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Final shot! House is broadly done, garden under control.

My vertical cladding goes to soffit and stops just short. I have metal drip over windows. Fabricated and powder coated to match window frames.

Just rip it all up and start again. Get the OSB off the roof, get it replaced with new OSB3 and start it off properly. The cost of a few sheets of material vs a new roof is not worth the hassle.

Have you considered grp windows https://www.lumiwindows.com Architects are great until they start demanding things, its your house at the end of the day have what you want.

This is another example of so called professionals milking you for every penny they can Joes experience pretty much mirrors ours Our Architect has done a drain layout showing Treatment plant and top water running to a soak away We also where Clay So no go there I did pretty much the same as Joe BC was ok with it But asked if it could be on a proper drawing The Architects assistant spent 20 mins putting it on a drawing and emailed to me o charge The reality is your Groundworks company may well find a better solution and tweak things anyway Or find you may have to add an extra manhole or two and sort this out with BC while the drains and foundations are going in Everyone has to earn a living but theses fees are unreasonably

Hi! We're buying a 1970's-built 3-bed detached chalet-style house in Bedfordshire. Apart from a lick of paint and a recent bathroom, it's pretty much unchanged since built: Gas warm-air heating (ducts, and lots of 'em) with electric immersion heater for hot water Parquet floors to lounge, hallway and dining room which needs resanding, filling and sealing (plus filling the gaps left when we remove the warm-air heating outlets) 1970s kitchen, including sliding-door cabinets! Our aspirations are: Immediate - Convert current tiny utility and the end of the double-length garage into a new dining area flowing off the kitchen, plus new utility and (probably) downstairs shower room Immediate - Roof lantern and bi-fold doors onto garden in new dining area Immediate - Replace warm-air heating, ideally with something more environmentally friendly Medium term - New kitchen (self-fitted) Long term - Replace tiling on gable ends with cladding (possibly cement board e.g. Marley Eternit) Challenges are: Three-gabled (T-shaped) chalet roof limits possibilities upstairs unless we put in dormers (which we don't have budget for and which would be tricky anyway due to multiple gables) No space to add a shower to upstairs bathroom unless we make the small bedroom smaller and so thinking of downstairs shower Existing ground-floor spaces are concrete floor with no inbuilt insulation Garage floor is about 6" lower and so when we raise floor we'll have to raise the roof too Extending heating to the converted area of the garage - warm-air ducts can't be extended (and we don't think we're fans of it anyway), so thinking of wet under-floor heating in conversion and replacing heating in rest of building with traditional wet rads Asbestos throughout (we've had a specialist survey) including soffits, boiler flue, roof tile underboard, boiler cupboard door, utility ceiling, Marley vinyl floor tiles in kitchen (only the last three of these areas are likely to be touched though) Budget for immediate stuff is £30k. Conversion could be £20k, leaving only £10k for heating changes. Looking for: Bright ideas on heating. Keen on ASHP but as we need new rads could be beyond our budget. Might have to settle for modern combi-boiler Any genius insight or pointers to existing posts on any of the above!

This may be of use to some people and of interest to others. Certainly I could not find much information before I embarked on our build and it was a bit of a leap in the dark. We designed our house with a swimming pool. It is quite an extravagance but my daughter and I really enjoy swimming and messing about in the pool and it is a luxury I have always fancied. The pool has now been up and running for the past couple of months and I am extremely pleased with it. The installers did a very professional job. As always I tried to make sure that there was as little maintenance as possible required. The filtration system by a company called DA-Gen is all automatic. In the last two months all I have had to do is put a pool cleaning robot like a Roomba in the pool every week and it polishes it up. Other than that there has been abolsutely zero maintenance. The installer told me that historically they would visit a pool once a month. They will probably visit mine three times in the first year and then less after that. The main job will be changing over the chemicals, and just checking everything is working. The pool automatically tests the pH level and adjusts as necessary. The pH is set at 7.2. The chlorine is set at 0.5 ppm which is the same as the local drinking water. The pool creates chlorine from salt when necessary and there is no chlorine smell or taste. The pool is from a company called Niveko. It is a one piece polycarbonate pool and came as a single piece on the back of a truck from the Czech Republic. The pool is 8.9m long, 3.4m wide and 1.3m deep. Thus it contains around 40,000 litres of water. I spent some time at the pool in the gym and reading advice from owners in America on what size to buy. Traditionally pools are twice as long as they are wide, but I wanted a pool that was long enough to swim lengths. Having tested out the gym pool I reckoned I needed at least 8m. If I could not get permission for this much floor space I would have investigated an endless pool where you swim into a current. Depth wise people recommended that a deep end was pointless as it was impossible to stand and play games. we often stand and play water volleyball and the depth is working out perfectly. More depth would just be more water to heat and more ground to dig out. I would recommend 1.3-1.4m depending on your height. I read up on various kinds of pools. A discussion with one company that build traditional tiled/concrete pools suggested a cost of £200,000 which was ridiculous. You can also have a liner pool where you build a concrete shell then use a waterproof liner inside. This is cheaper but needs replacing every so often. I also investigated building a pool from ICF. Although this seems like a good idea, I could not find anyone with expertise in it. Eventually I came across these polycarbonate pools. I liked the design as it has EPS insulation around the outside. The pool could also incorporate a built in cover. Around one third of the heating cost of a pool is due to evaporation. This also keeps humidity down. Finally the smooth finish compared to a tiled pool makes the build up of bacteria much less likely and reduces the need for cleaning and chemicals. It also means no sharp edges on your feet. The total cost for the pool, dehumidifying equipment, filtration, ventilation etc was around £80,000. The real cost is the 80 square metres for the pool room, plant room and changing room. This probably added around £120-150,000 to the build cost of the house. The building work was not complicated much by this, a deeper area of foundations was dug and the pool sits on a concrete slab similar to the ground floor of the house. We did find once we dug down that there was some underground water and it had to be tanked. The pool and ventilation were then put in place below floor level and covered up whilst building work continued. The pool sits on top of 150mm of EPS with a further 50mm around the outside. Historically a pool was a big negative on a house in this area, making them almost impossible to sell. The reason was massive heating bills and maintenance costs. Also they made your house smell of chlorine and the humidity would destroy your house. One thing that prompted me to write this is that we have our heating now all working as it should. I noted on another thread that they had not insulated the circulating hot water system. This has been done now. I thought that this was causing unexpected high bills for heating hot water. However, I have since realised that perhaps the main reason was that the pool, hot water and UFH had all been connected in series to the boiler. Thus when any one of them called for hot water from the boiler all the pumps ran. This was pumping hot water to all 4 UFH manifold in the house every time the hot water or pool called for heat. By my calculation the loops contained towards 200l of water which was constantly being circulated and heated unnecessarily. We have now separated the circuits and gas use has dropped dramatically. Before building the pool i tried to use @JSHarris heating calculator to calculate the cost of heating the pool. After a bit of messing around I decided that a pool was not different to any other room. The reason that pols historically use a lot of heat is that they were often put in orangeries or cheap extensions. Effectively you are trying to heat a large (80sq metres in my case) room to 28c all year round. These rooms often had single or double glazing. My pool is in a room as well insulated as the rest of the house with triple glazed 0.7 U-value windows. The area below the pool has 0.1-0.15 U-value, the walls 0.14. The heat recovery system is 90% efficient. The calculation said that the pool would cost around £500 a year to heat. Frankly even at £1000 I would have been pleased. Anyway I have been on holiday this week and checking our gas usage now that everything works as it should. We have been using 7-9 units a day depending on how much the pool is being used. We have been using 75-100 kWh of gas per day or around £2-2.75 a day in gas. Hot water is around £1 a day, so the pool seems to be coming in close to my calculation. I am very pleasantly surprised. This is heating the pool to 28C and the room to 24C when the pool is closed and 29C when it is open. The outside temperature has really dropped to around 15C. The humidity is kept to around 60% when the pool is closed and 65-70% when it is open. All in all it is a big extravagance but one I am very pleased with. It was great in the hot weather a few weeks ago, my daughter and her friends are loving it and hopefully I will get many years of enjoyment from it. In terms of things I would have done differently. We were a bit tight on the plant room and stuff just fits. The changing room door is quite close to the pool and the frame gets wet. We should have sloped the tiles back towards the pool so that when the kids jump in the water would run back naturally. I bought a squeegee to push excess water back in. Everything is pretty much finished, just some mastic around the room edges required. Heating costs may fall a little as the bottom edges of the windows have not yet been sealed to the floor and had compriband insulation outside, so we are probably leaking a bit of air. Pictures - Concrete pad awaiting the pool. Pool and ventilation below ground level. Plant room. These are the filters and chemicals, the dehumidifier/heater is behind the door. Changing room. We came up with the idea of building the bench out of wood effect tiles so it won't be affected by water. Changing room shower. Pool today after the kids were playing in it. Cleaning robot. The pool has two large colour changing LEDs that provide a great effect at night.

You normally match your window heads to your doors 2100 from the floor is normal regardless of ceiling height

I like the look of 300mm above a window it allows good depth for cornice and window coverings, that doesn’t really help you as that’s right in the middle of you measurements. Have you priced up doors? They won’t get dearer at 2330 will they ?

That's really lovely lizzie Mine will be a little more rustic, whether I like it or not Another question I've decided how I will be affixing the larch barge board, question is how close do I put it to the bottom of the slates? They currently overhand a few inches, I intend to but the larch right up to them, subject to someone telling me what I should put in between barge board and the slates or that I should leave a small gap?

Yeah single storey apart from the underground dungeon!

@pocster are you single storey? We are and our MVHR vents come out of the wall not the roof.

No. Not mad. It's more subtle than that. The Devil is in the the detail, and the approach. Circumstances forced DIY on us. Long story short, I'm starting to forgive myself for getting it wrong first , second and third times - I've settled on a general approach to reduce the likelihood of mess-ups. Research like mad > take notes > network > ask on BH > where sensible, do a trial / small exercise which uses the same skills > re-plan. Just Bloody Do It > get it wrong > re-plan > re-do Stop feeling guilty about not doing everything else > enjoy what I'm doing Leave it for a bit > come back to it a day later and re-assess. If necessary rip it all out and start again if possible. That takes a bit of guts and not a few swear words. Just Bloody Do It. Again. It works: takes seven times longer than I think it will take (not joking). And on a good day, I allow myself to take a bit of pride in it. Stupid I know, but thats the truth.

Funnily enough, the reason I didn't use a retaining wall with batter was to reduce the footprint! Building a vertical retaining wall gave us about an extra 1.5m of garden, plus allowed the house to be positioned a bit further back towards the wall, whilst still allowing for a decent path around the back. In turn, moving the house back allowed the drive to be extended up past the front door, giving us more parking space (proved to be really useful when I got an electric car, as it made positioning the charge point I use most of the time easy).

Apart from that, enjoying the ping pong of debate on the thread.

OP: Use whatever system you like but don’t put more on top of a bodge. Start again.

It was designed by the block supplier. Incline, gravity retaining wall.

Then I'd be suspecting a physical connection problem with the Wi-Fi antenna in the router. I bought a cheap end-of-line router from Maplin for some networking experiments. It worked fine as a wired router which was what I really wanted at the time but was useless as a Wi-Fi router: within one room it worked fine but as soon as you tried to use it in another room with the doors closed there was no signal. Later I opened the box up for other reasons and found that the cable from the antenna had come unplugged from (or never been plugged to) the circuit board. Plugged that it and the Wi-Fi work as well as you'd expect for a cheap router. Maybe your router's antenna or its connection have become unplugged or been damaged in some way.

That's Chrisp detailing @lizzie love the drips. What is the finish on the timber?

I really am not sure. Maybe some with a better understanding of network hardware can give a definitive answer. There may be a way to clear the table, try googling the problem, there may be an answer.

Respect: Sid would have killed me

Of course he understood that you were talking about overheating. That is, however, a different point to moisture interfering with curing, which is the one you were making. Goalposts moved.

Too true, I met loads of them. The really sad but is that they don't save much time and tend to use more materials. Even gelcoat spraying is a problem because of uneven thickness. Mind you, gelcoats are a problem full stop.

Roof has 2 sides ...???

This does make me wonder: do any units have filter access from below? Positioning it with its own loft access hatch directly underneath it would be pretty convenient in our install: just stand on steps, open a ceiling hatch and reach up to access the filters.

My own advice is to organise your WiFi completely separately from the broadband router provided by your ISP. This way there's much less friction to shopping around when your contract does come up for renewal. Ubiquity are considered the king of WiFi APs for home use, but Google WiFi is also pretty good and much easier to setup. (I've used both) Nice thing with both these is if you do get coverage black spots you can just add more APs to fill them in. The mesh roaming is pretty good. Just make sure to use your CAT cabling to with all the APs back to a central ethernet switch (they can use wireless for the back haul, but it's never as good)

Thank you @JSHarris - I remember reading your blog/forum posts about this and that's what made me immediately question this Openreach guy. I have a strong feeling that they are resisting due to the cost - there are 11 poles on our land.

That is a bigger version of the instant gas water heater in our static caravan. It worked reasonably well withing the limitation that ours is a smaller one rated at only 11KW so you don't get a fantastic shower flow, but that one claims to be 32Kw so should be plenty. You trade the expense of a G3 UVC sign off, for the expense of a gas safe sign off, and having a pair of cylinders on an autonatic changeover. You would need to first check with your gas safe man that particular unit is okay for permanent instalation in a building, i.e can you get the appropriate flue parts and does it meet regulations for a habitable building?

Vents are better on the roof plane rather than the ridge. Ridge vents are more for exhaust from gas and soil stacks where you want to create a negative pressure to draw the air from the vent.

Ours (Kingspan / Mitsubishi) is in the plant room next to our bedroom, with just a door (FD30) between the plant room and the bedroom. Even with the door open, you cannot hear the mvhr at normal speed, and when you put it on boost, for a shower, more noise comes from the ceiling vent than directly from the mvhr unit. I wired a house a few years back where they wedged an mvhr in the loft, it was really tight access, and they created 2 loft hatches so you could crawl in from both ends to change the 2 filters, but I have a suspicion it was going to be such an awkward miserable job that it might not get done as often as would be desirable.

Ours is in a cupboard in our pantry. You can't hear it unless it's on boost (which is rare - we tend to leave it on the background setting). I don't know how loud the Vent-Axia is though.

Thanks i do like that colour. It would seem i have some investigating to do, along with many other things ? I am slowly learning that at the end of the day no matter what the builder or architect says its your house and money, if it fits our needs and gives us a home we a happy with then all is good!

They are RAL7037. There are many different profiles for uPVC some insulated, some not as there are different types of engineered timber some with insulation and some not. He is wrong to make such a statement without qualifying it.

That looks completely arse about face to me, so the outer leaf of brickwork is wet leading to the insulation being wet, nope, I would treat that like a mini basement, needs waterproofing on the outside, lapped down onto the footing. I personally would rather prevent water coming in than let it in partly and tank on the inside like you are proposing.

Can anybody tell me in layman’s terms how I can fit my own windows, I intend having the lift and slide door fitted by the supplier but would like to fit the windows myself, what are the legalities of this ??, how does it work with building control ??, who else do I have to satisfy?? bloody hell more questions about windows than the rest of the whole build.

So a total of 175mm? The outside surface of the insulation is cold, the inside warm. In between these two places the temperature transitions between warm and cold. The definition of a "warm roof" construction is that the joists (or rafters) are located near enough to the warm side that condensation doesn't occur on them. If all of the insulation is above the joists then clearly the joists are on the warm side. Your proposal has part of the joist 75mm from the cold outside and 100mm from the warm side. So its actually nearer the cold side than the warm side which isn't good. Ideally you should get a proper condensation risk analysis done. Some insulation suppliers may do one for you.

I fitted my own windows in my build, apart from certificates relating to being “secure by design” and “u values” BC didn’t ask any questions.

bublshop sell them http://www.bublshop.co.uk/sunamp-heat-batteries-series-3/c326

Fensa is for replacement windows, all it does is prove your windows have been fitted by a competent person registered with Fensa and you receive a certificate for doing so. Confirming that they have been fitted by a registered installer and fitted to BC standards. The installer, not the manufacturer or supplier are fensa registered. When the supplier installs, they are both supplier and installer. You do not need to be Fensa registered to replace windows in an existing property, it helps but is not essential.

Flint walls are very common and in keeping here, churches etc. These panels though will have special, sentimental significance. The wife inherited, if that's the correct word, her late cousins geological collection of fossils and rocks. I've about 5 crates of flint he'd collected seeing some significance in each piece.

Don't be put off !!! If you are getting the land, for little money, you have a head start !! be kind to Dad, and ask if you can "tap into his topwater and sewerage" that could be £10-£15k saved, fill in the form as connecting to existing ! If dad "gives you " the land, HE has to survive 7 years, otherwise tax may be payable. You can build for circa £1200 to £15000 not 2-3k as others have quoted. I would be tempted to follow previous advice, get the shell up, then you have time to ponder your next move, and you will know what you have left, be realistic with the size a good sized house would be say £200k 4 bed 3 ensuite . remember, think TRADE TRADE TRADE do not use retail outlets ! good luck stephen

1: Do not skimp on the thermal envelope. Buy what your budget allows you to and what you like. 2: uPVC is generally more thermally efficient (profile dependant). 3: Aluclad windows in a coastal area are fine, it’s the hardware that takes a battering not the cladding. If possible get a coating applied, otherwise it oxidise and fail. 4: uPVC aluclad are a good choice and you can match them with timber versions fairly easily (manufacturer dependant). 5: Adding a foil internally, is just bringing the uPVC product inline with the cost of timber alu windows. At the end of the day, it’s what you can afford and what you like/want that counts. Shop around, listen to the advice on offer and see what options are available to you.

I've got the R9 windows. They are excellent and you can't tell they are upvc until close up

I’ve use the heat proof skim on top of cement boards One lady didn’t want a smooth finish So I used a sponge float to finish it with The skim is black and drys dark grey

@soapstar We live a couple of miles from the sea. We have Rehau Geneo fibre reinforced uPVC frames which are insulated and the thermal performance is better than timber. We had the corner welds filled before the frames were sprayed and so far everybody who has commented thinks they are aluminium.

For warm flat roofs, 100% of the insulation should be located above the roof structure on top of the deck. In practice this does not always happen but you are best to follow the BBA certificate of the insulation manufacturer.

If you choose to install a warm room there is no need to ventilate I chose to you the multi layer foil on top of the joist and 200 mil kingsman between the joists Covered with a 15 mil foil back PB I was restricted to how much build up I could have on top of the joists But there is nothing to stop you fixing kingsman in top of the joists

Lots of cuboid contemporary houses here - the planners (if there are any, I'm not entirely sure sometimes) seem happy to mix old classical houses with crisp contemporary designs, even as semis. The cuboid is often broken by inset balconies and protrusions (for lack of a better word) giving a kind of layered look, often further broken up by areas of cladding or a feature render colours. Plenty of white around, but also other colours for render and cladding such as timber, often at interesting angles rather than vertical or horizontal, zinc and even rusty steel (largely due to Luxembourg's history in steel production). I suspect that the UK planners are more conservative, so much may not be relevant, but at least here they seem able to think outside the cuboid...

Guildford Homebase was closing down when I went past it yesterday. Stuck my head in - 80% off all internal lighting was probably the best deal, but there was a minimum 20% (and I mainly saw 30+%) discount off everything. Not sure it it's still running, but some bargains to be had for sure.