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<Stands up> We live in an estate - a Persimmon one in fact - and love it here. <Sits down to a reassuring ripple of clapping from the amassed circle of new friends, and nods of acceptance now that I've finally been able to say such a thing out loud> Joking aside, having spent many years renovating various Victorian properties and developed skills, knowledge and experience of pretty much every aspect (including, unexpectedly, building construction photography which found its way into the Haynes Victorian House Manual!) we never expected to end up in a new build (or rather 3 years old at the time). However, an estate agent suggested we had a look round even just to rule such a property out so we did and something just felt 'right' to both of us when we did. We bought it and 14 years on have absolutely no regrets. Indeed, I can easily see us staying another 14 as it suits us (small family now) perfectly. Perhaps we've been lucky with having the show home but the house is very well built. Having extended it and retrofitted MVHR I've seen almost every last inch of the building fabric - inside and out - and the build quality is absolutely fine. I'm a fussy bugger too - non-aligned screw heads are all that's required to keep me awake at night. Compared to every single one of the older properties we've renovated it is world's apart. People say 'They don't make them like they used to' and all I can say is 'Thank God for that!'. It performs well and is an absolute dream to work on. It turns out things can be built square after all. We're not overlooked, although others are so of course not all plots are the same, and we've always had great neighbours so again maybe we've been lucky in that respect too (currently a vet one side and dentist the other so I want you to imagine a family photo hanging up in the hall showing our gleaming white smiles, even on the cat! 😂). For those that can't understand our choice I wonder what the alternative is that is being compared with? Presumably the same general location and cost, otherwise does any such comparison make any sense?

Well it's the second day on week 4. The ground floor screeding is being done as I type this. To date all the walls are up (they come fully glazed, partially rendered and plasterboarded). The roof has been tiled and guttering fixed, the first fix electrics are done, the first fix plumbing is done (wastes and supplies for basins, wc's etc come ready installed in the panels), the underfloor heating is in and the MVHR ducting in place. In the service room is the cylinder, expansion vessel etc for the ASHP and the external unit is here wrapped, sitting on it's pallet. They started on the 8th April and expect to hand over at the end of May. We elected to use Dan Wood as a "half way house" - it's our original design (although with a nod to that sort of style). We didn't go extreme, much as we would like as I wanted a smooth planning experience, which we got. So, some of the standard Dan Wood bits we omitted. They can finish right up to carpets; handing over complete, save for the kitchen (too many choices apparently). We wanted a UK stair with closed risers so it could be carpeted. DW use bare wood, open riser and being aimed at the German market, the pitch is lower so the going messed up our internals too much. We also left out the doors (odd looking with the leaf rebated and closing against the face of the frame) and floor finishes save for the bathrooms. Those are now down to us. We had to provide the foundation (insulated raft for us) and drainage/service connections. However, it's been a dream not having to organise anything once they sign off the slab as ok. Men turn up at 7.00am sharp and work to between 5 and 6. Saturdays 8 till 1 ish. All materials are either brought with them or turn up on time. Electricians, plumbers, and scaffolders are woven into the work and are here at the correct point. The electrician was here until 11pm finishing off first fix because the next trade needed it done. Every single day it progresses. It probably isn't the cheapest way of doing it ( about £1730/m2 ex foundations) but the joy of not having any arguements with individual contractors makes up for it and there is no doubt the polish crew working on this house work damm hard and do a good job. You have to credit their attention to detail too. They obviously do this all the time as all the membranes are properly taped and sealed, the windows being inserted in the factory are done properly, etc etc. It's clear they have designed out issues over the years and have come up with solutions that work - hence the 20 year guarantee. We could buy the plot but needed to sell our house to fund the build. We are in a static caravan at present on site. Having reached retirement the certainty of getting the build done in a sensible timescale so we could get on with enjoying life was a big driver for this approach. Hopefully it'll be a family Christmas settled into a house this year instead of renting a cottage to escape the cold and damp of a 32ft static!

Hi, I'm an old codger of 75 who really has run to nearly the end of my projects (I'd like to keep going but my wife says I have passed my sell by date). Of course there are things to do and some technical help for the newest stuff. In the past I have converted a flint barn (I did use a builder for the floor and steelwork), built extensions without help - including the drawings etc, renovated neglected buildings (largest was a 12 bed hotel in Austria - by the time I'd fitted en-suites I felt pretty good at doing them - and installed a second hand heating system that ran in wood chips, I collected it in four stages as it was a pile of stuff in a barn. Before it was naughty I have rewired houses, fitted gas central heating and plastic windows. In the last 23 years I have lived in Austria twice, France, Isle of Mann and several places in England. Some time I will be moving again to be free of a large garden - so that may give me an excuse for a final swan song of house doing up. After a flair-up of my emphysema, then with various arthritic joints I have swapped the sledge hammer for repairing clocks (but not for long I hope).

Decrement delay is a better term. It's a factor of the mass, heat capacity and thermal resistance of the material. Heavier materials that are harder to heat up are preferred because by the time the midday sunshine soaks through and heats the inner surface of the material it's already night time and? the heat flow is reversed. The inner surface never gets above room temp. This can be an all in one solution like woodfiber or cellulose or you can get the same effect with a layer of lightweight insulation like EPS coupled to a concrete wall or PIR over a thick layer of OSB and Plasterboard with some concrete roof tiles on top.

60m2 slab from the 70s is gunna be no thicker than 100mm. That’s 6m3 of concrete to crush. 12 ton maybe. £33ex a ton for type 1. £400. By the time you’ve hired a crusher, you’ll be no better off. £150 for a grab if you need to get rid of it. I’d just buy fresh type 1 in next time for sure

Buy by the lorry load is the cheapest and direct from the quarry, not the builders merchants. Bags have a bagging fee in the cost, builders merchants just get from the local quarry and add profit and a bagging fee.

I would look to use something like RockWool Flexi. It's nice and dense, easy enough to cut and squishes into uneven gaps. Plus it's not massively bad to work with. Another is Knauf Frametherm 32. Similar to above not quite as dense.

It's cheaper to buy in agrigates as you need them, than to crush stuff yourself, and end up with a pile of excess that has been stockpiled and is always in the wrong place.

Welcome! First your visuals are amazing. I think you rendered them in Twinmotion but how did you draw the building? It's hard to see in the photo but it's either turned black from mold in it or a build up of dirt. The lack of airflow isn't good, so you may want to sacrifice here and later when you can redecorate consider some internal wall insulation over this particular part. Remember that building regs expect a 50mm gap between the roof felt and the insulation, with free flowing air in here. I did knee walls last autumn and had significantly underestimated the impact it would have in winter. I used 100mm supasoft insulation as we use these for storage so brush against them. We shall see about summer overheating soon, and whether it's better or worse now. Others will have the knowledge to make suggestions, but you're spot on re rigid foam boards. For snug fit installation you can put strips of Gapotape down either side of the boards, but it costs an absolute bomb. With the badly fitted ones here I taped them to the joists with aluminium tape, so the insulation value isn't great but they are airtight. Thermal mass is a running joke on this forum but if budgets allow you may want to reach for denser insulation like wood fibre, which slows the progress of heat into the building in summer (see https://www.steico.com/fileadmin/user_upload/English_Media/Content/PDF_Not_PIM_EN/Brochures/STEICO_heat_protection_EN_i.pdf).

So am I, but I've given up caring any more.

Well done retrofit with decent amounts of insulation 😃 make sure the insulation is gap filled with expanding foam and all joints are taped. Not really sure what the heating grid brings to the party though, I would delete it, replace with polythene sheet (separation between the aluminium foil and cement in the screed) then use staples to hold the UFH pipes in place.

Have a look on YouTube and HA forums for more detail. Most of these IoT devices use an ESP processor to connect to one or more sensors / relays, etc. Traditionally they would be preloaded with vendor-supplied firmware that would connect back to a vendor-supplied cloud service. Tasmota and ESPHome are open-source projects to provide a configurable firmware that you can download onto IoT devices so you can use them without depending on some closed-source (usually Chinese) vendor-supplied firmware or having to write your own. Amongst other things these can use MQTT to control the device, and both have Home Assistant integrations so you can do pretty much everything through HA. E.g. Google "AliExpress Athom smart plug Tasmota". I bought 6 for around £60 IIRC and they came in about 2 weeks. Tasmota and ESPhome connect to your home router using TCP. The other option is to use ZigBee devices which use the ZigBee protocol and use a ZigBee dongle on your RPi with ZigBee2MQTT so that you can also control them using MQTT.

Yes, but it’s far harder to level and compact than type 1. I did the same, but if I did it again I’d get rid of the concrete or use it on the drive and get fresh type 1 for slab

Hard to tell from the pictures, but you may be right about the drainage. It also looks like someone skimped on the materials. It could be a mismatch of resin types, but that is an unknown now. But most likely, as @joe90 says, it was initially laid up onto something that was damp. You could try recoating it, once cleaned up, with one of the polyurethane systems. They have good reports. @Onoff did his roof with it and it seems to have worked.

Hi, Flat roofer here…the system is almost secondary to the installer. The arguments for fibreglass are always things like ‘the coat boats with it’ but houses and boats function very differently. I dont like any of the systems proposed but I think you will have less issues long term with rubber.

I used fibreglass on ours I had no experience but found it pretty easy with some good advise from a boat builder friend of ours

You want home assistant . Turn off all cloud crap ( avoid Tuya ) . Maybe Shelly if WiFi good . Wouldn’t want smoke alarm dependent on WiFi or zigbee . AliExpress zigbee stuff is a gamble . Some works as expected , some doesn’t and some you end up doing your own code work around or requesting on GitHub for proper support . China land isn’t that keen to follow zigbee spec …. Z wave though is certified so ( in theory ) more chance of working as expected . It’s all a bit disconnected and hobbyist . But with time and learning you can get something decent .

@SteamyTea is your man on fibreglass, he will be along shortly (it looks like damp got in during the cure when it was laid).)

@JohnBishop, I personally avoid using any which depend on vendor supplied apps. As @Wil suggests have a look at HomeAssistant. It runs fine on an RPi4 with a min 2Gb. Use USB3-attached SSD as your main storage device. HomeAssistant has a load of "one-click" add-ons and integrations, such as the Mosquitto MQTT Broker, MySQL, Zigbee2MQTT, ESPHome, Tuya, Tasmota, and these take away most of the configuration pain. I have a load of Zigbee sensors. All of my smart switches use Tasmota. I also have some custom Wemos D1 mini Pro set-ups to handle my DS18B20 temperature sensors and these run ESPHome. Everything is integrated through MQTT and all runs on my LAN. I buy everything on AliExpress and wait the extra 2-3 weeks to arrive. OK, I don't use RPis anymore as all my services run as x86-64 VMs / containers on an old laptop that I use as a server and this runs ProxMox host, but that my personal preference because I am an IT geek. A single RPi running HassOS will work fine for most users.

Only person than can answer this correctly is your structural engineer. We came across a well, right along the edge of the foundations. Call to SE. Said to fill with lean mix concrete, she then designed a ground beam to span over. I would not let your demolition contractor tell you what to do. They are, after all, experts at making things fall over, not stand up.

Sounds like our previous build We had three tanks One a modern plastic type The other two 6 meter deep concrete rings One was directly under one of the corners of the house and one under the garage Both had to be filled with concrete The third clean hardcore tamed dow in in layers Our SE dismissed doing anything else

If it were me I’d have it removed entirely. Otherwise they’d be unable to assess the soil conditions below. It might expose soakaways or pipes that you didn’t know about, there may have been a house there prior to the 60s house. I wouldn’t risk putting a new house on uncertain foundations. I doubt any foundations engineer or builder would either. Don’t underestimate the value of your disassembled 60s house. Timber, roof tiles, cable etc all has a value even if it’s free for collection on Facebook. We demoed our property at zero net cost, and probably ended a few ££s up. Soz if you knew that already.

Hi Tony and welcome. At 75 you are not as aged as some of the old gits on here!

I had a couple of plastic Spacers sitting proud when I did my bathroom floor and the first one I tried to remove left a little fink in the tile. So I used a soldering iron to melt the other two below the grout line

The BC side is not too much of an issue. The foundation stuff is dealt with as normal and we did that so it didn't move as quick anyway. As for the superstructure technically it's a dpc inspection but DW cover the whole slab and a photograph did the job there. The rest is factory manufacture and BC seem very happy. DW do the pressure test and provide all the certificates for MHVR etc. Hopefully the final sign off will be smooth after we've done our bits. We had seen an Adelia made by Scandi Huis, they have one on their factory site near East Grinstead. It was too big (and too dear). We had looked at DW but couldn't find a design we liked although some of the features we thought were interesting. So we came up with something along that scandinavian look which would not be out of keeping in the streetscene. MBC quoted and whilst we were considering where else we could go for an alternative quote, we spoke to DW just on a whim and they said they could get close. We had to drop a few bits, partly due to their system and partly due to cost so there was a compromise to be made but we're not far off. Just couldn't face several years of pain at our age just to get the fully glazed gable that you can't curtain anyway!

Really interesting! I didn't realise they did non-catalogue designs - it would be great to see yours. I had excluded them from my initial list, but sounds like it might be worth reaching out to them. How does BC work with something so speedy?

You ARE jokin !!!! ( I just don’t act my age 🤷‍♂️)

So are you @joe90 ….

I’m a young stud

I thought that also ( I didn’t , but felt as I had resurrected this zombie thread I should attempt to comment )

"just had a notification to say the house is massively on fire, better finish this pint and head off"