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Hi, my name is Graham (60's), and my wife Mandy(50's). We have a 6 year old collie/alsatian and a black and white cat. I was interested in self build a number of years ago but did not quite get around to a full house build - full time IT Security jobs get in the way! We completed a number of DIY jobs in our current and past homes e.g. new bathrooms, kitchens, extensions, garages etc. I have rekindled a bit of interest in ICF on approaching retirement as I might have a future double detached garage and storage in mind (and time to do it or manage it being done), and ICF/Durisol may offer a suitable method for walls and potentially a 'kingspan' roof. rgds Graham

After reading the thread below I went looking for how to properly hold a bigger drill. I'm sharing in case other beginners like me need to know how to safely hold a drill - and that a clutch won't kick in magically but needs you to provide resistance.

Ultimately, if the vast majority of the nation could take advantage of local/distributed storage, the we could run the grid on a fixed price, and a few, very large, nuclear plants. Now we know the that the 'strike price' for new nuclear is £95/MWh (adjust for inflation, with 2010 being the base year). So call that £120/MWh. If retailers double that, then it becomes 24p/kWh, or about what we currently pay. We would be taking in a lot of debt at around £10bn/GW for the installed capacity, and we will need a lot more than today if we truly decarbonise. We currently have about 80GW of capacity (not all of that is online at any one time). So say we triple that, and round up, 250GW. £2.5tn. That is about same as the current national debt. So instead of each person in the nation having £180,535 debt, that would become £361,070. That is ridiculous. The only real way out of both the climate and energy crisis is to drastically cut usage, so any scheme that pays people for over production is inherently wrong, we should really be rewarding medium and long term reduction.

Hi, I am renovating an old solid walled house in Northern Ireland. I am currently dry lining some of the rooms and landscaping/increasing the size of the garden. The next jobs include upgrading the bathroom wall tiles and levelling/replacing the entrance hall floor. We have architects drawings for a single floor extension of the living area and have yet to decide on the details and size of this extension, although planning permission should be a penalty kick. I hope this forum will help keep me focused on the essentials as I'm already regretting bringing mains wiring to some of the window tops for electric blinds. Thanks

I’ll be putting a new lintel in which is wider than the original. The one that’s in slopes up at the back. I’ll be making the gap a little bit wider for the regs

Yes they are taking the mick, but 2 weeks extra hire can't be more than £200. Too late now, just give them a bollocking.

Don't use them, unless you enjoy taking full risk on your shoulders. I chose to use a supplier that would measure, supply, and install. If they got measurements wrong or things didn't align as expected it was down to them to fix. I paid extra but slept at nights Supply only and a big chunk of money - you carrying full risk, no thank you.

Probably ‘ghost voltage’ being induced from other circuits the cabling for your circuit runs alongside. Impossible to say for sure without looking at it though

A couple of other easy tests to do: + Switch off the MCB and leave for 10 mins or so. If the 10V goes away, then it was likely just charge being held in some LED power supplies or similar. + If possible, turn the whole consumer unit off and see whether the 10V goes away. If so, there might be some cross connection e.g. on the neutrals, between circuits. >>> the other circuit connecting to the junction box was removed some time ago I might also be inclined to double check whether this was fully disconnected. Know what that circuit was used for?

Hi, reading back, did you ever have a soil investigation on your own site? I see the mention of sandstone on some of the records above and wonder whether there's any prospect of finding that? If you have a JCB, I think I might be inclined to dig the deepest hole I can in the extremities of the plot and look carefully at the spoil as it comes out. Anything remotely sandy may well signal success.

+1 what @nod says above, my floors were caberboard, no noggins and only glued, not a single squeak, dipping cannot occur if the joint is tight especially if glued with d4 glue

It is not fool proof but perhaps test a couple of places WITH THE MCB OFF, the meter on 600V range and with safely insulated probes - see dia below, ?1 = what I think you are doing plus also try ?2 and ?3 to see if the neutral has got away from earth. Disconnect any lamps - ?4 as modern LED and tubes have electronics in them which may be charging, and try the voltage test on the DC range as well as AC to see if anything odd is out there. If it goes away when you disconnect the lamps then its coming from / via them somehow and you might be able to spot where the problem is given the 1,2 & 3 tests at both AC and DC.

1. Block all airpaths. 2. Decouple the inside and outside layers. 3. Add a fluffy layer somewhere to prevent reverberation. 4.ADD MASS!!!

There are 2 kinds of noise, airborne and impact. You need to deal with both unless rumbling from traffic or bass guitars never happens. One needs soft stuff, the insulation. The other needs density. Eg masonry or plasterboard. As you say, build quality is crucial, or noise gets through tiny flaws. The figures you see in sample wall specifications are for perfect construction with no joints or edges. It is not real life. Timber is a possibility but needs attention. It relies on flexibility to break the continuity from outside to inside. Then plasterboard provides density. There is lots on this in buildhub already. The easiest way to search is to use Google. Buildhub sound noise insulation. Etc

If they are 22 mil boards and glued The ends don’t need to land on a joist or nog Plenty of glue and ring nails

I'd just send the commissioning doc in with a covering letter explaining the history. Unless there's been masses of other generation installed in your area it would be unreasonable for them to renege on the approval

Having cleared our own site I wouldn’t take it on for anyone else for £3k, but then, I dug up the bushes so they wouldn’t just regrow in no time. You can probably get cheaper but that might mean less professional, tidy and courteous to your neighbours (if you have any).

Yes it is, but why did you bring in furniture before the house was finished?

As others have noted, you can get any length you pretty much want, *BUT* as the length increases, so does either the width or height or both depending on what you are supporting. Attached are some examples from the MBC Timberframe factory tour I went on at the weekend...

that's what Alan Carr and Amanda Holden did, but I expect they had lots of legal peeps behind them and no mention of a limited budget to do up. Then being sold for charity I believe

I would also, in fact I would do as @joe90 did. Quick and cost effective, very easy DIY. ICF is a bit economy of scale, due to the concrete pump and its cost.

I have a resin floor on power-floated concrete with UFH, but it's a PU Resin. Are you sure the product you have been offered is epoxy? My base layer is epoxy, but all other layers are PU. It's a warmer, softer feel than tiles with good wear resistance. I'm told the top coat with eventually show signs of wear, at which point it can be re-coated, which gives the option for a colour change. Still looks new after 7 years. We treat it like a wooden floor, so furniture on felt pads and careful with sharp objects, ie. not as hardy as Porcelain, but then if a dropped a hammer on it there'd be no risk of it cracking. Rugs can cause a colour change, a slight yellowing we have found, but remove the rug and a few weeks later the yellowing disappears. No grout lines or expansion joints is a big bonus, we have 250m² of seamless floor.

My experience with SPEN is its straight forward. Everything on the G99 application is straight forward. The single line drawing of the house electrics may take a bit more research to compile but there's plenty of examples on the Web. Commissioning doc is straight forward too

Likely two different colours. However, the same grout colour can look very different depending in the tile colour and the way light falls on it. We had exactly that issue in the bathroom so tried different colours to get a match.

Two different colours Floor should always be done last

I wondered if there was any remaining value in the original paperwork, but between my installing the battery system and applying for a heat pump WPD had been taken over by NG and the process seems to have changed quite a bit. A phone call might swiftly elicit whether it can be re-submitted or you are better off starting again. Or you might be put on hold for 40 mins...

Welcome and good 🤞 luck.

You can get about any length you want, ours is about 9m and they cut about a metre off at site.

Hi @canalsiderenovation There are many, many alternatives to be seen which will potentially produce energy. In my humble opinion ( having looked at no end of options) the devil is in the detail (in this case otherwise known as the mathematics). I would first play around with the maths. This will give you an understanding of how much energy you can achieve from what set up (assuming no drought): https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/hydropower-d_1359.html Good Luck Marvin

Plenty on the tinternet https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005571046055.html?pdp

In general you'll do better by ordering almost everything in bulk with delivery included. ebay/gumtree is probably only best for higher value small bits and pieces like MVHR units or maybe a nice kitchen tap. I don't think you'll save anytime buying plasterboard or aggregate from there. What you really need to be able to do is drop to the builders merchants and get 1 last sheet of ply or a couple of 6*2s or 20 roof tiles last minute to save your tradesmen taking men off the job. A small 8*4 trailer would be ideal.

We had exactly the same situation, demolished a damp bungalow, in a hole, the front and back lawns always flooded. We raised the whole foot print of the build by 600mm, and now have a steady fall from the rear of the house to the road. The build was beam and block ,which made raising the actual house very easy as there is a void with no fill under the floors. The patio and drive way were raised with reclaimed crushed stone , leaving only the garden to fill with soil. We cleared 200mm of top soil off the whole site before the build started, fortunatly we had space to stack this and keep it clean. Then filled the garden area up with subsoil from the fondations with a bit of imported subsoil ,capped off with the saved topsoil. The planners had specified the ground level to eaves height, but fortunatly not the datum ground level.

fecking scumbag

Hello all I am very much interested in icf construction especially woodcrete am here to learn and share as I plan a future build.

I had a girlfriend who was a 'saver', I always knew how much she had saved, it equalled my overdraft.

Just saying hello, About 18 months ago the builder turned up to start work on our home. We have NEVER done any kind of renovation/extension work before, so naively thought it’ll be easy to add on/extend a dormer bed room :). A well, unstable existing foundations, complex steel installs, chasing HETAS certified installers for the flue etc etc, and we are now have the finish line in sights 😀. Still have some decision to make on garden wall finishes etc, but we are nearly there. Pretty sure we could have done lots of things differently etc, though I’ve actually enjoyed the process, and feel really lucky to have been able to build a home bespoke to our needs. I’m looking forwards to doing the same thing again, but for retirement some time around 2050!!

Hi All long time lurker, first time poster. We are renovating and extending our cottage in South Wilts. We’re about 6 months into the build having got planning in Jan, took us a while to get there due to bats, false start with first architect, and a slow planning process generally. The cottage consisted of an original 2-up-2-down and a couple of poorly constructed extensions (a ground floor lean-to which was then somehow converted to be two storey, maybe in the 70s). We’ve demolished the extensions and rebuilt GF to the same footprint, and FF will be a cantilevered, triple-gabled and vaulted ceiling “box” which we’ll have as a kitchen-living area (an upstairs down house to take advantage of the views we have here). Hoping to be weather-tight by the winter, and then complete by Christmas 2025. I am project managing sub-contractors and have a good friend who is a very skilled labourer/builder looking to gain more experience who is doing lots of the work and providing continuity throughout. We have converted a room above our double garage to live in whilst the work is ongoing, so here on site most of the time and we largely work from home. Thanks for hosting such an invaluable resource here - I look forward to contributing and please forgive the odd awkward question

Hi folks, Just in the throes of buying my first house and about to negotiate the planning process to build myself an attached workshop/garage. I'll start a thread on its own over this as Ive no idea where to start!

We are converting our sheep barn to a house. We built our on house in 1983 with support from a local builder but are doing this one on our own so need lots of advice and guidance

Hi I'm Jason I've been in the building trade many years and now retired so decided to do my own Extension Many years ago I moved into repair and refubishing very old very large normaly listed builings and now coming back to the real world I'm finding how many things have changed in the domestic construction world I'm starting to wonder if there is enough room in a house for all the insulation and damp prevention/ventilation measures 🤣 All kidding aside I'm enjoying the project but it never stops raining here

Hi All, I am professional software tester with 20 years of experience. I am basically a new bee in this field and know basic DIY skills like changing taps, carpentary, plastering, decoration: painting. I am originally from Hyderabad India and now settled in UK for 17 years with my family(my wife&4 children). I am a teatotller. Sports: I play sports like Table Tennis, Badminton, Smimming and biking. with regards, Mubbashshir

Hi there. We're building a passivhaus or - high performance if you prefer the term - treehouse. Triple glazed, insulated with straw, airtight with a Zhender MVHR. Busy little project. Taken a lot longer than we planned!!!

So firstly, I can't tell you whether the design is particularly complex yet as I don't have one... 😉 It is an award-winning Architectural Practice, with more than one office, but it's not based in London. It was the most costly of all our quotes from our shortlist, but they were also streets ahead of their nearest competition in how comfortable we felt to be in their hands. All of us make decisions about where we want to spend our budget, and how much we're prepared to spend on each item. Personally, this project will be my third home ever, and my first self-build - I don't move around a lot! Many others on this site are on their second, third, and more builds and have lived in many different houses. I don't have that wealth of experience, so I've chosen to engage someone in a specialist field to help me. I work in a senior position in the IT industry, and that's what my clients do every day of the week. Sure they can do some things themselves, but they trust that our teams have experience they don't and will perhaps approach something in a way they had not considered, improving their experience, reducing their risk, and providing an excellent return on their investment. This is what I am looking for from my Architect and why I was very careful about their choice. Cost is very relative; when you look at the work they will be doing, and the seniority and experience of the people I'll be working with, then I'm very comfortable that it is good value. For those interested in the process, I have a design brief that lists all the things we'd like to achieve and the way we'd like to live, a small number of photos that show the design aesthetics we are drawn to, a list of known constraints (for example, there's a 3" PVC water main with a 6m easement that goes through the plot) and a bubble diagram that has all our desired rooms and their relationships to each other drawn on it. Our architects will take that and use their skill and experience to bring it to life for us in the specific context of the plot, its orientation, the surrounding buildings and features, the options for access, and a hundred and one other variables that all have a potential impact, many of which I would just not have had the skill or experience to consider. Of course, assuming our appeal is ultimately successful... 🤣

@graham-l . There’s certain things all us Bristolians are good at apart from knifes and bodies in suitcases - it’s building 👍

Poor planning there. I did exactly the same at the ceiling. As I'd fitted new ceiling joists I should have just counter battened. Wouldn't have had to hunt down 2.7m plasterboard either!