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Showing content with the highest reputation on 06/21/20 in all areas

  1. The kitchen has a 10.5 metre steel ridge which protrudes into the vaulted ceiling by 50cm. I also attached the ventilation 75mm pipework along the side of the steel to supply the living room at the opposite end. So a curved ceiling to run underneath the inside of the ridge. A simple explanation is imagining a skateboard halfpipe upside down. I built a frame out of ply with cutouts for batten to run the entire length of the ceiling. I then fitted a layer of 6mm red faced ply to create a curve. Then the final layer of 4mm birch plywood, glue and pinned and treated with Osmo oil. Well, it took a while. I know my building is not 100% square as one of the long kitchen walls was leaning out when we fitted the original rafters but overall the sheets all butted up square with only one sheet needing a little fillet added. I started in the middle of the room to allow any discrepancies to dealt with at either end. Then it was back to more plaster boarding and a novice bee keeper. More to follow.
    9 points
  2. Seemed to spend most of the winter and spring fitting plasterboard. At times I struggled to keep motivated. About 275 sheets later and still a bathroom and living room to board out even now. The plasterer did a great job, I have great admiration for the skill. Did some drainage and fitted the Vortex treatment plant and rainwater harvesting tank aswell as the. mains supply to the house as the ASHP arrived ready to be plumbed in. My dear Father built the staircase which went straight in. I showed him a photo of a staircase without stringers and he just got on with it. Thank you Dad. Its nearly May 2019 and the kitchen ceiling issue is nearing a solution.
    4 points
  3. We were pretty lucky to get a big plasterboard delivery the week before lockdown. The inside is now boarded, taped and painted. The bathroom floor has been tiled. A wee thanks to @nod for pointing me in the direction of ditra. Floor seems solid enough and looks neater than I thought it might. The water treatment has been plumbed (thanks to @PeterW for the plumbing advice). Needs a bit of refinement to make it look more aesthetically pleasing but it is watertight, which is the main thing. Next stop second fix electrics and plumbing. I'd originally taken a year off work which is now up, so the sooner we get out of the caravan the better. Laptop on a wee solar panel and dodgy 4g connection isn't ideal.
    4 points
  4. Back in June 2017 we found a house for sale close to us in Holywood, Co. Down - 4 bed bungalow, 115m2 on a large plot on one of the best streets in the town. Within our budget. Couldn't believe it! So we put in a offer at the asking price. Didn't hear anything back. Phoned the agent a few days later and bidding was going on way above our offer... developers with cash. Obviously they saw it a potential site. So, we accepted our loss and moved on. Then, two months later, it appeared back on the market! Issue with site lines meant you'd never get permission for additional units on the site. So back to our original offer, and it was accepted! It was a kip. We knew there would be serious renovation works and were budgeting to spend £80k+ on renovation and extension. Turns out we were very optimistic. Estimates started being bandied around that were double our budget... kind of in the new house build territory. So we took the plunge and looked in to financing a new build. Turned out more difficult than we thought - no local lenders would offer a product, luckily we got a recommendation for Ecology and they would allow us to convert our existing residential mortgage to a self build, once we had full PP. In Sept 2018 after a year of planning, we finally got FPP. Original house: The issues were much bigger than we though - no foundations, lime mortar was crumbling away. The brief of the new design was straight forward as we knew what we wanted - simple, 200m2, 4 bed, big open plan living area etc. The sloping site complicated matters a bit... so much so we ended up including a full footprint basement, rather than have split level living. The design at the front is deliberately simple as we're in a conservation area and didn't want to battle too much. Rear is where all the action is!! The design has changed since these renderings - no garage, and smaller courtyard and few retaining walls. These pushed us out of budget when the QS estimates came in at £340k! Almost £100k more than budget. Latest floor plans: Basement: Ground Floor: First Floor: As I type this, we have just started site clearance and ground works..... with an interesting find that could threaten to eat up our contingency already!!!
    2 points
  5. What are the manufacturers instructions ..?? I would start there. You can use spacers and bed the screen onto CT1 clear or EB25 and then wait til it’s set and pull the spacer and do a full run of sealant but it seems to just create a messy finish. I would be taping the tray and screen and bedding the screen onto a full bed of 3-4mm of decent sealant all the way to 20mm from the end and sit that on a spacer and basically full fill the whole of the run. Inside can be tooled to a flat finish and the outer the same and you wont see the join. Pull the spacer from the end when the sealant is fully set. With wall profiles you need to only seal the outer edge so any water that gets in can get out. And make sure you have lots of baby wipes, a tin of MultiSolve and a bin nearby ..!!
    2 points
  6. My heating system calculation is pretty simple in essence. It is driven by three measures: The delta between the house target temperature and the outside temperature averaged over the day The day-averaged actual temperature delta'ed against the target temperature. These two are calculated each midnight. For the actual temperature, I have a DS18B20 buried inside an internal wall (actually the one my control system back onto so it was easy to drill a hole into the plaster and drop one down into the studding). IMO, doing this is a lot better than measuring air temperature as it gives a better estimate of the overall temperature of the internal fabric. For the outside temperature, I actually use an API that the Met office publishes and query the outside forecast for the coming day. We don't have any funny microclimate issues and this is good enough for what I need. Another option that I have considered is that our outsidel meter box is flush-mounted in our external stone skin; I have thought about dropping a DS18B20 down the wall void behind this between the outer skin and the inner lagged Larson strut timber frame of the house, as this will smooth out any spot surface solar heating noise. So each night at midnight I use these two terms in a simple linear model (i) to calculate the amount of heat in kWh that I need for the next day, (ii) to uplift or drop this to adjust if the house is too warm or too cold. I set the two constants in this calculation initially from my Jeremy-like heat calcs for the house, but tweaked them after a year by a fit to the actual house data. So what this daily calc does is to work out that I need to put, say, 12 kWh heat into the slab tomorrow to keep the temperature of the house on target. Given that I still haven't bothered to install an ASHP but use a 3kW heater into the slab, this equates to 4 hrs heating is needed so I heat the slab from 3-7a.m. (to use E7 low rate electricity). The last measure is the actual house temperature. If I need any more than 21 kWh, then I add this first 21 kWh midnight to 7a.m.; I only add the extra heat drip-feed N mins per hour if the house temperature drops below the target temperature. Because all (or sometimes most) of the heat is added overnight, there is a residual <1°C daily ripple on the actual temperature, but we find that we don't really notice this. The scheme works really well and the day-to-day average temperature varies maybe ¼°C. The one thing that does kick the temperature off is having visitors to stay because these extra warm bodies aren't factored into the heat calcs. This system runs for about 6 months a year, but cuts out for the summer hump where we don't need any heating. Note that we have smallish cottage-style windows so we don't have solar-gain management issues. As to slab temperature, we run our pump 6 mins every hour when the heating isn't on, just to redistribute any local solar gain across the entire slab. I take the average temperature of the flow returns coming out of the slab at the end of this 6 min period and this is a very accurate measure of the average slab temperature. No other probes needed. We already have a ~300m long probe.
    2 points
  7. In response to @Russell griffiths post about blogs, here goes. It is still 2018. I finished the Tata Colorcoat Urban roof, tricky around the Velux windows and fitting the ridge trying not to get sealant everywhere. No leaks 2 years later. Kwikstage very useful, heavy but a worthy purchase on a long self build. I made up one of the roof trusses for the garage and thats where it sat for another year. Back inside and started to put down 150 Celotex on the ground floor, taped and polyethened ready for the screeders. All UFH supplied by Wunda, about 1200m of 16mm pipe on the ground floor for 14 ports from 2 manifolds. All cliptrack and staples. Take care not to kink the pipe and take photos and measurements if you might be fixing anything to the floor. The electrician arrived and made great progress and then the screeders in early December 2018, 200sqm of 45mm anhydrite down in 2-3 hours. Once the electrician had finished first fix I started battening the OSB ready for the plasterboard, I notched out around the wiring. I fitted some resilient bars to all the ground floor ceilings, little cost apart from fitting time. It's now 2019.
    2 points
  8. You can get some pretty high quality short throw projectors now which will eliminate the big projector hanging from the roof plus a lot of the wiring considerations.
    1 point
  9. Do you really need a screen? I have only done one house with a cinema room and a projector, and they got good results just projecting onto a nice flat white painted wall. It would seem to only be a requirement of you don't want a white wall? TIP from that job. TEST the 10 metre long hdmi cable that you bury up the wall and across the ceiling before the plasterboard goes on. Better still install two. the time to find it is a dud cable is not when you first plug the projector in. It was a mare to pull a new cable through.
    1 point
  10. All mine are like that. With the requirement to make them bright colours (some are pink) it can be hard finding any that are plain wood. Not many merchants stock them.
    1 point
  11. It’s okay - don’t worry about it!
    1 point
  12. It will be fine - it is dry and it doesn't leach through
    1 point
  13. Hi Alex, I've given this a little thought. Although initial impressions mightn't stun, the house isn't actually that bad. Just wearing the wrong frock. I think on a modest budget you could make huge improvements. There is no visual break from the hard brown surfaces running from the driveway through to the low wall, the rockery/garden and the walls. The expanse of plain brick above the door also jars. I suspect this was done for ease of maintenance but lends to the "quarry floor" appearance of the whole thing. The windows are flush with the external wall giving a caravanesque, depthless quality, lacking the 3D appearance of solidity and quality. The roof and the dormer are what they are, but the combination of weathered tiles and various shades of brown give that feeling of putting a three course meal into a blender. My suggestions: 1. Simplify the colour pallet, choose 3-4 main complimentary colours and stick to them. 2. Improve the appearance of the house openings by adding some depth. 3. Break up the hard surfaces. You could remove the roof and replace it with 400mm I Joists, pumped with cellulose, externally insulate with 300mm rockwool with a modern thin layer render, new triple glazed windows €100k plus etc etc etc Meanwhile back in the real world with bills to pay, and if your primary objective is aesthetic improvement rather that comfort/energy upgrades, I've made some suggestions below, see what you think. Jonathan I don't think brick and a contemporary aesthetic are mutually exclusive. Buy some tile paint, and give the whole roof, including the shingles on the dormer a new lease of life. Consider some contemporary window mouldings to give the windows depth. Paint the windows and the fascia+soffit a tasteful colour. Update the front door to a more modern design. A coat of paint,some new glazing and some ironmongery might do this. Add a tasteful porch overhang to break up the large area of brick above the door and provide shelter. Change its colour as required to achieve the contemporary aesthetic. Dig out the area of limestone and plant lawn or tidy shrubbery in this area. Take up the last 2-3m of brick paving nearest to the house and replant with lawn or similar if space allows. This terraced effect would settle the house into its surrounds and reduce the feeling of living in a parking lot.
    1 point
  14. We have the Jetfloor system. Funny thing is it was about 15% cheaper than Tetris when we had our quotes (about 5 years ago). Makes you wonder sometimes whether someone just sticks a finger in the air on prices.
    1 point
  15. Our frameless shower came with chrome plated U channel to sit the glass in. We fixed that to the tray with a clear silicone sealer then used same to seal the glass into the channel. Been fine for 12 years.
    1 point
  16. On the building itself. You have a reasonably plain and not very interesting building. You don' have to focus entirely on changing the structure itself, and personally i think I would look through the lens of using it (argued in last post) rather than "what does it look like". I think that changes will be appropriate, but that I would treat it as perhaps one package now and another one further down the track - perhaps think 7-10 years. And I think the roof (unless it is failing) is one I would leave for now as it could swallow so much of your budget. Consider Las Vegas ?. You go there for three reasons - gambling, floor shows and fun. But the cards and the go-go dancers do not just stand there to be looked at. Both are also about display, and concealment, and diversion of the senses, and implication about things unseen, and creating thoughts in the mind of the viewer which haven't actually been done. Play some games and make it a house fun. You can do that with your house - if you put a suitable pergola or part or perforated wall 3m in front of your house you may be able to leave it as is, or do something inexpensive. You can grow a climber (eg Virginia Creeper or a Wisteria) right up the end gable to hide it. Or a half width terrace to break up the monotonous facade. I am slightly drawn to a simple render of the walls, and leaving the roof and windows alone unless there is a real reason to do it, and then spend the weight of the budget on things that directly impact on your enjoyment of living there. If you want I think you could be quite bold - eg somehing posmodern could be interesting, such as an arcade build from royal blue bricks, but that might need careful handling. Just thoughts. Ferdinand
    1 point
  17. Do not under estimate this advice.
    1 point
  18. That's about it. I bought mine second hand from ebay for £120 and have had half that back already by "hiring" it to two locals. I still have the driveway to finish properly so will be keeping it for a while longer before I sell it. I might even turn a small profit when I eventually sell it.
    1 point
  19. I went with Velux in 2016 and am very happy, there are other cheaper brands out there so do your research. Look for good reseller discounts - I got mine from NL but the euro was stronger then (1.4) so made sense. My Integra windows work great - they come with about 6m of cable terminated in a 3 pin plug so was easy to terminate them to a fused spur - just remember to plan to have one in proximity. I have 4 Integra and four other manually operated ones in accessible rooms. They are solely controlled via their wireless touch pads and as you get one per window you will have a few to distribute round the house, any window can be controlled via any pad and you can group them together. We got the roofer to fit them along with the external motorised blinds (also controlled through the wireless pads). They have a rain sensor pad which will auto close them and I see they now have a range of indoor controllers and sensors to track humidity and Co2 plus extension to apple home kit so looks like there is an app now as well. As you say, great for cross ventilation in summer when the MVHR does not cut it. My advice, which ever brand you go for, is to ensure your drawings and plans are aligned to the standard window sizes offered. We needed to do a few NMAs to tweak the planning drawings to reflect this. We had a couple of SK10 and PK10 which are quite huge but also MK04 which is a more common size Velux. If you're using the insulated frame kit (recommended if the rest of your build is of a highly insulated standard) then ensure you allow for the additional tolerances in the aperture - we needed to knock ours about a bit to fit (too tight by a few mm) so just keep an eye on that.
    1 point
  20. I recently fitted a 10mm glass screen, 2000mm x 1200mm. Fixed on one side and I used some Transparent Setting and Distance Blocks - 4mm Thickness in the U channel fixed to the wall and between the glass and tray. I felt if the screen was knocked the blocks allow a little bit of absorption.
    1 point
  21. That's all I done with mine. No silicone on the inside at all. I used Tec 7 silicone for mine. Just beware that the glass is pretty heavy, mine was 1400mm wide 1800mm high.
    1 point
  22. Probably better your way but depends of door is hinged of fixed glass panel. If it is hinged off it then probably best directly on tray as more friction.
    1 point
  23. Hi M, Sorry, I'm late to the party - only recently joined the forum and just seen your thread for the first time today. My immediate reaction to the plan is that you've got a large plot and have resisted the temptation to build a mansion that kisses all four boundaries. So, well done for that! ? Okay, now for the criticism! As you approach the property, the first thing one notices is not a beautifully designed and built house (hopefully!) but a garage! That's not good, IMO. In your shoes, I'd move the whole house down the plot very slightly - only by a metre or two, so that you can then swing the garage around 90 degrees and have the door to it on the north side (as one looks at the plan) as opposed to the east side. I'd also link it to the house, so you can access it internally without having to go outside in inclement weather. This provides the addition benefit of being able to easily convert the garage into extra living accommodation / workshop / granny flat - or whatever in the future should you want to. It will also be an attractive benefit on the property particulars should you ever want to sell it. If you do this then, from the outside, the garage will appear as an integral part of the house and won't scream garage on arrival. Attaching a trellis to the east wall and having some planting will soften the whole look. Aesthetically, if you go down this route (or something similar), I think it will make a huge impact on the overall look of the building - for the better, obviously. This is especially true for people arriving at the property for the first time; first impressions count and all that. Just my £0.02p worth. Tim.
    1 point
  24. Nice to hear! Clearly i've just 'thrown it together' in a free moment so do have a pro check it through, but I've been playing with various room designs for a while so it's not absolutely crazy I think Quick note: I'm probably going to go for a telescoping pocket door which give you even more gap space. https://www.eclisse.co.uk/telescopic-sliding-pocket-door-system-double/ is on my shortlist. Also do make sure you have enough storage in the kitchen. Not that I changed anything to yours but it seems a bit thin on shelf space? I would probably try to use the side wall too.
    1 point
  25. That curve is just stunning. Can’t wait to see this finished.
    1 point
  26. It may be that the surveyor didn't properly check his work product before issuing to you and your greater knowledge of your plot identified some errors. Feed that back and ask him to correct these errors to your satisfaction. Our survey had similar errors, which were obvious and really important to us for Planning Submission. They concerned ridge heights on the two neighbouring properties - the original submitted drawings did not appear to be correct, from just looking at the houses. Anyway, we requested that he checked and he did ( admitting that he thought he was getting some issues with his instruments when he was surveying the property) - we were correct and the ridge heights were corrected and a revised drawing issued.. The other key learning for us was ensuring the architect properly used the survey information for the site layout, so that all subsequent drawings and plans could be overlayed and all used the same data. This came to light when the engineer responsible for designing all our BC drawings, including drainage, rainwater, and also our retaining walls, identified that the architects layouts did not use the surveyed data. We then had confidence in using surveyor to accurately layout the groundworks (including all the underground drainage, landscaping and retaining walls, and the insulated foundation installed by MBC
    1 point
  27. Bit of googling found.. http://www.bonningtonsurveys.co.uk/assets/samples/TSA%20Client%20Guide%20-%20Topographical%20Surveys_Issue%203_HR.pdf Page 5..
    1 point
  28. It seems that buildings, walls, drain covers, kerbs, roofs are easy to plot with great accuracy. There should also be spot heights around the site so you can see the levels. The data should relate to the OS data. I think trees are more difficult, especially where there are lots. No defined points. You can get a tree survey done if you need an arb report. Mention your concerns to the surveyor and see what he says.
    1 point
  29. thank you @puntloos!! I showed your layout to my other half and we both thought there was real merit in having a sitting area that we could close off from the kitchen/dining area. Great idea!
    1 point
  30. To work out your views you need to set up a gauge rod go and buy a length of roof batten 4.8m long. Mark on it your finished floor height( roughly) then mark on it your ground floor ceiling height, then how high your floor joists will be roughly 300mm this will give you first floor height. If one of you holds it up it will give you an idea of how high you feet will be off the ground when stood upstairs go and get a big stepladder or hire a small scaffolding tower and set it up, both get up there with a cup of tea and have a good look and think. Spending £200 now could be the best decision you make. I will tell you a story about mine, we have stunning views, the sort of views you would pay hundreds of thousands for. we Have a BIG picture window in our bedroom, I showed my mate around the house a few months back, as we have known each other 30 years he speaks his mind with me which is cool, the conversation goes like this. Him. You cocked up here, you should have a patio door there me. Why him. So you can walk out of your bedroom and look at the view me. Who would want a patio door in the bedroom him. Well I have one in mine, it’s excellent me. Really, oh, how often do you use it?? him. Ooh I don’t know, haven’t been out of it for————— a few years I reckon, tbh I think we lost the key to it. So have a really good think of how YOU will use the house. Because of our views every designer we talked to wanted to put in 6-7m wide bi folding doors, we used to live in Australia so out there it would be the thing to do, but over here, really, how many days of the year will they be wide open, we went for a large sliding door and a big picture window so we can enjoy the view from the comfort of indoors.
    1 point
  31. Good review, but no matter what tge failings tge design was sufficiently good to sweep Miss Elizabeth Bennett off her feet!
    1 point
  32. Don't use a metal tape measure when you check. ?
    0 points
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