anyway! I have offered a walkthrough without thinking how I can do it - I can load it up to You Tube but would rather not - any alternatives?