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Last week our timber frame structure shot up. This week was supposed to be the second week of a two-week frame installation but the team finished on Tuesday, having worked through the weekend. And off they went, but not before I persuaded them to stand still for 30 seconds for a snap for posterity. So here they are: Brandon, Jake and Callum - Great work guys! Their early finish allowed our chippie Alan to press on with the 18mm ply required over the roof for the zinc roofing. 60+ sheets of 18mm class-3 exterior ply were put up amazingly quickly by Alan with a bit of assistance from his pals on a couple of days. The only lifting gear on site at present is a Genie lift we bought, guessing it would come in useful, and Alan made great use of it to create a novel “Ply Sheet Lift 'n' Slide Sledge”. I pointed out to him that I’ll be patenting that idea, since all intellectual property rights obviously sit with us as site owners. He seemed unbothered. Next week Alan is away on hols (not in my plan, are you sure Alan?!). Thus we were going to have a quiet week which I labelled ‘contingency’ to make it sound more important. But Brian from Wessex Metal Roofing phoned me today (yep, Sunday) and asked if they can start the zinc roof a week early... “Oh, go on then.” So off we go again - more fridge-stocking required! Timber frame details Last week I promised to say some more about the frame structure, so at the risk of boring those not wrestling with the same choices we faced,t here’s some more detail (skip to the 'And finally...' section if you’re not interested): We decided early on that we wanted a factory-built SIPS or insulated Timber Frame structure. We’d used SIPS on our previous house with positive results. I contacted a dozen or so companies and received quotes from eight companies for supply and installation of the insulated structure: four SIPS companies and four Timber Frame. The price range was surprising: the most expensive was 240% the price of the cheapest. Of course each quote had a slightly different scope but factoring in the work we’d need to do to get them all to the same level of insulation and airtightness, the price range was still over 200%. In the end, shortlisted Turner Timber Frames, whose price was near the lower end but leaving us with a fair bit to do once the structure was up, and MBC who unsurprisingly were at the top end for an impressive approach and structure. After talking it through with Geoff our architect, he agreed with us that the price difference was so big it was hard to justify the MBC approach. Therefore we opted for Turners… And they have been really great to work with throughout. Matt, their Timber Frame Manager, has been very helpful and responsive. Their price has not gone up at all as we moved from initial quote through to signed-off design (in fact they came in below their initial estimates for steels and crane hire). They kept to the agreed timescales. Their sub-contracted installation team were really good, as previously noted. The quality of the frame appears very good to my untrained eye… and Alan our chippie seems impressed as well. The structure we bought is Turner’s Super Advanced timber frame: 140 × 38mm studs at 600mm centres with 9mm OSB sheathing and a breather membrane on the outside. The pre-fitted insulation is 120mm PIR and it fits really precisely everywhere. We opted for an additional 50mm PIR inside to give us a wall u-value of 0.13, recognising that in so doing that we had to fit the VCL, 50mm PIR, and 25mm service cavity battens ourselves (though all are supplied by Turners as part of the package). Some other frame or SIPS suppliers do all that for you, but at a cost. What you see in the pictures is the frame before we fit the VCL and additional insulation - I think you can see how tight that pre-fitted insulation is - it’s really very snug all round. I was worried we might have gaps to fill but there are none. The roof is open-web 254mm Easi-joist rafters with 11mm OSB, which we paid Turners an agreed addition to have their installation team cover with breather membrane and vertical 50mm battens to create the ventilation space we need for our zinc roof. Turner’s approach means we have no unsightly purlins to interfere with our vaulted ceilings. But the roof does present a challenge for insulation. We decided to opt for blown cellulose within the roof space which should fill the open web joists, plus 100mm PIR below the ceiling, to get to a u=-value of 0.09. It meant we had to find someone to fit the VCL below rafters and make it airtight (see below). We also have to fill in all the roof perimeter gaps to stop the cellulose blowing out, and we have volunteered Alan for that. He’s delighted (I assume). We always knew the blown cellulose was going to cost a fair bit. J W Insulation from Halstead in Essex came in with a good price and are lined up to do the work w/c 4th August. Before that we need the VCL membrane fixed the roof. In the end we decided that a specialist company would be best for fitting the ceiling VCL, the airtight wall membranes, and additional internal insulation. We have South West Insulating from Redruth coming along from 28th July to do that work. So we have a busy few weeks ahead - I am hoping all that activity meshes together and the various teams don’t get in each other’s way (and the drinks fridge is big enough!). And finally (for this week)… Frustratingly, despite the frame being up for a week now, as a wheelchair user with a 300mm high perimeter foundation wall to get over I have not been able to see inside. Until today… Although I promised Mrs P. that this build would involve no heavy lifting or lugging on our (i.e. her) part, today she has been heroically moving pallets, ply sheets, and 4m scaffold boards into place, which we have screwed together make a wheelchair ramp! So today for the first time we could both enjoy the shape of our new house from inside. And we love it! It's impossible to capture in photos but we are both really pleased with how it feels, the room sizes, the vaulted ceilings, the overall layout… everything. Which is just as well really as it’s a bit late to change the design now 🙂

Blogging: an activity where the perpetrator converts trivia into prose and in doing so reorganises their own otherwise disordered mind. Possible side effects: perpetrator enhancing feelings of self importance; boredom amongst those reading; history being rewritten. I find it interesting to contemplate why I don’t have quite such a burning need to blog at the mo. I’ve always enjoyed working with wood and metal and power tools. And that’s what I’ve been playing at for the last three weeks. I’m not really at home with concrete and soil and masonry - they’re from another planet. On top of that I’m working closely with Rolly the chippy, and he is knowledgeable and experienced, which translates into me having great confidence in him, and additionally he is calm, and has a very powerful calming influence on me. So my head isn’t quite so haywire most evenings now, certainly less than it was during both demolition and groundworks. My head is also full of diagrams and schedules. Both the project and the timber frame kit are constantly changing puzzles which I do kinda understand and can usefully sit and think through - and having puzzles to occupy me keeps both anxiety and random diversionary thoughts at bay. Which is a v long winded way of saying that I’m happy with how it’s going right now. Since the last entry the house has shot up. We’ve had roughly a metric ton of steels popped on to the top of the downstairs panels. Two steelworkers, me, and a genie lift, watched by J and Steve the injured builder. It’s fascinating how banter volume is inversely proportional to difficulties being encountered. It’s also fascinating how distracting, frustrating and irritating little side comments can be from the audience. I’d never cope with stand up - even the gentlest heckling would completely derail me. Jerry and Paul however are made of more hardy stuff. Most of the steels they got up in no time, but then we got to the bogey - the longest, heaviest beam. It would have been massively easier had it been wheeled into the house the other way round, and in hindsight we’d have finished quicker had we put it back on the trolley, wheeled it out into the road, smiled sweetly at the scowling motorists who appear to turn purple if delayed by more than 2,345 microseconds, spun the beam round and wheeled it back in. In fact that was even suggested, but no, perhaps because it would mean admitting defeat, we soldiered on regardless. Regardless and in near silence. Even the audience cottoned on and were uncharacteristically quiet. Then suddenly, we got the beam to spin round above the head binders, dropped it into place, bolted it up and the only thing drowning out the huge sigh of relief was the loud resumption of banter. Banter and tea appear to run our build, both as a glue and a lubricant. Feelings do run high at times and managing feelings, both my own and others, is far more important than I ever imagined. An essential part of that is that the peeps working with us seem to care about our progress, take pride in helping us. We make no secret of our inexperience and our reliance on others and so far that has been met with both kindness and determination to help us. We’ve been stupidly fortunate. Anyway, we’ve also put up the rest of the downstairs panels, including the monster 11’ wide one which was the heaviest of the whole build. Leaving that till we’d done the rest of the downstairs turned out to be a very smart move. We probably found it easier than any of the panels we put up in the first week of frame erection, despite the weight of it and the fact that it was awkward. Part of that is Rolly and I settling in to work with each other. There is now a lot less verbal communication than there was to start with. We’ve also honed panel handling so there’s less pure physical grunt needed. And of course, as time goes on with each panel fitted we’ve more room to work, and that’s also significant. With such a cramped site we are constantly tripping over stuff, moving stuff repeatedly, trying to get stuff delivered at the last minute, etc. But much as I might try to plan, at times there’s no choice but to work with way too little space. A good example is the joists. They were delivered before we’d finished putting up the downstairs panels and there’s an awful lot of them. Ideally I’d have put the delivery back a couple of days but that wasn’t an option. I had no idea how much time the limited space would cost us. Ho humm. Talking of joists that was the next job. Rolly and I deposited nearly another metric ton onto the downstairs panels by hand, (just how much does this ‘lightweight’ timber frame structure support?). I say by hand, but shoulders, knees, and just about every other available body part was deployed. I don’t know what lifting capacity each of us have but somehow when working together we exceed more than the sum of our two capabilities. It’s probably simultaneously driving progress and pushing us a teensy bit too far towards injury risk but it’s just what one does. Joists up Rolly set to making us a temporary staircase while I attacked flooring boards. The temp staircase really has helped reduce fatigue and made getting things upstairs safer and easier. Good idea Rolly. Anybody would think he’d done this house building stuff before. We’ve so many joists we almost don’t need flooring boards, but they’re on the design. Yet another metric ton of them. Plus several kilograms of this funny polyurethane glue stuff. That’s really odd to work with. The first day I came home with black gloves on, only non removable ones. I’m sure my fingerprints must have been obliterated (I certainly couldn’t unlock my iPad) so that would have been the time to do a bank job. But there was no time for niceties as the following day the upstairs panels were due and the telehandler was booked, so I had to get enough decking down to allow the piles to be dropped upstairs and sorted/distributed so the other two piles could follow. Rolly was given the day off for the delivery - he’s not supposed to be full time anyway and his skills are reserved for the clever woodworky bits. So Andy the Boss supplied a telehandler driver who was also a power lifter and another equally capable bod to help me sort the panels. When the downstairs panels were delivered they were dumped in the piles they were transported in and Rolly and I had to reshuffle them, which took lots of time and energy. This time I got the long suffering timber frame company to send me pics of the piles so I could work out which pile to do first and how to sort them into sensible piles. For once the theory worked in practice and despite the complaints about how near the edge of the deck I kept walking that day ended with three piles in a near sensible assembly order. I was pleased with myself but I had a nagging doubt - would it speed erection? As I was pondering this very question Dean the neighbour (two doors down) wandered onto site to offer his help with future deliveries. “Why wait for a delivery?” I asked, there’s tons to do and I’m certainly not too proud to accept help. Next day Rolly and I attended to the odd bits and finished the decking whilst the first lift of scaffold was put up. I’m not sure I did anything but look for discarded cups, (sort of) wash them, boil a kettle and make tea, repeat. Rolly has a near infinite tea consumption capacity but the scaffolders beat him hands down whilst managing, like Rolly, to work hard and get lots done at the same time. The song definitely has it wrong, nothing stops for tea but it gets drunk anyway. Tea is useful though. Rolly arrives way before we are allowed to start work so tea helps him cope with rising agitation as the clocks edges glacially towards 08:00. Tea (and biscuits) helps me get Rolly to stop work long enough to help me plan too. And as we drank our tea and discussed the upstairs panels Dean the neighbour arrived. “I can help for a few hours” he said. Now Dean is in his mid eighties so the average site age rose to 73 that day. Hence my initial caution. I started getting Dean to help me organise and stack lightweight stuff, but it became clear that as he tuned in to the way Rolly and I worked (it’s a kind of grunt and nod based language previously unknown to science) that more ambitious stuff was in order. Panels! The three of us got the first two corner panels up, rather effectively. Whilst Rolly was checking and bracing and securing those panels Dean and I got ready for the next panel, only we didn’t, we put it up ready for Rolly to do his check/brace/secure thing. Fast forward, and I do mean fast, and five hours later almost the whole of upstairs was up. Staggering. And very satisfying for all concerned. Perhaps the speed was helped by my sorting after all. The next day Dean pitched up we lifted the gable panels from the ground floor - there was no room on the deck to use the telehandler to get them up previously - we used ropes, crabs, ladders and way too much giggling but up they went so another keep me awake job was dashed off. Don’t underestimate the capability of us wrinklies. Not so easy was the cement board fitting next day. It’s a bitch of a material to work with and slower than I’d have predicted. But we need it done before we fit the roof trusses - finishing these and getting breather membrane on will be the first job next week. On Friday we were ready in good time for the roof trusses, all 19 of them. Two powerlifters from Andy the boss arrived just as the lorry backed onto site. It’s almost like it was planned. They took one look at the job, shook their heads and took up positions. It worked like this (after a couple of false starts): Driver on lorry pushes ends of truss to edge of lorry. Shortest guy on site grabs end furthest from house and has the job of stabilising the truss. It’s at this point I realise why I need platform steel toecapped boots. Short tempered power lifter grabs end of truss nearest the house. Truss is run towards house like a pole vaulter on speed. At last second short tempered power lifter pushes his end of truss skyward. Shortest guy at back of truss grunts and struggles to keep truss upright whilst swearing, profusely. Truss end is caught by other power lifter (the smiley one) just before it lands on the upstairs floor. Smiley power lifter drags truss upwards as shortest guy is dragged along the ground with it still trying to keep truss upright. Rolly and smiley place truss neatly on rapidly growing pile. In total there was 31 minutes between lorry arriving and the truss pile being completed - if my pics weren’t time stamped I’d not now believe it. That made even the short tempered power lifter grin. To finish the week while I continued fitting cement boards Rolly prepped the first truss for a test fitting. Getting the first truss up felt good, really good. That made me grin. I’m loving this part of the build. Yes, progress is visible, and that helps, but it’s more than that. Even when I’m doing things I’ve never done I’m in my comfort zone, and the muscle and joint aches diminish overnight, and I’m not generally laying awake worrying. OK, that probably means I’ve missed some thing or things that are really important, but I’m feeling good. Long may it continue.

After many years of searching, we finally have a plot! Our offer on this plot was accepted in March 2024 and we've only just now completed. But we're excited that it's finally done and we can move forward. Next steps: We have an architect already and a set of draft plans. We'll be working to finalise these plans and take them to planning. The site has detailed planning permission already, so we'll just be looking to vary the design -- and not significantly so fingers crossed it goes okay.

After what feels like forever we finally started real works. We’ve done lots to the plot, tree clearance, root removal, digging out beds, planting, etc. but little to da bungalow itself. We held off stripping out ‘til we were sure the project was viable, which was über cautious but that’s us. Selection of timber frame supplier wasn’t straightforward. It came down to a local-ish company (ETE) who supply a panelised frame for manual erection on site or stick built on site under the supervision of an SE. Most frame companies require crane assembly, which we can’t have due to overhead wires. But once we felt we were in the right place, planning, party wall agreements, demolition survey, site insurance, timber frame supplier, the main peeps to help us build, etc. then we got down to it. That initially meant selling/giving away the kitchen, a fireplace, the conservatory, the UPVC windows and door, an electric fire and even a garage. I had intended to do more stripping out before the cavalry arrived, but there was always a more important task: digging test holes for the structural engineer (needed for the foundation design, so vital); getting the gas meter removed/capped off and the pipe cut of at the verge annoyingly costing £1,700 (not safe to have gas on site in the way, so vital); replacing fence panels including digging out big roots (to keep the neighbours on side, so vital); erecting a shed, with of course a base (to keep those working on site happy, so vital); moving the water supply (to avoid it being trashed by the groundworks, so vital); digging in (by hand) the 10m of electric duct, casting a concrete base for and installing a huge, but apparently necessary, meter kiosk to comply with the DNO requirements, enabling them to charge us £9,500 - ouch - so vital); dismantling the garage (which was in the way and we wanted it to be reused, so vital); and finally, dismantling the conservatory (which was also in the way and we wanted it reused, so, you guessed it, vital). Turns out breaking up concrete by hand is exhausting, but oddly therapeutic, even if you do bend your ancient trusty steel spade. I wonder, have I got so used to digging foundation test holes and digging soakaway test pits and digging out roots and digging in pipes and ducts that I’m actually going to miss digging? Scarily possible! Who needs a mechanical digger when you’ve a mattock from Amazon and a new steel spade from Toolstation? But then the real works start. 34 years ago we built our current house helped massively by Steve the builder, who was a bit older than us. This time round it’s a repeat, as the same Steve is helping us and given that I’m nicely in my 60s and oddly, Steve is still older, it means that none of us are in the first flush of youth. So my theory was that Steve was the brains and I would be the brawn. Wrong. Steve is both it turns out. Monday saw us stripping off roof tiles and after a day on the battens I was wiped. Tuesday saw me on the battens again for half a day stripping the rest of the tiles and then, just to vary things, I then spent some time on the battens stripping off the felt on one face so we could get the chimney down and kick down some ceilings (overboarded lathe and plaster). Whilst we were out on the tiles UK Power Networks, our DNO, dug up the road and put in our underground electric feed. And a quick bit of begging over the phone got the meter moved that afternoon, so we had site power again. Bliss in a coffee cup. So by the end of Tuesday I was pleased with progress but exhausted. On Wednesday we started stripping out walls and we discovered that there was a lot more plasterboard than I first thought. Damn. Pronto plasterboard skip ordered, we estimated that we’d need a 4 yard skip, so to be safe a 6 yard skip was ordered. Which meant we needed easy barrow access so we removed a window and cut a new front door. Wednesday night I went home totally exhausted and less than pleased due to all the newly discovered plasterboard. That night I came to terms with my limitations, so I messaged Steve to suggest he do a 4 day week to give me time to tidy up and recover. He agreed and offered to buy me a pipe and some slippers. (Pic of new door) The skip arrived promptly arrived at 07:30 next morning. There then followed a rabid day of plasterboard removal. Incredible how effective a spade can be indoors when instructions are given to the novice. By the end of the day we’d nearly filled the skip and had just a hallway ceiling left covered in the dreaded plasterboard. I could hardly raise my arms. One of Steve’s endearing features is his sense of humour. One of his most irritating features is his sense of humour. So as I’m on a step up, gritting my teeth and willing my arms up again and again yet another joke prompts the giggles. That was it, hopeless. My giggling got him giggling and progress paused. Priceless. But determination sustained and the skip was filled. Thank goodness for over-ordering. I went home a zombie, but with less energy. Friday and Saturday were tip runs and tidying up, and now on Sunday I sit quietly reflecting on a week that was unbelievably productive, thanks to Steve’s experience. But oh my, it starts again tomorrow. I have no idea if anyone will find these ramblings of interest, but they are, much like digging, remarkably therapeutic too!

Da bungalow that is, not us mortals. We carry on sweating in our hi vis. We were pleased with how the timing worked out - planning to demolish during cooler months so all the neighbours will be wrapped up warm indoors away from the dust, plus it’s hard work so cooler temperatures help comfort. So much for that plan with our mini heat wave! Steve took pity on me by leaving me recovery time on Monday and Tuesday. Good news from a site clearing and tidying point of view. It gave me time to kick down the last of the ceilings, mostly while the windows were still in, and then for J to pick out all the lathes for safety and for disposal at our nearby recycling centre (I’m old fashioned, I still call it the tip!). Trevor the trailer was bought for £200 just over a year ago to help clear the mountains of brash from clearing the massive overgrown conifers. Skooby the Skoda was bought as a building vehicle for £700. We now realise that they have paid for themselves many times over in saving in skip costs. If I’d known how much we would be saving we might have bought a car with a working heater, but hindsight is a wonderful thing. Monday afternoon was window removal time! Ben arrived bang on time and had agreed to help us remove the windows, though he’d never done it before either. I was relying on Steve’s knowledge. Shame he wasn’t there. So da bungalow now has a series of holes where windows were. Each neater than the previous one. If you look at them in chronological order you can see evidence of two keen but clueless numpties first hacking out a huge hole, taking forever, graduating in stages to the last one which was beautifully neatly and quickly and efficiently removed. Yet another example of experience being the thing that one acquires just after needing it. So by Tuesday evening we had a clear site, which is incredibly important on such a tight, narrow plot. And then next morning, Steve returned to the job, so progress exploded again. We stripped the felt and battens off, with muggins of course being the idiot hopping round on the battens for two thirds of the day, with the last third being careful removal of some of the roof timbers. Rather disappointingly, we found woodworm everywhere. So my plan to build my hideaway at the bottom of the garden from reclaimed roof timbers has gone. Some of the timbers came away scarily easily. But those that didn’t put up a hell of a fight - they used huge nails in the 1920s it turns out - and this wasn’t ideal as force had to be used in moderation in case of unseen weakness leading to accident or collapse. We were probably overly careful but better safe than sorry. The next two days are a blur of heaving and bracing and sledgehammering and chainsawing. Thank goodness for a decent twin battery Makita saw - saved us no end of time - and my little one handed chainsaw - AKA Lightsaber - was slower but brilliant in places too. It’s oddly satisfying knocking off the little bits of wood that hold up the soffits and facias and rainwear - sending the whole assembly crashing down in a plume of dust. Even more satisfying to push over the block gable - the thump when it hit the ground was like felling a big tree, primevally enjoyable. We did take a break for a site visit from the ground worker. He asked all the right questions which does give confidence, including asking me to gain permission from our neighbours for him to hand dig one shared corner of our frontage to carefully identify where our neighbours services are. He might even have a use for the roof timber mountain we now have! More skip cost saving. All this is punctuated with other strands of the project. They are vital but hard to find the will to divert onto when mid hammering. In that way J and I are working together fantastically. I haven’t the bandwidth to think - I run to keep up with Steve when he’s there - I run to tidy up when he’s not there to get ready for when he will be - I go home a bit too late each day and after a coffee and a discussion about the day I then bath and by the time we’ve eaten it’s bedtime. Buildhub, apart from my weekly therapy session (oh ok, blog writing) is a distant memory. So J does the thinking, I do the grunting. That’s a little bit of an overstatement as in my head, when I stop to access it, is a 3D model of everything and every junction and material and supplier and missing quote and little red flag of issue that might become critical path and hence needs sorting before it does. I can and do flick into ‘principal designer’ mode when needed. But the day to day scheduling and remembering is falling to J. J has given me a little exercise book and my own grown up ball point pen to keep my to do list in. It’s a bit year 5 but it turns out very effective, as long as J remembers to remind me to look at it. Between us we are working incredibly effectively. Long may it continue.

On your marks: Get set : Wait! Day 1 of panel erecting was rained off. Humph. I tried to pretend to be human again by popping into town with J for a spot of bargain hunting (for stuff we don’t need, natch) but inside I’m still a self build automaton. My recovery won’t really start till we move in methinks. Next day we start the day by admiring my new paddling pools. The previous week I carefully swathed the piles of panels with tarps before it rained oodles. Good theory. But without me noticing the panels with doors or windows happened to be uppermost so they filled with gallons of water - pulling the tarps into the hole with them, so parts of the panels got a bit wet as I wasted time bailing and lifting tarps to get rid of the water. Eventually we started fitting sole plates. Happily the blockwork was very close to mm perfect so there was little in the way of adjusting needed. Next job was to fix trimmers to the outsides of the windframe which stabilises the rear of the house, and was, we felt, the safest place to start fitting panels. Cue Hilti gun. I was dead clever at this point. Instead of wasting money hiring I bought a cheap ex-hire one. After a false start requiring the gun to be swapped I tried to use it to fix a trimmer to the windframe. Nil pois. The flange was 12mm and there was no way a Hilti nail was getting through. So I’d ended up wasting more money than hiring. Damn. Will try and resell. The self drilling screws I’d bought as a backup didn’t work either, they just snap. So the cavalry, in the form of J, raced to Grip Fixings for some FB self drilling screws which, after some experimentation we did get to work. Once the sole plates were down and the trimmers were on it was time to play musical panels (without music, we are a no radio site). The panels were stacked for most effective transportation, not in installation order. But that doesn’t matter as each panel has easily removable lifting straps so it’s dead easy for the crane to pull them off from the top, drop them into position, apply a temporary prop and go on to the next one till they are all up and can be stapled together. If you have a crane that is. Our site is oversailed by next doors telephone and mains cable, and the front of the site has both kinds of wire strung across it too. That’s why almost all of the timber frame companies I talked to at the self build show wouldn’t quote. Just one SIPs company would but they gave every impression of not caring about minor details like feasibility, perhaps because with the prices they charge they could hire a Chinook. The company we are using typically supply builders who instal themselves, which suited us a treat as tins of spinach aren’t that expensive, and otherwise it would be stick built on site which was a bridge too far. We’ve benefitted greatly from the experience and engineering knowledge of the panel company so in hindsight right now it feels like a really good plan. But on the ground, when the panel that logically should be installed next is at the bottom of the biggest pile with the biggest, heaviest panels sitting on top of it, one questions previous decisions. Many times I called time out to consider if we needed more muscle on the team. I have excess bloody minded JFDI determination but compared to Rolly the Chippy I’m a snowflake. I’m not sure he understands the word can’t, which makes ensuring on site safety requires both strength of character and a big gob. And firmly resisting the temptation to ‘just go for it’. To start with it really did resemble one of the old sliding tile puzzles I used to do as a kid. Only with tiles that don’t slide and are up to 8’ x 11’ and weigh up to 135kg. It started getting better when I took some time one evening to ship as much possible down to the man cave slab at the bottom of the garden. With each panel it got easier and we steadily accelerated. Happy days. Not so happy when it rained though, but we erected the little camping shelter I had in reserve which gave us somewhere to sit and plan in the dry and it gave us the chance to deploy my table saw, which is useful. On the Friday the joist delivery and subsequent stacking took me most of the day. The delivery driver was about 4 decades younger than me, a foot taller, looked strong and was brilliantly helpful. At first, us moving 6.3m 47kg posijoists from the lorry to our slab saw me running to keep up. After the first few he slowed down to match my speed, or so I thought. A few more and I found myself wondering why we were going so slow. I’d worn him out. By the time we’d finished he was visibly wilted, but we’d done it. I separated the flat roof stuff out and shipped that down the garden too, which used up the last of my day. Thankfully nothing stops Rolly the Chippy so he’d carried on doing useful stuff. By the end of the week we’d got the two sides mostly done. I stood in the back garden and looked back at the pics of the site when it was first cleared. We’ve come a long way. It was a needed boost. The next Monday our big glulam arrived, easily transported on my super useful little trolley. I’ve been laughed at and teased about my trolley, but it’s moved an awful lot both on the slab and up and down the garden. Rolly’s little board with casters is better for moving panels on the flat slab but my DeWalt trolley is the bee’s knees otherwise. By the end of Tuesday we had all load bearing panes (external and internal) up, with header plates in place so we were ready for the metal men to come and instal about 800kg of steel atop the panels. So Thursday Rolly and I rechecked everything was still plumb (small adjustments needed) after the weight of the steels had landed and then it was time to focus on getting ready for joist hanging. Friday saw the arrival of the same team of brickies who saved our plant based bacon equivalent two weeks previously. They are a team of celebrity look alikes: Pete Townshend; Paul Weller and Charles Branson. Despite this they are a whirlwind. It hadn’t occurred to me that hitherto I’ve only worked with builders, not brickies. They are brilliant at what they do, but they only do brick and blockwork. So I needed to ensure that all was done/planned ready for them. That meant sorting all the breather membrane on Friday late afternoon ready for the brickies’ Saturday shift. J and I worked late to do enough to be ready for them and whilst we managed it, with only a modicum of tetchiness, I now realise, that looking back, I really needed to stop and carefully think through how the brickies would work in with the project. They are a force of nature. Light the blue touch paper and dive for cover, but in a good way. Sort of. Once they start things happen so fast that there s no time for me to think, and frankly I wasn’t ready. I think we’ve just avoided cocking up but only by overusing J and my combined brainpower and if I’d been on my own the project would now be in trouble. It isn’t helped by the fact that they’d offered to do two days to sort the plinth bricks. That bit I was ready for. But then they announced that they could stay till the house blockwork was all finished, so things I thought were a good few days away were suddenly NOW! I’m loving working with Rolly on the frame, he’s precise, informative, patient with my constant stream of dumb questions, and he makes us productive. But I need to do my part of project management too. And it turns out I find it too easy to get lost in the woodshavings. J and I are project managing between us and that is working well. At least I think it is, if you’ve seen Arthur Christmas we’re a bit like his parents, Dad, like me, wears bright clothes, smiles a lot and peeps think he is leading, but in reality Mum, like J, is keeping track and thinking and usually quietly steering. I must try harder next week or we won’t be ready for the upstairs panel delivery next Friday! And like Rolly the Chippy, I can’t let the word can’t onto site.

…well, the shell of a house at least. What a crazy week. We chose the factory-built timber frame route because we like the idea that the shell goes up within a few weeks. But the pace of progress this week has been startling. The frame erection team of 3 arrived at 7:30am on Monday. A big yellow crane arrived at 8:00, with the frame arriving on an artic by 9:15. First off: a careful check shows that the frame fits the footings. Hurray! In fact the footings were within 3mm all the way round, which is credit to the groundworkers. From then on it was flat out and 7 days later the structure of the house is pretty much complete. Those guys do work very hard though - long days under a blistering sun, and straight through the weekend. They are aiming to finish the tidying up by Tuesday, get Turners to sign-off the frame, and head off home to Essex. A great crew - real grafters. We’ve also been very lucky with the weather of course, though the erection team certainly wished it had been cooler each day (we’ve had highs of between 28C and 32C for the last 5 days). We kept them supplied with cold drinks and ice-creams as best we could and we’ve installed a fridge in the workshop which has been popular. The frame itself looks very good - it all appears to fit together tightly from what we can see. No gaps around the insulation, or between the panels. I’ll say more about the frame structure next week but for now here are some pictures of daily progress, plus some at the end showing some of the detail: This time last week: Monday: Tuesday: Wednesday: Thursday: Friday: Saturday: Today - Sunday: And a few of the details, some taken earlier in the week: And finally, for both of you who made it this far, one of those oak posts I cut and chamfered last week (the softwood beams will be hidden in the soffit:

We start the week with the latest quandary: how to show the warranty surveyor enough trenches so he can confirm he’s seen 50% of them. He saw some last week and if we dug the rest of them then that would add up to enough. However, if we did that we’d have a massive issue with spoil and we would not get the concrete lorry on to pour, so it would be barrows. Apparently pumping is an option, but we’d need to close the road which is a lot of cost and a great deal of time wasted. So, my Monday morning starts with red eyes from pointless endless ‘loop’ worrying instead of sleep, and the morning on site starts with a replan. The only way to do it appears to be to dig about two thirds of what remains, piling the spoil on the already done foundations, then let the surveyor see the newly dug trenches, then fill that and then next day (yes, this plan extends everything by at least a day) we pull the rest and pour on the final day. This involves lots of wasted time shunting piles of soil around - we can’t have a grab lorry on the road due to low wires, but we can have one on site once we’ve filled the trenches and they are thus stable. All the grab lorries are reserved for Kev the Dig’s last day. Now the issue with this is it mucks up our warranty inspections, (but not our BCO inspections as that one is in the bag already). So it’s on the phone to the warranty provider to seek guidance. Their response to my barely suppressed panic was reassuring and sensible: I’m to take more pics than David Bailey and show the surveyor as much as we can. I resumed normal breathing. But then - “Oh, and by the way, the surveyors report mentions removing roots round the trenches.” Yep, he mentioned that and I have done that I happily said. “And remove the shuttering too.” Another Roy Schneider moment. This is becoming a habit. Apparently this report was written before the surveyor went on holiday, i.e. before we poured any concrete. When, if it had been mentioned in the ‘roots’ phone call, we would still have had time to do that. Panic factor 8 Mr Sulu. Again, a reassuring and sensible response helped me calm down, for which I am grateful. We agreed all shuttering would be removed from the rest of the foundations, and advice would be sought but something low risk like that will be fine, the nice, calm voice assured me. I need to get lots of pics sent in to complete that bit, but it sounds like it’s ok. Phew. So then we finally got on with the dig. Lots of spoil shunting, a few little bits of soft ground to be dug past. A stern lecture (not needed, but kindly meant) from Kev the Dig about not going down a 1.4m deep trench as the sides were just too crumbly, and we were ready for our inspection. The surveyor arrived on time, and was happy and relaxed. Stayed a good few minutes this time (we were his only call that day as it was supposed to be a first day back and in the office day), talked through what we were doing. In response to the shuttering we left in he commented “oh that’s ok”. All that angst. Sigh. He appeared happy with all that he could see, noted that I was talking to the warranty provider peeps, so him being happy is the main thing. So we got on with pour #3 and removing the shuttering. The forces involved in pulling out a piece of 4’ by 8’ ply, even when less than half of it is in the concrete, is staggering. Kev used his digger to pull them out by the rope loops we had attached, but even then it was a struggle and only achieved by wiggling his bucket. Next day, we dug out the rest of the foundations, dumping the soil on the previous day’s pour and then lunchtime we poured #4. Bit of a moment when the digger severed the temporary site water pipe that some idiot had dug in and forgotten. Fortunately when I did that I had used the stopcock at the water meter so I knew it worked and the flow was quickly stemmed. Interestingly, after all my panicking this was the first instance where Steve and Kev showed significant concern and were moved to move rapidly. I guess water mixing with sand makes good castles but poor trenches. I simply don’t know enough to panic about the right things. That overcome the rest of the day went to plan, so we finished the foundations. Four tranches of trenches. Finally, a full set. Thursday was spent moving spoil to the front of site for 5 loads of a 16 ton grab lorry to be removed, and that still left some. Including the previous loads well over 100 tons of material gone by grab, all for a little three bed detached on a diddy site. Staggering. Next week we will hopefully get the invoices and we’ll find out if day rate did save us money. Fingers crossed. Next job is below damp blockwork and we’d planned ahead a delivery (meaning Steve had told me to book one days before) for Friday morning, first thing, so I could bump out and be ready for Steve to start blockwork Tuesday. At one point it had looked like we wouldn’t be ready for it so out of courtesy I warned the builders merchant and agreed I’d confirm by 17:00 the day before. Big mistake. Huge. Waited all day and despite reassurances over the phone no delivery. They finally admitted it would be there mid morning Tuesday. Visit to builders merchants for a ‘robust and direct’ discussion, which at the time felt pointless, as the rogue agent had absented himself, so there was a danger I might be shouting (I didn’t shout, but you know what I mean) at peeps who were already on my side. So instead I shared, in a measured way, both my feelings and the knock on effect on the project. Ten minutes after leaving there I got a call to learn that miraculously they had found a way to deliver Saturday morning, which they did. We aren’t allowed to work Saturday afternoons, Sundays or bank holidays so only a small proportion has been bumped out ready, but it’s a start. But the lesson is be careful with courtesy. In the everything at the last minute, think only seconds ahead building world giving someone a heads up that a delay might happen then sets that delay in stone. Won’t be doing that again. Far better to cancel at the last possible second and try not to feel bad about mucking peeps around. It appears that some won’t worry about how much they muck me around. Overall, in the end, despite my gripes it’s been a good fortnight. We aren’t completely out of the ground yet as we still don’t finally know how deep we need to dig down to ensure our solid floors are indeed solid, but the worst is definitely under us. Might even get some sleep now.

That was an advertising slogan from the 40’s and 50’s, which persisted in popular culture into my childhood in the 60’s (I’m a wrinkly, but not that much of a wrinkly). And oh boy, with the recent downpours we desperately needed a hat on the house. As kids we used to turn the phrase around - “if you want to get a hat, get a head”. That’s what counted for humour back then. But like all my frivolous tool purchases over the years that turn out to be really useful if not vital during this build, so that phrase became immensely apposite. Our timber frame paddling pool needed a head to put a hat on. In the case of our design ‘a head’ meant a full set of trusses, all braced as per, a layer of OSB (a softy southerner version of sarking), anti everything mesh closing the continuous ridge vent, the eaves bunged up with timber, and the flue hole cut and the attic bits of the flue in place and the final length ready for erection. Rolly the chippy and I had discussed in great length how to put the trusses up. They were in a pile on the upstairs floor needing the bird’s mouths to be cut. We concluded we needed more hands to do it. At this stage we both nod, look round, remind ourselves that we are alone, then stay silent till one of us gives in and says “shall we give one a try anyway? See how we get on?”. That’s the danger of two peeps working together who each refuse to believe they can be beaten. So, Rolly cut the bird’s mouths on three trusses while I pointlessly thought through different lifting options for a pair of old codgers whose combined total age is 140 years. If only I’d bought a chinook. Anyway, there we stood, each end of a truss, silently psyching ourselves up. That was brought to a close by a series of half sentences, which we took turns to utter. Things like “well, we could lift this end onto the plate, then, ummmm….”; “would a rope, sort of….”; “could the scaffold tower help with, maybe, erm….”. We were facing certain defeat, or at least, the need for help. Where was my octogenarian neighbour when we needed him. Visiting friends in Europe, actually. So we did the only thing left to us, we applied good, old fashioned BF&I. (A core skill of mine, as it happens.) We fluffed it twice, each time returning to the starting position. I’m not sure an onlooker would have been able to discern any difference in approach between the three attempts, apart from facial redness growing by each failure. But attempt three worked. Hussah! We sort of repeated the same process, each time making small changes. By the time the eighth truss went up, as I mopped up the blood (I’d bashed my nose) I wondered what on earth we’d found so difficult. Rolly then did his orang-utan impression, while nailing the bracing on to give us a firm set of trusses to build from while I tidied and generally fussed, pointlessly. It’s amazing how a couple of well nailed cross members stiffen an otherwise wobbly set of timbers. That done we continued getting more trusses up. With each one it got easier with practice but harder with less room to work with, ending up with three trusses bunched at each end that we walked to their position once all was up, Rolly on the scaffold outside, me on my tower inside. Simples. By the end of that day we had got all the trusses up and braced enough to get through the expected storm, v pleased. Not so pleased about the next day though. The forecast was dire so Rolly stood down and I tried to have a Tidy Friday. However most of the weather missed us so it ended up a day wasted in many ways. The only really good bit was the roofer popping by allowing a discussion about gable verge and soffit details - that went well, or so I thought - with the roofer happy with our design and booked in to felt and batten us next Thursday. Monday we got the rain we were promised for Friday. Sigh. Dean, the neighbour, turned up to help just as it started hammering down and I’d put the kettle on. Obviously we blamed him for bringing the rain with him. I fed everyone biscuits but had none myself (sniff) as our BCO turned up, and I discovered the recipe for a quick and positive BCO inspection. Try really hard to do good stuff; know one’s design intimately and by heart; and further than that, understand it at a micro level; and have the inspection done in pouring rain so it happens quickly. I think the last bit overrides all the rest, but they’re still a good thing. We are lucky to have a BCO who is a nice guy, who is himself a self-builder, and who loves his job. Either way our BCO was a damp but happy man with our build. Dean and I got a bit of the OSB sarking on when it dried up, while Rolly closed the eaves, so it wasn’t a complete wash out. Next day Rolly and I got a rhythm going and got loads of sarking up, using ropes for security, leaving just the top rows each side which were thankfully half bits. So next day, with nearly a complete layer of OSB on, we discovered how useless sarking is at keeping rain out. Cue yet more depressing sweeping water off of the upstairs floor. Yet even in such circumstances illumination is to be found. Tony trays. You thought they were just for keeping the air in, but no! they are far more versatile: they keep the rain in too. With a flat surface like an upstairs floor however fast one sweeps torrential rain towards the stairwell much of it reaches the walls. When it hits the Tony trays it is skilfully guided round the end of the joists and then down the inside walls. Of course, this is good news especially when one has carefully stored lots of stuff out of the rain, neatly stacked round the edge of the downstairs walls, as all that dry and dusty stuff gets a good cleansing rinse in pure rainwater. All my paslode nail boxes are now papier-mâché, which doesn’t bloody help. The best laid plans and all that. And the delays meant that the plan was starting to look too tight. We had a day to get the rest of the sarking on and a few other bits and pieces done to be ready for the roofer. Cue the cavalry - which in Suffolk can be a helpful neighbour. Rolly did the clever woodworky bits while Dean and I got the top rows of sarking on. Our scaffold is v thin on one side as we are so close to our neighbours, so I could only safely lay a ladder up the roof on the other side. We’d used a roofing ladder for the lower rows but that didn’t work for the top row as the hook was in the way of fitting the boards. So we laid a normal ladder up the roof, and then I laid on the roof, feet atop the ladder, while Dean attached each sheet to a rope and pulled it up to me to fit in place, first on my side then on the other. Worked a treat and with Dean holding the rope we had a backup against the gusts of winds which was never really used but was a comfort to have anyway. Actual safety verses perceived safety is fascinating. As I lay on the sarking getting ready to pull up the next board, waving at a regular passer by (who took another picture), Dean took one look at me, perched on the top of the ladder and asked if I was sure it was safe. “No”, I said, “I’m at significant risk of bashing my thumb with my hammer”. If fall off the ladder AND I didn’t keep one hand on the top of the last fixed board I’ll collect the odd splinter as I slowly slide down onto the scaffolding. Our 40degree pitch means one cannot walk on the OSB but it did mean I could hold myself in place with one hand very easily. OK if I did slide I’d swear a lot but we’d have a laugh about it after. If I was monkeying about on a felted and battened roof the risk of falling through would be massively greater and much more dangerous. In reality I was much more at risk of injury lifting panels on the slab - back injury, crushed fingers, etc. But Dean saw height and that triggered his ‘oh my’ function, (he’s American so he says things like that and “do the math”, and “oh shoot”, etc. bless him), whereas he and I lifting panels didn’t bother him one bit. Peeps (no names, no pack drill Rolly!) constantly leave stuff about which constitute trip hazards, and I’m regularly kicking them to the side or picking them up as I fear peeps tripping and the resultant injuries, which depending on what is there to fall on could be really nasty. Hence my obsessive tidying and my Tidy Fridays. It took me a while to realise if things get untidy I get a big knotty ball of anxiety in me that I just couldn’t turn off. But everyone else wanders past the mess oblivious. So my perhaps irrational trigger is disorder. Go figure, as Dean would say. Once I’d put the last bit on I treated myself to a sit down with a view, on the ridge. I had been looking forward to that moment for many, many days. My favourite place in our current house is on it, on the ridge to be exact. The view is spectacular. Turns out the new pad’s ridge view is just as good. Sitting there, looking across the river towards the ancient burial mounds, even with the rain starting again, felt like the Pooliverse (any Perishers fans out there?) was telling me that it’s all ok, this is meant to be. As the roofer arrived next day I was back laying down on the job, this time fixing stainless steel anti-everything mesh along the gap at the top for the ridge vent. I was very glad to see him, until that is, he asked about the gable verge and soffit details. They are as we agreed, I said, happily. Only it turns out that he had no memory of our previous discussion and anyway he’s a visual sort of guy, rather than a discussion with drawings, sort of guy. So I’ve simply no idea what he thought he was agreeing to the previous week, but we had to do the whole discussion again, this time with wood to mock it up. Fortunately the end result was very similar to my original design, but sometimes trying to plan ahead and get things nailed down in advance in the building industry does feel like trying to buy spirit level bubbles - impossible, and at the same time a source of great amusement to others. That discussion was had on the scaffolding in bright sunshine. But grey clouds were on the horizon so that time wasted was bad news. Two strips of felt later the heavens opened in one last assault before we put our hat on. I guess the Pooliverse has a sense of humour which is hard to appreciate as one sweeps and sweeps and sweeps endless puddles away. But the rain stopped and the roofer got back up there and we finally weren’t topless any more. While the roofer roofed I carried on setting out my flue and while my back was turned Rolly threw up our internal upstairs walls. Perhaps he wiggles the end of his nose, that would account for the speed. We were slowed a lot by the joists being slightly not where I thought the plans showed them to be, (“what do you mean I can’t cut through a pozijoist? I’ve big saws, of course I can!”), but a small (40mm) wall shift sorted the flue run and suddenly we’ve gone from wooden cathedral (micro version) to embryonic home. Albeit a damp one. The week ended with just me doing my Tidy Friday bit and knocking off early for a bit of a low key garden party held by one of our new neighbours. I know our build has upset some a bit but, we are again, ridiculously lucky that the vast majority of our new neighbours are very welcoming and tolerant. The Pooliverse continues to be good to us. Oddly, I then hit a downer, which is very ‘me’. I have no idea if this is an unusual habit, but when faced with the achievement of an important milestone I don’t feel like celebrating, I suddenly have the bandwidth to contemplate what’s left to be done. This time was a lot worse, as I suddenly realised that my time working with Rolly would soon end, and working with him felt really good. Funny old emotional roller coaster, this building malarkey.

Don't Panic - we're not selling what we've been building. Back at the end of April (I thought it was longer ago than that - time either slowed down or we sped up, not sure which) SWMBO had just had a toe joint fused together to try to resolve a long period of pain following the critical infection she got over 3 years ago. We're pleased to say that it seems to have done the trick, and she has now rejoined me in getting the house ready for habitation. I left you all with another list to contemplate. So here it is with some brief updates: Hassle the SH1T out of the window installation company to investigate and fix the leaks (three fixed windows and a sliding door) that came to light after we did the first lot of plastering - it worked, and the window no longer leaks - yeehah!! the rest of the plastering - was all completed the rest of the mist coating and painting - one bedroom and an ensuite left more stone work - still on the list moving as much stuff into what we now call the attic (a very large room downstairs as we don't have a real attic) in order to clear all the other rooms - done Install the UFH upstairs with plywood cover - done, and manifold connected up and filled fit the bathroom - done fit the kitchen - done fit the utility and cloakroom, utility done electric 2nd fix - done and signed off rainwater soakaways - still on the list rainwater collection system - still on the list backfilling - partly done, still on the list concrete lego brick retaining wall - delivered, to be fitted Flooring - in progress Wood cladding - still on the list Air tightness test (as I write this, I think "oh, sh1t, I must get that booked in") - done and certificate issued Fit internal doors - still on the list Fit en suite - still on the list Build MY garage - still on the list A green roof system, because its on the planning application, and may be required for certificate of completion (unless someone can enlighten me as to how to avoid this, and be able to delay the installation) - still on the list So, that big window, the one in the middle bottom below. First chap who came to inspect and report back left the company without doing anything, so two chaps came out (I think mainly as protection for each other from my wrath). Suffice to say they inspected thoroughly having listened to the fact that we had investigated excessively to find the point of ingress of the water. The ensuing repair entailed the whole window (glazing, individual door frames, and the outer rail frame) being removed from the hole (thank goodness for the steel beams above), a manufacturing fault being rectified, and the multiple installation faults also be repaired and then finally reinstalled correctly. A few days later to allow the massive amounts of sealant that were applied to cure, we sprayed a large amount of water at the window and gladly it seems to be OK. We now await a traditional SW'ley storm this coming winter. All the remaining plastering was completed, and not only did the mighty SWMBO mist coat all but one bedroom, she also painted all the walls bar the bedroom and the en-suite. I'm not sure she wanted to see a paint roller for a few weeks after doing that lot. As you can see in the picture above, on the right hand side, we started laying the UFH insulation and pipes and overlaying that with 6 or 9mm ply, depending on what the final floor finishing was going to be (we planned ahead 🙂 ) In May, we were joined by our son who had stated clearly that he wanted to help us with fitting the kitchen. This was very welcome as there were a few heavy units to move into place, and it was fantastic to have a pair of stronger arms (than mine) around. And so with his help we managed to get to this point (left photo). Since then I've been doing all the finishing off (doors, plinths, hidden handles etc..) But the "pièce de résistance" was having the breakfast bar made from planks of the trunk of a walnut tree that we had to remove to build the house. Here it is in the right hand photo Having done the kitchen, focus turned to the bathroom. Here's the result We started putting down final flooring. In the breakfast bar picture above you'll see the stick down LVT that we had fitters into do, and we've done LVT click flooring in the bathroom, a bedroom, the utility and cloakroom, and one other room. We also had some of the backfilling done, meaning we could do away with the temporary steps upto the front door and the areas around it. So, still a lot to complete. This last week has seen the temporary utility removed and the permanent one installed, and a bed has arrived into the one floored bedroom. Selling up: We've sold our "holiday home", and our primary residence is on the market (anyone want a four bed detached with double garage in the Reading area?). Next week we begin the process of moving into a building site, albeit one with a few luxuries (like the ability to cook a full roast dinner without the electricity tripping, and have the option for a bath!) No new list this time around 🙂

Floor The main focus this week has been laying the DPM + 220mm PIR floor insulation + 50mm upstand insulation round all the walls, then the UFH perimeter expansion strips and the vapour separation layer ready for the UFH pipes. It’s proved intricate work. Ken our first fix plumber assisted by local builders Barry and Jordan together have been working hard to complete the task by the end of August so that the liquid screed can go down during the first week in September. Early this week it looked like there was too much to do in the time available which added to everyone’s stress levels but by the end of the week the guys have made good progress and appear to be over half way through. We have a little bit of contingency with the screed team who are happy at this stage to leave the pour date a bit flexible during w/c 1st September, so we are hoping we will be alright. One thing that is particularly pleasing is the meticulous attention to detail being applied by Ken, Barry and Jordan. The PIR boards are being cut and fitted really tightly and the taping of joins and of the DPM is being done with real care. If we were doing this again (Mrs P: “We’re not”), I’d consider building the non load-bearing internal walls later, on top of the screed, which would have saved a lot of effort intricately cutting, fitting and taping DMP and insulation to those internal walls. But no doubt a different series of problems would have ensued. Electricity supply Also this week, SSE came in and moved our electric supply from a meter box which used to cling to the side of a now-demolished wooden garage, inside to the plant room. Two SSE engineers for two hours = 3p change from £700(!) Hey-ho, it’s done now. External battens I reported that these were all done last week but I forgot about the cross-battening required for the vertical timber cladding. Anyway, that was duly completed by Alan and Chris this week and the walls are ready to receive STS construction boards plus Ecorend thin coat render (for the rendered sections), and Brimstone Ash vertical timber cladding on the other areas. I need to arrange delivery of the latter when we have sufficient space (the cladding is bought and being held by Vastern Timber pending delivery). But work on the backing boards for the render starts on Monday - yes I know it’s a bank holiday but the render people are keen, so who am I to stop them? Carpenter Chris also sorted out the ply protection for the front door and here's our lovely temporary door - the real one is safely wrapped up in the workshop. Scaffold Also keen to work the bank holiday weekend (well, ok, after a bit of encouragement) were the scaffolders, who arrived on Saturday morning to remove the scaffold, which they did in a few hours with no dramas. So we can now see the house! although it’s still looking very shiny-silver. The plastic protection is remaining on part of the zinc pending the completion of the vertical cladding of the wall on the left And finally… Remember this rogue beam from last week’s blog? Too close to the window reveal to allow us to fit an external blind… Well, I asked Matt at Turner Timber Frames to check with the engineers whether it and the one at the other end of that roof canopy are structural and it turns out they are not, they are purely 'cosmetic' and can be removed if we wish. However, in the meantime we are wondering if we really need and external blind anyway(!) Also, we need to talk to Alan the carpenter about how we are going to finish the roof in that area, and he’s away until next Wednesday. The soffit will be clad with some of the Brimstone Ash but should the soffits be horizontal or follow the slope of the rafters? Do we need some kind of clad gable at the end? Also, how easy will it be to take that beam out? It’s on joist hangers at the wall end but how is it fixed to the top of the oak posts? At least we have options to consider now though. Dashboard: Contractor days on site this week: 19 Contractor days on site since build start: 211 Budget: No change, running slightly over. Plan: On track to move in by Easter 2026. New measure - Number of bacon baps bought: 8 this week; 41 to date. These are ‘keeping people happy’ baps. Unfortunately there is no entry in the budget for them so I have explained to Mrs P. that they’ll have to come out of the kitchen budget. Kitchen -> food, it’s obvious! (Although as Mrs P. points out: "No kitchen; no food" which is a concern.) At any rate bacon baps from time to time feel like a worthwhile investment to keep everyone happy. Issues and worries closed this week: Scaffold is now down; the renderers can get at the walls! Current top issues and worries: Insulation - the additional ceiling insulation is still a worry - going to need to schedule it in after the screed now. PS We’re at a wedding next weekend so the weekly blog may be delayed or skipped. I imagine you’ll all survive the blow.

A quieter week this week but good progress nonetheless. The main build focus this week has been on the south-facing single pitch roof which is to be covered using in-roof solar panels with slates around the boundary, then zinc facias to match the rest of the roof. It seems the zinc roof guys don’t do slate roofs and the slate roofers don’t do zinc, so two roofing teams required. Fortunately, both teams have been excellent: professional, tidy, friendly and turning up when they say they will. All you could ask for really. Also fortunately, the slate roofers (Pete and Dave from G M Spicers) will fit the solar PV panels under the guidance of our electrician Nick. And that has been the main activity this week - roofing battens and then the solar PV panels. (I should just give a mention to Travis Perkins who supplied the cleanest, straightest 2 x 1 battens I have ever seen, barely a knot anywhere. It’s a shame they’re florescent yellow - I wouldn’t be surprised if they glow in the dark.) The solar panels are by Solfit and clip together to form a watertight roofing surface - no trays, they just fit straight on the roofing battens. They’re about 1790 x 1220mm and weigh 26kg each, so getting them on roof is no easy matter but the Pete and Dave seemed to manage ok. We have 35 landscape format panels (5 rows of 7) at 425w each giving 14.8kW total generating capacity. There are no doubt cheaper panels available but we have saved 77m2 of slate or zinc roofing, so that helps the economic case. By the end of the week, all the panels were on and the team had started to fix the slates around the edge so we can see how that will look. Also this week the zinc roofers stripped off the protective film from most of the roof so we can see that now and I have to say it looks really smart. Aside from the actual build work, we’ve made good progress on planning future activity with an number of trades now provisionally booked in including: UFH fix, screed, floor tiling, external rendering, airtightness test, decorating (single-colour spray all through), and bathroom fix, courtesy of my brother Chris! (Yes, there are lots of other activities booked in too - but we didn’t book them this week!) The next few weeks remain very busy (hopefully) so watch this space for more progress… Our windows and doors are due to be installed on Thursday and Friday, so if you see Kevin McCloud in the vicinity of north Dorset, please send him away! Dashboard: Contractor days on site this week: 10 Contractor days on site since build start: 166 Budget: No real change, running slightly over. I keep finding things I’d forgotten to include (e.g. decorating!). But I also realise I haven’t factored in our VAT reclaim yet. So overall, all ok good. Plan: On track to move in by Easter 2026. Issues and worries closed this week: Velux flashings. At last, we have solved the mystery worry of the Velux flashings. More detail here for those really interested https://forum.buildhub.org.uk/topic/44742-velux-flashings-for-standing-seam-zinc-roof/#comment-626128 but in summary: Velux twice got it wrong and the second time tried to sell us some flashings at £588 + VAT each, when we actually needed some £43 kits…also made by Velux. The latter are now fitted, so all is resolved. Current top issues and worries: Scaffolding - unresponsive scaffolding company. The scaffolding needs to come down in two weeks time but I’m worried that we’ll be used as free storage and thus be held up. Scheduling future deliveries: insulation, battening, cladding, render boards, MVHR, UFH kit, ASHP, HW cylinder… all due in the next six five weeks.

A longer than usual blog - we’ve had a lot going on this week. We definitely reached site capacity with five vans and seven contractors on-site on Thursday and Friday. Seven pallets of cellulose bales arriving mid-week didn’t help space management either. The whole week got fairly stressful but somehow we seem to have got through it. Phew! Membranes The plan was for the team from SW Insulation to fit the VCL membrane to the vaulted ceilings, cross-batten with 25x50mm in preparation for the cellulose fill, then move on to the wall VCL and the additional 50mm PIR and 38mm service cavity battens on the walls. As I type that it sounds like rather a lot. It proved to be too much indeed… Our lovely vaulted ceilings turned out to be a nightmare to fit membranes to. Those, plus the ceiling cross-battens (essential to stop the cellulose blowing the membranes off the rafters) took three guys pretty much all week to do. So the walls will have to be tackled when the team return on the 11th August. We had no carpenters available Monday to Wednesday but on Thursday and Friday both Alan and Chris were on site. Chris rushed around closing all the external gaps around the roof edges off with OSB, while Alan worked flat out trying to keep ahead of the zinc roofers (see below). Closing off the roof edges was essential if we wanted to avoid the cellulose blowing into the rafter space and straight out across the neighbouring countryside. Before: After (ok, different section of roof but it all had to be done): The pressure to prepare for the cellulose fill was heightened a bit because I’d cunningly agreed to the cellulose team coming in on Saturday to fill the roof… Cellulose Ray and Devlin from JW Insulating arrived mid-morning on Saturday and worked straight through to 6pm to fill all the rafter spaces. It wasn’t plain sailing - they were worried the membrane wouldn’t hold. They had to put a some extra edge battens in to make sure the membrane did not get blown off due to the pressure of the fill and they had a couple of ‘blow-outs’ they had to fix. Apologies for my terrible photography but here is Devlin blowing the cellulose in to one section: After filling the first section they checked the density by cutting out a cylinder of the filled cellulose and weighing it. The core sample came out cleanly without disturbing the surrounding cellulose and after weighing they pushed it back in place and taped it up; it's amazing how the cellulose (which is simply pulped paper, treated to make it fire and mould resistant) seems to bind and 'set' in place once it is blown in. The test showed we were a tad over target density. I asked Ray whether that was a problem: “Not for you” was the reply. I assume they could end up using more cellulose than planned but they were happy to carry on. By the end of the day we had a fully-filled roof. Another milestone achieved! The photos don’t show it too clearly but the visual effect is as if there’s a vast silver duvet placed over the house. You can see the patches they used to cover up the entry points for the 'blowing hose'. We hadn’t realised the cellulose blower was 3-phase and came with its own noisy diesel generator which ran for 9 hours non-stop. Not much fun for our neighbours - we’re hoping they forgive us. Fortunately it was all done in one day, so peace was restored today (Sunday). Have we done the right thing? Choosing the best approach for insulating the roof has been tricky. With hindsight, PIR between the rafters might have been easier (especially since I now know you can get open web rafters with PIR between the webs, so no voids to have to insulate). Alternatively, maybe we’d have been better to have a warm roof with 200-250mm of PIR on top of the open web-rafters, which would then have served as service spaces for cables, pipes and MVHR ducting. That would have made for a very thick roof which would have been difficult to disguise though. But we liked the idea of cellulose fill for its eco-credentials and its noise insulation levels (especially with a zinc roof). Having said that, to get to our target u-value (0.1 max) we still have to add another 100mm of PIR on the inside; we'll leave some channels to run the MVHR ducting through. That’s the next job for South West Insulating when they return on the 11th August. Another option would have been to go for a more ‘Rolls-Royce’ solution like the timber frames offered by MBC, where they take responsibility for the roof insulation, VCL and airtightness. But although our costs for adding the insulation and membranes are higher than expected, it’s still going to be a lot cheaper than the MBC frame. Anyway we* have made our decision so we have to stick with it and see it through; it’s definitely proving trickier to implement than anticipated though! (*Well me - I can’t blame Mrs P.) Zinc roof The zinc roofers, Wessex Metal Roofing were also working through the week, finishing the main roof, fitting the small areas of zinc facade, and various facias, ridges, and gutters trims. They also kept Alan busy on Thursday and Friday making sure the necessary ply backings were in place to keep ahead of them. Scaffold issues: One area of challenge we have is the scaffolding. Ideally we need some limited changes. The scaffold company are in a fix though - too much committed work for the people available. In fairness they are communicating well and being open about their issues: fitters unexpectedly leaving or having to be let go, holidays, potentially over-ambitious work commitments... I have some sympathy but I sense it is going to be nigh on impossible to get them out for a minor adjustment any time soon. We’re going to need to think imaginatively to avoid being held up. I'm going to imagine everything's finished and we've moved in - feels better already. Next week: Work should start on the south-facing monoridge roof which is mainly solar PV panels with some slates round the edges. It’s a different roofing company because it seems the zinc roofers don’t do slates and vice versa. They sounded busy and stressed too, so I’m hoping they turn up. Aside from that, it’s a quiet week. We were supposed to be doing the blown cellulose roof fill but.. oh.. I see that’s already been done! Well done on getting to the end of that blog! Just for fun I've added a summary 'dashboard' below. This is turning into a weekly project report - sorry about that: old habits. Dashboard: Contractor days on site this week: 26 Contractor days on site since build start: 156 Budget: Currently running £8k over (Benpointer budgeting rule 1 breached - poor management 😂). Plan: On track to move in by Easter 2026. Issues and worries closed this week: Making the roof space airtight enough for the cellulose blow. Completing the cellulose fill. Confirming the window and door opening sizes match the ordered windows and doors. (Actually that was checked as ok by the Norrsken pre-install visit last week but I forgot to mention it, but its a big tick in the box and would be a huge disappointment to C4 had we been on Grand Designs.) Current top issues and worries: Scaffolding (see above). Velux flashings - more on this next week. Scheduling future deliveries: insulation, battening, cladding, render boards, MVHR, UFH kit, ASHP, HW cylinder, PV panels… all due in the next six weeks.

The end of our last blog entry ended thus: Dare I add a what's next list 🙂 ? Well, here goes .... Plastering finished in the open plan area this coming week (by others) Remainder of stone cladding arrives and work begins to get the most inaccessible (high) parts put up before the scaffold gets taken away - this means cladding two 7m x 2m wide walls Plumbing pipework ready for ASHP installation Gabion basket and pad for ASHP to be installed on Mist coat and first coat on plaster (SWMBO is at the ready) Begin fitting upstairs UFH Front door being fitted (January) by others Take 3-4 days off for Xmas ASHP installation (January) by others, that will allow for hot water and the downstairs UFH to be available ... Fit a temporary bathroom ... Fit out utility room as temp kitchen ... ... and this is why - Move out of static van for the month of February (rules is rules!) and decamp to the house The title of the blog may be a little misleading - let me assure you that living in the house for a short while was great. We liked it so much we stayed for 5 weeks instead of the 4 that we had to, as it was warmer than the static van we would be going back to. If you recall the beginning of March was a little frigid, even down here in the South West (the van sits in a valley that collects the cool air very well and so is often 3 to 4 degrees (K and C) cooler than the surrounding area. We can recommend such a short stay in the house before getting stuck into the final push on the interior. It has definitely helped in providing an order of works for us in the coming months before we finally move in properly by highlighting things that may have been overlooked or forgotten in the general melee of all the other things that have been taking place over the previous 6 months. So, back to that list: I've commented on this in a post somewhere else, but in coloured text this is what happened Plastering finished in the open plan area this coming week (by others) This did happen in October Remainder of stone cladding arrives and work begins to get the most inaccessible (high) parts put up before the scaffold gets taken away - this means cladding two 7m x 2m wide walls This also got done before the scaffold was removed in early January - thankfully the temperatures and the rain played ball Plumbing pipework ready for ASHP installation Sorted Gabion basket and pad for ASHP to be installed on Filled and Pad poured Mist coat and first coat on plaster (SWMBO is at the ready) What a job - so much brighter Begin fitting upstairs UFH No, no, no, what were you thinking (but more to come on this below) Front door being fitted (January) by others All done and glad I did not have to lift it up the stairs Take 3-4 days off for Xmas OH, YES and very much enjoyed ASHP installation (January) by others, that will allow for hot water and the downstairs UFH to be available ... All done and worked very well, hence the extra weeks stay Fit a temporary bathroom ... The temporary shower was so good we were going to keep it but then changed design of the bathroom - one of the things from living in the house Fit out utility room as temp kitchen ... This is still in place and being used as part of our welfare unit on site Here are some pictures of the above work And so, we moved in just at the end of January and lived in the house for 5 weeks. During this time we experienced what the house was going to offer us, and, apart from the dust, we were only too happy to be able to stay an extra week when the cold snap came along at the beginning of March and we could delay our return to the static van (AKA tin box). This in spite of a temporary bathroom, kitchen and bedroom facilities. The cat, however, thought differently about the dust, but seemed generally happy with the quality of work While we were in the house during March work carried on with fitting the remaining plasterboard ready for the plasterers to come along in March. This was pretty much all we did - and we're very glad to only have a few more sheets plus some waterproof backerboard to fit. No pictures of this as it is really not that inspiring 🙂 Going into March we created YAL (Yet Another List) 🙂 We've all been there - the ever changing & expanding, rarely static or reducing list. Anyone got onto the LOL yet (the List Of Lists)? This included, in no particular order (that came later), Hassle the SH1T out of the window installation company to investigate and fix the leaks (three fixed windows and a sliding door) that came to light after we did the first lot of plastering the rest of the plastering, the rest of the mist coating and painting, more stone work, moving as much stuff into what we now call the attic (a very large room downstairs as we don't have a real attic) in order to clear all the other rooms, Install the UFH upstairs with plywood cover fit the bathroom, fit the kitchen, fit the utility and cloakroom, electric 2nd fix rainwater soakaways rainwater collection system backfilling concrete lego brick retaining wall Flooring Wood cladding Air tightness test (as I write this, I think "oh, sh1t, I must get that booked in") Fit internal doors Fit en suite Build MY garage A green roof system, because its on the planning application, and may be required for certificate of completion (unless someone can enlighten me as to how to avoid this, and be able to delay the installation) We are focusing on the internal works in order that we can move in, although not necessarily completed on the outside, sometime in the summer months. The first 3 or 4 items have progressed well: <----- This is the "attic" with a garage floor paint that remains a little tacky even 3 weeks later, but it'll eventually get covered with a "proper" floor at some point in the future Despite the window leaks not being fixed yet, we have ploughed on and had all the other plastering done. The window installation company knows the situation and is fully aware that we expect them to repair any further damage caused by the water ingress. (I'll not respond to any comments on this point for my own sanity 🙂 ) Flooring has been ordered, and 2nd fix electrics loosely scheduled in, as well as some of the backfilling, and prepping for the garage foundation. The UFH has started where the floor is available, and in order to be able to install the kitchen (the picture below is not where the kitchen will be - I don't appear to have photoed that - strange. Those who have been reading my blogs will recall from an earlier entry the terrible story of SWMBO's foot. Well today (Apr29) as I write this on a hotel terrace in Oxford she is recovering from her sixth operation, this time a toe fusion, that will take her out of the game for at least 6 weeks, 2 of which she has to spend with the offending appendage raised above her heart for 23 out of 24 hours every day. She won't even be able to climb the walls with frustration. So yours truly will likely be happy to be dispatched to the house each day to GO AND DO SOME WORK!! 🤣 Until next time, which I hope will be the "We've moved in" entry.

The trouble with allowing contingency is that when you don’t need it then it feels like time wasted. I guess it’s a bit of a drawing of breath really, much needed, but one’s natural bent (in my case anyway) is to automatically reach for my spade and start work - thinking not required. Oddly, we aren’t in a rush, in fact, the faster we go the quicker we run out of money unless our house sells, which in this market is looking unlikely. So taking time out is a good thing, it’s just that it feels like I should be making progress regardless. We had allocated this week to a week away, maybe going on a tour of timber cladding suppliers in our campervan (who needs airport security checks when you can be rained on in a muddy field) but other events kicked that into touch. So doing nothing this week should have felt ok. Twitch. In the end I did just two half days to pull up the wooden floorboards. We put them on Facebook as free to good home and after our standard allocation of time wasters a lovely chap turned up and worked hard with me to carefully lift them, remarkably preserving the tongues in the process. The lesson is that I should have bought a pallet breaker as then we’d have done it in one afternoon, instead of two. We did discover a few wasp nests under the floors, one mummified rodent, and an uphill poo pipe - that’ll be fun taking out…. But no other surprises, thankfully. The flow direction is left to right…. But with that and some of the internal doors finding new homes we are pleased with the amount of reuse we have achieved for bits of da bungalow (RIP). Anyway, I promised a demolition summary, so…. We got two quotes for demo companies to do it. One definitely wanted protective scaffolding (we are extremely close to the neighbours) and the other wasn’t clear on that. They were close in price and cheaper of the two was just over £11k and probably scaffolding (undefined). The cheaper one wanted a welfare unit too. The dearer one was willing to do a part demo - he pointed out that if I took the roof off then we wouldn’t need scaffolding and he’d knock £4k off. So despite agonising over which was better we ended up using neither. As part of getting quotes we were told we needed a demolition survey (AKA asbestos check). This cost £350 (zero VAT) and fortunately returned very pleasing results. Steve, our guardian angel, however, pointed out that a demolition company would do it quick but very dirty and with the big machines they’d use the probability of damage to neighbours was significant. Plus about 98% likelihood of really pissing lots of peeps off too. Not good. After some negotiations it was agreed he’d work with me on a day rate and the rest, as they say, is either history or a trauma that therapy will reduce in time, but either way we got da bungalow (RIP) down. To be fair, there remains a small amount of woodwork (floor joists) to pull up which will take me a short day, and there’s concrete to break up and cart away, but the ground worker includes that in his price (partly as there seems to be a local shortage of such stuff), and I’ve three catnic lintels to clean up and sell, but I call it done. Costs: Demolition survey: £350. Demolition notice: Can’t remember, it seems so long ago, but we don’t think there was a charge. Man days: Neighbour (to help get roof tiles off): 1 day at a cost of a lot of tiles (we were robbed!) Steve: 16 days. Expert guidance; lots of hard work; wicked sense of humour but oh, the singing! Me: 25 days - General dogsbodying and everything no one else wanted to do. Why did it always have to be me up the ladder? At least my singing is tuneful. I think. Total man days: 42. The answer to the meaning of life - how appropriate. Materials: Dust masks : ~£30 Gloves: ~£50 Makita reciprocating saw plus blades: £115. Heras fencing: £120 Hard hats and hi vis waistcoats: £22 Angle grinder discs: ~£10 Diesel for umpteen tip runs: £?? - but there was so many it looks like I’m going to be invited to the tip staff meetings from now on. Bath water, washing powder, lecky for washing machine, etc. £?? Total known materials ~£347 6 yard Plasterboard Skip: £396 inc VAT Stuff sold: Scrap (so far, there’s still some copper lurking around) -£292 Roof tiles -£320 Odds and sods sold on faceache -£200 Total sold: -£812 So, if I ignore the cost of my time, it comes out less than £4k. Rather pleased with that, and as the neighbours appear to be ok, it’s a good result all round.

More or less done these two rooms now, which after finishing the bathroom were basically just flooring and decorating, making a bit of furniture and then moving some other furniture I already had which was always destined for the dining room. I’ve got planned some bench seating for the wall side of the dining table to make it more space efficient, but not any time soon. I think this will be the first time, certainly in the last 10 years, where I have no outstanding ‘filler that just needs sanding down and painting’ kind of jobs, everywhere has skirting board which is painted… the little things in life. Everytime I walk in the bungalow and see the French dresser, it just melts my heart, knowing that my late wife would have loved to see it where it is now, we did buy it while she was still alive as they were stopping making it and was perfect for the look we were going for, managed to bag the dining table off eBay from the same range for around £200 I think brand new, and the chairs were ones we had from ikea which I upholstered and painted white to match. I know the plug sockets need covering, managed to locate them just slightly too high! The bookcase is to be backlit with an LED strip light (awaiting Black Friday being the right bugger I am!) and then will be filled with all my books, photo to follow at some point. The hallway has also been redecorated and the floor sanded and reoiled - out of anywhere this small passageway has suffered the most during the works bringing everything in and out, so was nice to get it back to 100% again

Very busy again this week - we were probably running at the maximum people we can have on site without contractors getting in each other’s way. On Thursday we had the carpenters, the insulation team, a roofer and the window installation team on site, and it’s not a very big site. Windows and doors The main highlight of the week was the arrival of the windows and external doors on Thursday together with a team of four (from Ukraine, though the windows were made in Estonia). The installation team led by Alex and Val were on-site by 7:30am and the windows arrived at 8:00. All the windows and doors went in smoothly over the next day and a half. Barring a factory error, we knew they were going to fit as Alex and Val had done a pre-installation site visit three weeks ago. There were no factory errors and everything fitted perfectly. There was no fuss about our difficulties with getting all the requested scaffold changes done (we didn’t) - the team worked around the shortcomings. For those interested, the windows are triple-glazed, alu-clad, inward opening tilt and turn, Norrsken P33A units; the doors are S305A alu-clad, composite panels doors and the 4 metre lift and slide, which is also triple-glazed, is Norrsken’s S305A door. The lift and slide door weighs in at 475kg and was moved by hand down a 500mm wide gap between our scaffold and our neighbour’s fence, then lifted manually into place. Here’s the sliding panel coming in first - it was stood to one side then fitted in once the frame and fixed panel were in place. I have to say, we remain very impressed by Norrsken and would recommend both the product and their installation subcontractors. Alex and Val suggested removing the front door, wrapping it and storing it safely, then cladding the frame in ply with a temporary door in place during the remainder of the build. Seemed a sensible suggestion and that is what we aim to do next week. Here's Dima, Alex and Val from the Norrsken window installation team: Having the windows and doors in is obviously a big step forward but we had progress on other fronts too: External wall battens and roof Our carpenters Alan and Chris made a start on (and indeed finished) fixing the 50 x 50mm external ventilation battens and have pretty much finished. (That’s messed up my wallplan - it’s not supposed to be done until next week!). They also boarded out the plant room walls with 18mm ply - it seems sensible given the amount of kit we need to fix to the walls in there. Just in time for the electricity supply, which SSE are coming next Tuesday to move into the plant room from the current external meter box. The slate edged, solar panel roof was finished this week too and now only needs the zinc mono-ridge capping/facia to be fitted (tomorrow) for the roofs to be complete. Insulation The team from Cornwall were back this week for what was supposed to be week two of two, to membrane and insulate the insides of the external walls and the underside of roof (below the blown cellulose layer). Progress has been slow for a number of reasons and the work remains a long way from complete. Still to do is the insulation on a couple of high walls and the whole of the roof. Partly, the job has proved a lot more involved than I or the contractors realised. Also they were delayed this week by other work over-running, sickness, and a funeral. On the one hand, given it’s a fixed price contract, we should not be too worried. But there is a potential impact on the schedule downstream if this work is not complete by about the 3rd week in September. And for the next 3 weeks our focus shifts to the floor: fixing the DPM, insulation and UFH pipes, then pouring the screed. So there is no access inside the house for the wall/roof insulation team until about 8th September. I can see this getting messy but for the moment we are trying to keep to the current plan which leads to the plastering starting on 6th October. It might be time to fire up Steve Jobs’ Reality Distortion Field (well, it worked for him... until it didn’t). Mistakes - I’ve made a few… Here’s a good one: We planned to fit an external blind to the master bedroom window, partly to keep the solar gain down and partly for blackout purposes. The idea was that the blind would be hidden in the timber cladding, out of sight when not in use. But despite poring over drawings and designs endlessly, I failed to spot that the roof canopy has a return beam that comes in 20mm above the window reveal - so there is no way we are going hide a blind cassette in there. I’m not actually sure what that beam is doing given there is no weight hanging off it and surely the roof trusses provide enough of a horizontal tie for the oak post? It’s probably too much effort to challenge or change now though and Mrs P. and I both feel we can live without an external blind there (and fortunately our Part O Overheating assessment did not take the external blind into account but listed it as an optional improvement). Other mistakes are either too minor, or too embarrassing to mention. Stress Yes, I can confirm that running a self-build is pretty stressful - on a par with the stress levels I used to experience running big IT programmes, I’d say. I won’t deny we’ve both had a few sleepless nights worrying about what’s happening tomorrow, or the day after, or next week... Still, every task done is one we (hopefully) no longer have to do. Dashboard: Contractor days on site this week: 26 (that’s our record week!) Contractor days on site since build start: 192 Budget: No change, running slightly over. Plan: On track to move in by Easter 2026. Issues and worries closed this week: The windows are in! Our scaffold issues haven’t held the window installation up (though the scaffold itself did fortunately hold the window installers up!) Current top issues and worries: Insulation - still lots to do, increasing potential for the dealys to impact our overall schedule. Scaffolding - still a worry, although we do now have a provisional date when the scaffolders plan to take the scaffold down, so fingers-crossed that holds. Scheduling future deliveries: insulation, battening, cladding, render boards, MVHR, UFH kit, ASHP, HW cylinder… all due in the next four weeks.

Forgive me holy Bill Dub, it has been many weeks since my last confession: and in that time I have uttered much profanity and at times, I have edged a small way towards despair. I used to think I was good at working alone, and I sort of am when I have confidence that I have a good idea of what I am doing. The other thing about working alone is that it’s dangerous - especially with net access and faceache marketplace. Guess who now has a fridge freezer in the site hut (vital, darlings) and a bargain paslode (see, we are self builders really!). Anyway, to start with the plan was to: Block up to damp all but a central path so we could get stuff through to the garden. Hire a digger. Dig out for the Hide (my hermitage at the bottom of the garden). Shutter up and get mesh in for the raft for the Hide. Hire a dumper. Use said dumper to ferry concrete from the road to the Hide (circa 75m) Reduce the ground level at the front of the site where the garage will be. Dig, instal and fill in the 2.4m3 soakaway, using the dumper to deposit the spoil at the front of the site for a grab. Get the spoil gone with a small (9 ton) grab. Enough crush delivered, spread and whackered ready for the over site. Mesh in for reinforced over site. Dumper in concrete. Add top layer of blocks (thermalite) and TA-DA!! we will be ready to start erecting the timber panels which were due for delivery 18th of July. Good plan. But as we know, no battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy. Due to the stupid levels of heat, and an old injury flaring up, my retired builder buddy Steve has not had that many days on site in the last 6 weeks. To start with we, meaning Steve, made good progress laying über heavy 140mm concrete blocks. In hindsight using them was a mistake. I was advised to use them rather than thermalite hi-strength blocks for all but the top layer to save money, only they didn’t as the weight really slowed us down. It also took it out of Steve. But blocks laid, we went on to the Hide, and we got most of it shuttered up and we laid the A393 steel mesh (2.4x4.8m bits of that are heavy!), so we were ready to concrete the raft so I hired the dumper. But then Steve had to have a few days off. So I pressed on as well as I could. I had no digger or dumper driving experience and frankly it showed in the glacial progress. When I started digging the soakaway hole, if it was being filmed an advisory would be needed at that point to say “those of a nervous disposition please look away now”. But I managed to dig the soakaway, put the topsoil aside, fill the dumper with load after load of subsoil, dump it by the road, install the crates wrapped in the odd fabric, and put the topsoil back. Exhausting, especially constantly jumping from one machine to the other, but rewarding despite there being no visual evidence after the event except on my phone. Our BCO has since approved our soakaway from the pics, which was a relief. I think it was around then that it became clear that handballing off the timber panels was going to be a nightmare. Panic. But one conversation with Andy the Boss and a telehandler was booked. Saved again. Still no Steve, so onto the crush as we can still run the dumper over the crush and the filled in soakaway to get the concrete to the Hide. 30 tons of crush sounds like a lot. However, when faced with a 9 ton load dumped near the front of the site ready for me to drag it onto the slab it feels like an awful lot more than a lot. So days were spent moving crush, some with the dumper to start with but that only worked for so long so the dumper became redundant. I did get a bit faster on the digger, eventually. Originally I had thought about using a line pump but was dissuaded. Apparently there was a fatality some years ago in our area and it appears amongst many in the trade concrete pumps are the bogeymen. But as there was no sign of Steve returning it was time for a replan - saved again by Andy the Boss. So the dumper was returned and the pump was booked and I carried on with more loads of crush. The second 9 ton load enabled me to create a sort of ramp so by switching to another local company who had a smaller vehicle I hoped to get 4 ton loads dumped direct where they were needed. It sort of worked. He reversed down the site and over my foundations and tipped onto what will be our lounge. V good. But then he had trouble getting back up the slope and at one point we were shovelling crush to unstick the lorry. Not good. After a few goes he got out, to my relief, but I was told that the remaining two deliveries would be tipped front of site. Damn. So I leapt on the digger, and used the hour between deliveries to redo the slope, whackering down the crush in places to help. When the lorry returned the driver got out, looked, nodded, jumped back in his cab and reversed all the way again. Result. Same for the final 4 tons too. Saved me hours of diggering. Peeps do seem to try even harder to help when one is building your own home. Such a small world though. In conversation with the driver it turns out he delivered the bulk of the aggregates to us during our build 34 years ago. Another day of grading and whackering and the digger was finally finished with. I sort of enjoyed it a bit but one can have way too much of a good thing. Steve returned for a couple of days to do the last blockwork needed for the over site pour, which got us into a position where we felt ok about going away for a few days to mark a big anniversary. Which we really enjoyed. On our return we learnt that Steve was grounded until further notice on medical advice. We had two days on our return to get the A142 mesh in - which was not enough time for me on my own - especially as I had to go get different spacers for the mesh as I’d cocked up my planning. Carrying the 2.4x4.8m sheets on my own was really weird. The weight wasn’t so bad but they waggled so much that it destabilised me so had to stop and ground them to reduce the risk of a fall. So Saturday morning (the pump was booked for Monday first thing) the cavalry arrived in the shape of J who had re-researched how to do the mesh/spacers/tying in. We flew along. Relief. On Monday the pour was uneventful. I learned that the fatality was due to a fall where a chap had his hard hat on backwards - nothing really to do with the boom that was there at the time but legends become self sustaining. A couple of days of tidying up and many, many phone calls then ensued - I needed the top layer of thermalites done otherwise the panels would sit soaking up sun and rain for days. Finding good brickies at short notice appeared a pipe dream. Not for the first time we were saved yet again by Andy the Boss who rustled up a two plus one brickie team, who, he assured me, would sort things out Friday afternoon as long as I got a mixer on site. Steve agreed to provide a mixer that he’d drop off Friday morning. All way too last minute. We had no choice but to trust and hope. On Thursday it was pointed out to me that a pile of crush on site could form a ramp which would allow the telehandler to get on the slab and place the panels in the best spot. Sweating profusely with my spade and rake was a good way to learn to appreciate a digger. But by the time I wobbled home site was ready. Friday morning started badly. Scooby - my dilapidated and beloved Skoda bought a year ago for the build - was booked for an MOT - my mindset was that it was more ‘the last rights’ than it was a routine check. So I loaded my pushbike on top, drove to site to drop off my tools only to find that without warning, the road was closed. Annoyed. Stressed. We’d had to give 12 weeks notice but apparently Anglian Water decided the day before despite it being planned in in advance. I dropped Scooby off at the garage with a lump in my throat and peddled like mad to get back to site. The water board guys agreed to let our delivery through, much to my relief. On site I wanted to recheck all my levels and move some stuff to be ready for both the delivery and the brickies. I’d just got that done when Andy the Boss turns up in the telehandler. The delivery lorry, however, took one look at the road closed sign and drove off somewhere random to give me a call. Several gritted teeth calls later and I managed to talk him in (why hasn’t anyone invented Satnav?) and we then did lorry and telehandler ballet, with a support act of irate drivers blaming me for the road closure - more gritted teeth, smiling from the nose down calming and redirection of a succession of stressed senior drivers. The first pile of panels fell off badly placed bearers, after which Andy the Boss followed my signals rather than those from the well meaning driver. (An hour of manual panel shuffling later revealed no damage - thankfully - but they ain’t easy to move on my own as some of the weigh OMFG kg). The rest of the offloading went ok. Deep breaths. Then Rolly the Chippy turned up to have a look at the panels we will be erecting the following week. He has a lovely calming way with him, just what I needed. The brickies turned up exactly on time and in a couple of hours on a burning hot Friday afternoon laid a phenomenal amount of blockwork beautifully. Their job was made harder by having to wiggle round the piles of panels but they just took it all in their stride. And to make matters even better the garage rang. Scooby had passed. I could have cried. So much had come together all at once. Next week we start putting panels up. Unbelievably fortunate. At times over the last few weeks the fatigue and self doubt had eaten away leaving me feeling that it didn’t matter how much one did right, how much one achieved, all that counted were one’s mistakes. J rightly reminds me that if it was easy everyone would do it, and talking things through together really does help enormously. Right now I feel ridiculously lucky. May that feeling continue.

(There’s way too much verbage here - sorry - but it reflects the deep spring clean my head needed. Will try to make time for a demolition summary in another post which would be far more useful for others). Each Monday morning, since we started demolition on the 17th of March, at stupid o’clock, I shuffle round the kitchen getting breakfast ready trying to assess how my body is doing, physically. Well, sort of. What actually happens is I slowly get my knees and my back working while bemoaning my stupidity and sheer arrogance in thinking I can do this, convinced that my I am starting the week more tired than the previous Monday. In some ways, almost certainly mentally rather than physically, having a break really takes it out of me. That Monday restart is just simply tough. I could tell myself that this should be the last week of demolition. That this is the last push of the hardest bit of the build. But inside I know that it’s getting towards the end of one phase of a long line of phases each of which I’ll be convinced at the time is the hardest one. But two hours later, at 07:35, I’m on site boiling a kettle waiting for Steve to arrive and my head is in gear and my fatigue is mostly forgotten. My 20 minute meditation, aka the drive to the site, has done its job. I do know I can do this. Anyway, I s’pose I should write a few words about da bungalow. Today, the kitchen gets it! All that’s left now is most of the kitchen walls, composition uncertain, and the dunny. The end of the kitchen nearest the road is, we thought, mostly masonry. The other end is now naked studwork. We left the studwork last week as we suspected it was needed to help the 6m long part timber frame kitchen wall stay up, which is surprising given that this studwork waggles like mad when nudged. So the first task was to take some of the weight off of the 6m wall. We didn’t dare hack the plaster off as we had elsewhere, leaving clean-ish metal mesh to peel off for recycling. Instead we peeled both plaster and mesh together, piling in a heap for me to process later. That worked to start with, but as we made our way along the wall it became clear that there was progressively less strength left in the studs. In the end the wall plate that ran through to the single skin masonry section gave just enough strength to allow us to dismantle the wall in a controlled manner. At one point we did stop and consider just pushing down the middle section, but that could have destabilised adjacent sections and also given the likely state of the soleplate it could have kicked out at the bottom. With next door’s wall only 1,030mm away that felt too close, even with heras fencing between. So we carried on slowly peeling and it became evident that in that middle section, all that remained intact was the two layers of render, topped by a wall plate. Truly scary. Another thing not to share with the neighbours. That done we could then take down the studwork. It was by then wobbly enough to push over safely onto the floor, and a couple of well placed cuts meant it would fall the right way, so push we did. Timber frames falling like that just don’t give that satisfying thump that masonry does, but it does still leave a lot of clearing up of timbers bristling with nail heads. The nail points are, at Steve’s insistence, all hammered over safe. In fact it’s been drummed into me so hard over the last 5 weeks that I now referring to it as ‘Steve-ing the nails’. The wood mountain grows and we learn that the wood man is maxed out and won’t be returning. Would have helped had he told me that last week but that’s life. Back to faceache it is (other social networks are available, but few are as annoying). As we work our way along the kitchen wall towards the road we find a mixture of stuff. Odd bits of plasterboard. Glass fibre insulation as well as the nasty snowy type stuff we’ve had in many other places. Pieces of wood and brick and block and tile just shoved in to repair holes in the render. Satisfied that the remaining masonry end walls (a ‘C’ shape) are safe and stable, we stop for the night. Next day we have rain first thing - the first on the project so far. So we bravely don our hats and coats and bugger off to Cafe Nero to drink coffee and plan. That turns out to be fabulously timely. I have picked up bits and pieces over the years and I’ve recently read tons about building stuff but putting it together in the right order takes Steve’s experience and caffeine. We’ve now got our slightly unusual foundation design, and that enables us to talk over who should do what, when and how. Annoyingly, Steve, with his wealth of experience and such a brilliant, caring and dutiful attitude, would be the perfect ground worker to safely and cost effectively pull our foundations. But he’s semi retired and he hasn’t got the right PI cover and all that. Our party wall agreements (which I was pleased to get as at one point it felt like it might cost us lots and lots of time, money and angst) and our warranty provider (thank you Protek) require fully insured, experienced professional contractors to be used for the foundations. So it isn’t a good idea for me and Steve to do them, even though we’d probably do it more carefully and with less noise and disruption than a ground crew. Sigh. It feels like the litigious nature of our world is killing common sense. In theory the party wall awards required specialist demolition contractors to be used. We did get two quotes, each of which were going to send in a nice big machine with bloody great jaws to eat da bungalow and cause mayhem, and in my view, likely do damage to our neighbours. But we managed to get site insurance (thank you for real this time, Protek) which specifically covered demolition. But if we weren’t bloody minded enough to test and challenge then we could easily have gone with it and ‘done it properly’. Bigger sigh. OK, rant over (for now). The rain stopped and it’s back to site, having lost a couple of hours. We keep telling ourselves that we are not in a rush and it’s not sensible to set targets so of course Steve and I rush to recover the time and hit target for the day - the rest of the kitchen. We first hit single skin red brick, then round the corner, a red brick outer skin and under the internal stud skin, some very old painted plaster from the original outhouse. From the broken earthenware pipes I’ve found digging near there I now believe that this bit was originally the privy. Nearest to the road, so as far from the living rooms as possible, with sections of lead water pipe built in, it conjures up an image of such a different way of life. We find a ‘T’ joint in the lead pipe, simply sweated together - a wonderful illustration of what 100 years have done in plumbing technology terms. By home time we have a short lower section of red brick wall and a twin skinned block section of wall left, both stable but still irritatingly short of the target we didn’t set ourselves. Next day even though we want to finish the kitchen first it’s better to get the dunny down whilst there are two of us. It’s the last chance for a collapse to damage next door so I need Steve on site to blame in case anything happens. The potty is carefully pulled out (will be reinstalled in the house as temporary welfare suite - i.e. a pan, a bucket and for special occasions, a loo roll). The metal lathe and plaster remains only on the inside so is dispatched fairly quickly. Some hammering from a very mobile (but safe) bandstand removes the mostly masonry wall with the window and another sellable catnic is discovered. We now have a trio of them to clean up and sell on faceache. Thence the last studwork to drop. Just like one end of the kitchen, a couple of thought through cuts and a push and it’s down. Just like that. We tidy up, and quickly knock down the last little bit of kitchen wall thats next to a neighbour, and we stand back and contemplate for a mo what isn’t there any more. Steve won’t be back for nearly two weeks, and I think he’s a bit disappointed that he leaves one little corner still standing but he points out that even I can’t cock up taking that down. Personally I think he underestimated my talent in that. So Maundy Thursday sees me bashing plaster off of metal mesh, to get it ready for recycling, and generally clearing up and loading up for a tip run. And something very odd happens. I’m working at the front of the site, nodding at passers by, smiling with my eyes at them (isn’t it weird how a smile gets through a dust mask), when a chap from over the road I’ve not met before comes over. Richard introduces himself and I brace for what I know is coming, as in fairness the dust and noise can’t have been nice for the street. And he hits me with it, and I am taken aback but I try not to show it. He tells me how well we have done and how little disruption, mess and bother there has been. He’s impressed. Wow. Chuffed. We have quite a chat (after all, he will be one of our neighbours and it beats hammering mesh with a spade) and he leaves me rather buoyed up to say the least. Then a chap from three doors down comes and has a chat, just for the neighbourliness of it, and it reinforces how nice a community our new pad will be in. And then (how do I ever get anything done?) Monica stops to say hello and tells me that our demolition ‘is a work of art’. She walks past regularly (I have said hi to her a good few times) and she’s been watching and she is hugely complimentary. If the god of fat, little bald fellas had carefully planned a reward at the end of the demo phase she couldn’t have done better. Tip run done, I then felt I could reward myself by taking down that last corner. Rather than do it top down I stripped out the inner skin (more bloody snowy insulation) and one side to leave a bit of wall to go down with a satisfying thump. Next door have a couple of young lads, the oldest being 9. It struck me that at that age I would have loved pushing a wall down - so a quick convo with his mum, a hastily fitted hard hat and oversize gloves and with mum filming we rock the wall till I can let him give the last push - his grin was a fitting final smile for da bungalow to provide. Bye bye bungalow.

So a quick recap - back in December 2023, what may be my last ever employer decided to ask me to leave. I had mixed feelings about this. I took several weeks to think about next steps and actually get around to writing a father of the bride speech which I'd been putting off. After the wedding in March (a great day and a great speech!) I started to look more seriously for a new job, but being the wrong side of 60 now, the IT industry is not a good place to be looking especially when so many other people have been let go as well. Coming up to the end of May, we sat down and took some tough decisions; we bought a static van on a site about 3 miles from the plot, I stopped looking for a new job, SWMBO did an internal job transfer, we rented out our current house (instead of our original plan to sell up) to three newly qualified doctors (our niece and two others on their first F1 rotations in our local hospital so that worked out well), and we spent 6 weeks decluttering, and moved down SE Cornwall (Kernow) at the end of July. In the last blog entry I ended with a list: Finish ventilation system Finish insulating the GWW Finish backfilling Electrics Floors Walls ASHP and HWC Kitchen Bathrooms The remaining plumbing Outer wall coverings This is how it looks today Finish ventilation system Finish insulating the GWW (Great West Wall) Finish backfilling (on the back burner) Electrics (first fix) Floors (now on the back burner) Walls (En suite partition walls to be done) ASHP and HWC (being done in January) Kitchen (planned for January or February) Bathrooms (temporary loo and basin installed, cold water only, temp bathroom planned for January) The remaining plumbing Outer wall coverings (rendering done, stone cladding starting next week) What I missed off the list, and has taken most of our time: Sound insulation (R35 rockwool and resilient bars) Plasterboarding So a few photos are required I think: MVHR unit in place (since removed as plant room walls have been put in and waiting to be plastered inside) Ventilation distribution boxes and pipes fitted: Plaster board arrived (in May): My cold water manifold has pipes attached for the first time (one now being used for the temporary toilet and basin), no picture of it but just to the right is the hot water equivalent: We powered up the sewage treatment plant for the first time (nearly 4 years after it was first installed!): We started plasterboarding, first a large room into which we moved all our stuff that was in storage so saving a hefty wedge per month on storage fees, and then the much larger and more complex open living area: We took some time off in early October and went sailing for a week, and when we got back some kind fellows had installed some scaffold (first time on this build), and in the following few weeks we had the renderers in thanks to the Kernow weather gods: Meanwhile back inside, we finished plasterboarding the large living area, and during this last week the plastering started (kitchen area first!). We set off a couple of insect smoke bombs as we had a cluster fly infestation and wanted rid before plastering started 🙂 : Dare I add a what's next list 🙂 ? Well, here goes .... Plastering finished in the open plan area this coming week (by others) Remainder of stone cladding arrives and work begins to get the most inaccessible (high) parts put up before the scaffold gets taken away - this means cladding two 7m x 2m wide walls Plumbing pipework ready for ASHP installation Gabion basket and pad for ASHP to be installed on Mist coat and first coat on plaster (SWMBO is at the ready) Begin fitting upstairs UFH Front door being fitted (January) by others Take 3-4 days off for Xmas ASHP installation (January) by others, that will allow for hot water and the downstairs UFH to be available ... Fit a temporary bathroom ... Fit out utility room as temp kitchen ... ... and this is why - Move out of static van for the month of February (rules is rules!) and decamp to the house Well, I'll let you know how it all goes 🙂

Weeks 18 to 23 So it’s been a while since the last update, but a couple of weeks ago the scaffolding came down and we can finally see our lovey slated roof and the solar. I am very happy with the roofers who worked so hard in the cold and the wind, as we are quite exposed. Anybody in the South West looking for a roofer I would be happy to recommend them. On the inside I have started with the insulation between the rafters. I am using Rockwool flexi slabs 140mm thick with an air gap above. On the outside I have put some insect mesh up already before the soffits are closed up, it’s attached to the ends of the rafters and will eventually be attached to the battens/cladding. As per previous blog the costs of parting with the builder and finding our own roofer and solar has proved to be good. Their respective quotes have been invoiced for the same amounts as the quotes, no extras or surprise costs. A saving of at least £12,000 against staying with the builder as his quote would have also incurred extras no doubt as he didn’t include Soffits on his build quote or roof quote, and he acknowledged they had not been included in any quote. Carried forward total £140,645 Scaffolding for roof £1440 Roofing. Felt and batten. Slate with Brazillian Graphite natural slate 500 x 250mm. Hook fix system to costal zone spec as per plan. Dry ridge system Con6 with Marley modern smooth grey ridge tiles. Two vent slates. Total supply and fix. £16786 Supply and fix softwood treated facia and bargeboards. Eave ventilation. Complete counter batten. £2111 Solar 15 x500W solar panels and GSE in roof trays. (Interior fit to be completed once windows are fitted) Supply and fit £4357 DPM for windows £316 1 Pallet of Rockwool 46m2 (Expect to order 2 more pallets to finish between rafters then PIR under rafters) £580 First electrical order (cable and back boxes, enough to make a start) £280 Windows all paid for £20869 A few incidentals from B&Q and Wickes etc Brings the total to date of £186,757

As promised, I spared you a Week 14 blog due to our visit to Yorkshire for a wedding and catch-up with old friends. It was lovely to do something unrelated to the house and it made us realise how all-consuming our build has become. We will definitely try to have some more non-house time through the rest of the build. That said, it’s back to the matter in hand: UFH Two weeks ago the guys were battling through laying the floor insulation in preparation for laying the UFH pipes, ahead of the screed pour which was booked for 3rd September. In the end it was a very close-run thing - the UFH pipes were ready by 13:30 and the screed arrived 10 minutes later. Too close for comfort really: Tight project scheduling is one thing but the stress of 11 cubic metres of unusable liquid screed potentially being dumped on the site was a very uncomfortable feeling. Screed Once started, the screed pour itself (by Williams Walls and Floors) seemed to go very smoothly (hah!) and it looks fantastic. We have had 65mm of Cemfloor Therm liquid screed laid. Still in stressed-out mode I woke up before 4:00am the next day worrying about what would happen if the pipes floated up or the screed was laid too high (they didn’t; it wasn’t). (I helpfully woke Mrs P. too just so that she could share the experience - she seemed not to appreciate it.) We left the house shut up for 24 hours as instructed by the screed man Rob Williams. On Friday morning I went over and opened up to find we had a sauna! All perfectly normal apparently, but the combination of heat from the screed setting reaction, the well-insulated relatively air-tight house and (presumably) 1000’s of gallons of water created an atmosphere that made Singapore seem like a desert. Sadly, I failed to get any photos of the clouds created as the windows were opened and the saturated ‘sauna’ atmosphere hit the September morning. By the afternoon, with all the windows and doors open the inside of the house seemed perfectly normal again. Seeing the screed poured in a few hours and reflecting on how fiddly all the underfloor insulation had been to lay, made me wish there was an option for a poured floor insulation - it would surely have been so much less effort and faster? Edit: There is apparently - https://www.rtu.co.uk/assets/documents/RTU-Ultrabead-Brochure.pdf. I have no idea if it is any good, what the pros and cons are etc, and it is too late for us but if we were doing another build (Mrs P: “We’re not!”), I’d certainly look into it. Render Just to make sure we weren’t missing an opportunity to get some outside work done while the focus was on the floor, we had booked our render team (Caesar Spray-rend and Plastering) to start boarding up the 50% or so of the external walls that are to be rendered (the other 50% will be vertically clad in Brimstone Ash). So on week 14 the STS construction boards were fixed to battens and last week the base coat was sprayed and smoothed out. It already looks a lot better just for some of the shiny breather membrane walls being covered up. We now have to wait a week before the top coat can be applied. We’re using EcoRend Thincoat for anyone who is interested. And finally… Marcus from our super groundworks team came in on Thursday to set all the stainless steel oak post brackets in concrete on top of their support pillars, and also to lay the smoothest, tidiest concrete slab you have ever seen to rest our ASHP on. …Which is just as well because the ASHP arrives on Monday! Dashboard: Contractor days on site this week: 22 Contractor days on site previous week: 16 Contractor days on site since build start: 249 Budget: Getting more challenging tbh - beginning to eat into the contingency - mainly costs I hadn't properly estimated. 😱 Plan: Still on track to move in by Easter 2026. Issues and worries closed this week: UFH pipes laid. Screed down! Current top issues and worries: Insulation - the additional ceiling insulation is still a worry - scheduled for w/c 15th September.

As mentioned last week, the zinc roofers asked if they could start a week early(!) and so, on Monday morning along they came - Brian and Tom from Wessex Metal Roofing in Salisbury. The first couple of days were mainly rolling out long zinc profile sections from the back of their van, then these proceeded to be fixed on to the 18mm ply sheeting that Alan the Chippie had laid the previous week. Three triple-glazed electric Veluxes arrived from the builders’ merchants (I forgot they were coming last week tbh) and while I spent ages looking on the (frankly rather terrible) Velux website for installation instructions and videos, Mrs P. pointed out to me the the CCTV seemed to show the guys had already fitted them in. “Oh, I’ll stop looking then.” The moment the roofers realised we have CCTV 😂 : By the end of the week most of the zinc panels have been fitted, plus some facias and gutters. I must admit that when we signed up for a standing seam zinc roof I assumed it would actually be ‘zinc’ - but it appears to be white plastic, with ‘zinc’ written on it - we've been done! Apparently it’s best to take off all the protective film at once otherwise it can start to age differently. For those interested, we’ve opted for VMZinc Plus in ‘Quartz’. We can’t wait to see it ‘undressed’. Although most of the zinc panels are now on, there is still a fair bit for Brian and Tom to do including some vertical clad sections on the far side of the house, plus facias, verges, and a ventilated ridge for the south-facing monopitch roof (on the left of the photos). Also they have the zinc gutters and downpipes to fit. They are expecting to finish the week after next. We’re also hoping that the work on south-facing roof, which is mainly 30 in-roof SolFit solar panels with a band of slate tiles around them, will start w/c 4th August. So with luck by the end of that week, all the roofing, gutters and downpipes will be done. While the roofing carries on through next week we also have South West Insulating (SWI) from Redruth on-site to start fitting the VCL/Airtightness membrane and the additional internal wall and roof insulation . The sequence for the next three weeks inside should be: Week 1 - South West Insulating - VCL to roof, then VCL + 50mm PIR + service cavity battens to walls. Week 2 - JW Insulation arrive from Essex to blow cellulose into the roof (a 254mm cavity formed by the Posi-joist open web rafters). Week 3 - SWI back to finish roof works (100m PIR + service cavity battens). Let’s see how well that masterplan survives the heat of battle 😬. And finally… On Friday, evening, after yet another huge tidy-up of the site by Mrs P., we hosted about 20 local friends for beers and a chance to look around the skeleton of our house. We had beautiful weather and of course everyone was very kind about the house and what we are doing. A lot of really great questions as well about the technical detail of the build - I was surprised how genuinely interested many people were and I suspect a few were thinking they might have a go at self-build themselves.

Well, sort of. Working physically hard is sooo emotionally easy compared to the frenetic whirlwind of strip foundation digging and filling. If that means that to you, I sound an emotional fruitbat then I commend your perceptivenes. I find it impossible to predict in advance the bits that will be most stressful. In the last two weeks I’ve had all but two days on my own on site, as Steve has been on his hols. So it’s background organisation tasks and planning for the most part. That means tip runs; getting blocks and bricks and sand and cement delivered for below damp; yet more manual moving of soil; generally tidying up; bumping out stupidly heavy 140mm concrete blocks; breaking up soft reds from the demolition for hardcore; and lots and lots of measuring and thinking. The two days Steve was there were spent setting out and getting some blocks laid. Setting out would have taken Steve on his own just a couple of hours. However, he had me to help him, so it took over half a day. I did learn a lot and because of concerns about preserving the precise sizes of the alleyways either side, and making sure the front face of the house is nicely co-planer with next door, and by the way still sitting properly on the foundations, and working out where to set block levels to, and my constant re measuring and questioning, I managed to burn a lot time more than just the morning. The levels thing was, in hindsight, quite comical. Not at the time however. We ran round the foundations with the laser level trying to spot the highest point, allowing for the 225mm steps. With the best will in the world foundations don’t end up perfectly level, so one finds the high spot, and all blockwork works to that level which saves stupid amounts of block cutting - adding more pug (perhaps a Suffolk word for mortar) is a lot easier than taking some off of a block. But with a laser level a higher number means a lower level, and one of the two of us just kept getting confused by that. I’ll let you guess which one. Confusion is, however, contagious it seems, as eventually I asked enough silly questions to get Steve confused too. It’s nice that I do have something to contribute to the process. Steve’s relief when he finally could get on with some blockwork was palpable. To his credit he must have been sorely tempted to insert the laser level staff somewhere painful, but he kept his patience, bless him. So we didn’t get that many blocks laid but we did enough to be ready for the windframe for the back of the house. Getting that fitted was fun. 200kg is not much by steel standards but my goodness it took some grunt. Because of the slope of the site instead of the legs (columns) being just over 2.5m long they were 3.5m long. The crew were a man short but I knew that when I asked them to come fit it so I gleefully volunteered to help. They were a brilliant pair - it was a constant stream of jokes and leg pulls and laughter. The only exception was getting each leg upright - that was pure grunt work - done nearly silently apart from grunts and barked orders. But the three of us got the first leg vertical. They then told me to ‘keep ‘old of that’ which turned out to be hard work, as keeping a near 12’ length of 1’ wide steel still on a blustery day wasn’t trivial. I also found it hard to believe that some goo squirted from a mastic gun would hold it up. I’ve read about but never seen a chemical anchor. Amazing. The other leg done we attached both legs to the previously lifted beam (with a genie lift - bloody handy that is) - and 16 bolts later we had a windframe. After weeks of a flat site it looks way too big, but after measuring many times I can now confidently confirm that I hope it’s right. Fingers crossed. The other thing this week is that the costs for the strip foundations are now all in, and we are quietly pleased. We were offered a fixed price of £16.5k, and lord knows what the extras would have really totalled as we did go deeper and use more concrete in many places due to soft ground. Instead, overall on day rate they cost us: Digger hire and diesel: £800 Labour (Steve and Kev the Dig) £4,400 Ply (some second hand) and cutting discs £700 47m3 of concrete £5,200. Waiting time for concrete lorry £74 Rebar (for steps and joins in foundations) £100 Spoil away £1,600 Total just under £13k. Happy days. It’s amazing what one doesn’t know and can’t imagine. When ordering concrete from the company we used (they only do 8m3 wagons) ordering 1+ means they send a full lorry then wait for us to tell them how much to send in the second lorry which turns up half an hour or so later. Ordering 2+ means two full wagons turn up at once - yikes! Ours site is just too small for that - hence the charge for waiting time. Anyway, next week Steve is back Wednesday so it’s blockwork to damp and over site over the next few weeks. And after a year of not doing anything towards my man cave at the bottom of the garden suddenly now I need to progress that too. It’s a nice problem to have.

Weeks 24 to 27 Windows Installation Choosing window style and supplier has been one of the hardest decisions. We finally decided on Aluclad wooden windows from Norrsken. It’s been a long journey and Norrsken have been with me on that journey since December 2022 to installation end of February 2025. A big thank you to Nick at the window company for sticking with me on my numerous window quotes, that took over 2 years to finalise. Due to my architect not thinking ahead how Part O would effect the design, the windows had quite a few changes and quotations from a few companies. In summary Part O (Overheating) was first published in December 2021, we didn’t submit plans until May 2022, we passed planning in October 2022. Then we realised that the original design wouldn’t pass Part O that’s when I started understanding that in my opinion the architect should have been planning ahead and designing with Part O in mind. We had an overhang in the design but not large enough to qualify as shading for Part O calculations. I spoke to a local company who could do the Dynamic modelling route to pass Part O but they had a backlog of customers who like me needed help to pass Part O some of which we’re probably going to end up spending thousands on solar glazing and various other mitigating factors. The company suggested I look at the simplified version first which basically is a spreadsheet on which you enter your room sizes, window sizes and orientation of the building. Although our windows were not too big the daytime overheating looked like it could be managed by tweaking window sizes a bit but nighttime bedroom overheating was more of a problem because we are a bungalow and the windows needed to open for ventilation but also be secure overnight against intruders whilst we slept, Part O offers some guidance and I found future homes https://www.futurehomes.org.uk/library#Guidancetoolsandtemplates particularly helpful. In the end we settled on replacing 4 windows with 6 large Velux windows that allow for more air flow and by changing some windows to tilt and turn inwards this allows the bedroom windows to be safely partially open in the tilt position whilst still being secure at night. We had to go back through planning for the window changes but the architect did the amendments free of charge and the revised plans were passed in May 2023. I’m happy with the end outcome. I still have lovely big picture windows allowing viewing far into the distance and without any glazing bars. The opening inwards will allow for easy cleaning, but cleaning is a long way off. The Velux windows free up room for kitchen wall units where we previously planed to have non opening windows. A Velux in the pantry as well as freeing up wall space for shelves lets more light in and probably will result in less switching a light on and off. The house is designed for us in that our en-suite is larger than the bathroom shared by the two guest bedrooms and by changing that window to a Velux it allows for a shower area that doesn’t have a window sill almost in it. I started researching windows quite early on because I wanted to make the most of the views but also I expected it to take a while actually getting round to see different companies. We moved to Cornwall to start a new business, have a field for our Greyhound to run in and be a bit warmer and sunnier than Manchester. I love living in Cornwall but it does have its downsides in that we live one and a half hours away from a motorway, our local home building shows are smaller than one hall of Birmingham NEC. We visited some of the local window suppliers but we mostly got to see one small window or a cut away demo window for each supplier and they didn’t offer a great deal in choice, mostly double glazed not triple glazed samples. If we went away for the weekend I would try to find a larger showroom we could stop at on the way, luckily for us Norrsken has one showroom in the UK near Bournemouth that we stopped at on the way to The Isle of White. We decided to get the window openings measured by the supplier, it cost approximately £800 for this but it was worth it. I had some questions about window opening sizes during the build before the concrete pour and Nick helped answering all my little questions, he knew how the window sizes had been changed to pass Part O. Even though the person sent out to measure ended up having a hour and half travel delay he still spent over 3 hours measuring and discussing the window location within the ICF opening and we marked on where I was to put the EPDM so it would be under the window and coming up the inside at the window board. The ICF is capable of load bearing the windows and fastening them back to the concrete core but the windows were going to be big and heavy (they come fully glazed) so we decided to use stokbord at the base of each window as our ICF was still soft enough that you could make an indent with just your finger (much like PIR) so when the weight of the window was resting on a shim it could push the shim into the ICF and general handling during installation could cause indents in the ICF. We used 3mm stocbord under the windows and 12mm under the sliding door. The 3 windows that look down the field were levelled and measured using a laser to ensure they would be the same height from the floor, and again a laser was used at installation. On installation day the fitters arrived at about 8am and the windows arrived shortly after, it was a great feeling that we were finally going to be watertight and to see our chosen windows. The installation team were all great you could tell they all had a role during the installation, Illbruck FM330 airtight foam was used and Silka EBT+ sealant. I am now taping the windows inside and out using Pro Clima tapes. We purchased 10 windows (4 non opening, 6 Tilt and Turn) and a sliding door. Windows P33A, 10 windows average uW.80 Sliding door S319A 2m wide uW 0.76 Aluminium clad, Marine Finish, Trip,e glazed. External colour 7030 Stone Grey Matt Internal white stain Breakdown of window costs Windows £11,500 Sliding door £3500 Sills and trims £740 Installation £2600 Stocbord £500 Survey £750 Delivery by small HIAB £1320 Total to date £207,626 I have been continuing the installation of the Rockwool in between the rafters and building the gabion wall when the weather is nice. I researched and purchased a plasterboard lifter that will reach 16ft and a table saw for the insulation under the rafters. The renderer is booked in for May, colours chosen. The wood cladding is ordered and ready for final payment so hopefully the next blog will cover the cladding.

Once again it's been much longer than it should have been since I last posted with my last entry being July, wow where has that time gone. Back then we were building the walls for phase 1 and installing the window and door lintels. Back then it was warm, unlike now and building could be done in shorts and T shirts Once these walls were built then it was time to think about a roof, even though it is going to be a temporary one for now as the whole house will have the final roof at the same time. This part of the conversion is designed to look like an extension as it did on the original. So, the South wall is higher and this 'hooks' on to it. We also have on-site building inspectors checking out their new home Then we had to start getting the rafters in situ, allowing for the overhang on the sides and end. The roof 'ladder' was built from the wood that was used to line the windows whilst building. These did take a long time as the roof is 4 degrees so slightly sloped so each block of both cavities times 2 had to be cut to the exact size required The weather wasn't always kind, but we did have some visitors to check out what was happening. Eventually, it was finished with the temp roof on. Windows covered for now as this will become our storage shed for a while During this time, we also had to move the stables. From this, already part demolished, not sure where the original pictures have gone. To this to this, luckily moved by a local farmer. Not sure when the horses will have them back though. Next is to start on the East side of the main part of the build. Originally our SE said that we had to have 2.4m deep underpinning foundations. But, our BCO had on on-side meeting with the SE as he felt this was over the top. We dug some example trenches to show what the soil was. He agreed with the help of the dog that it really is sand in this area. We do have some clay further on where we can have stepped foundations But he has agreed that we can have 750mm where it's sand so we are doing phase 2 which will be the office, master, bathrooms and 2 bedrooms. It will be the plant, another bedroom, family room and pantry which need deeper foundations. We have started digging out for the 2nd phase so will post my next update in due course. Thanks for looking and good luck with your builds

A relatively quiet week this week - the lull before the storm (hopefully not literally!) The scaffolders arrived to put up a single-lift all around the exterior on Thursday and Friday (and Saturday morning as it turned out). I say single-lift but there were due to be a couple of hop-ups for the gables on the south-facing roof. However, at one end the gable is over a canopy roof which means the first lift is 2m away from where the gable will be. We've left that one off for now - I'm hoping the timber frame company (Turners) can work off the scaffold tower at that end, or I will get the scaffolders back and put in what the frame erectors would like (we may need a sky-hook to hang it off though). The site is looking spick and span at the moment; the groundworkers were really tidy, the weather has no doubt helped (dust is easier to sweep up than mud), and Mrs P. has done some sterling work this weekend tidying up the few bits of spare timber, pallets, bulk bags etc, left by the scaffolders. As they were packing up one of the scaffolders saw an empty bag (which they had brought) and asked "Is this rubbish?", to which I replied "Oh yes, thanks", thinking he was going to take it away, but no, he just threw an empty Red Bull can in it 🤷‍♂️. Scaffolders truly are a breed apart. The house has proved to be too wide for the CCTV camera, so we moved the camera back. Now we have the workshop roof in the way - grrr! Looking at the project finances, frighteningly we have already spent over 1/3rd of the budget 😱. Major spend so far has been on design and planning, the timber frame and windows are both paid for, a good slug of the groundworks costs has also been paid with an invoice for the balance expected soon. This week I ordered and paid for the MVHR kit (based around a Zehnder Q350) and the ASHP and cylinder (Panasonic L series 7kW + 300l cylinder). I ordered the latter through Air2Heat who provide an MCS umbrella service (Paul Thorney - really helpful) so we should get back £7.5k via the BUS grant scheme, which would leave the heat pump and cylinder costing a net £1,200 plus installation costs. Anyway, we're currently running about £500 over budget (excluding contingency) with some opportunities for future savings and a fair few areas of potential overspend. Time for Benpointer's three Laws of Budget Management: If you go over budget, that's bad management. If you come in under budget, that's poor estimating. If you come in bang on budget, you've almost certainly committed both 1. and 2. Next week is going to be very exciting - I hope in a good way. Tomorrow (Monday) our timber frame arrives from Turner Timber Frames, with a team to erect it. The weather forecast is good, so fingers-crossed the frame fits the footings and it all goes up smoothly 🤞.

Despite the yellow weather warning we luckily had the coastal wind pushing it away, most of it fell on Tuesday but only 6mm The trench foundations are excavated and inspected. Then the concrete poured, and the first blocks laid followed by dolly blocks and internal supporting wall starter blocks Total man days of labour for week 2 is 13

So I spent 3 days with a 1.5 tonne excavator and a pecker breaking up the huge amount of concrete slab. Thankfully, it wasn't reinforced and all I can say is that I didn't envy the neighbours. I am just finishing off pulling up the broken slab with a 3 tonne machine and getting the concrete collected with a grab lorry. There is about 5-6 loads to collect and that is going to cost me about £700. I could have hired a concrete crusher, but I calculated that to hire a crusher, 5 tonne excavator would have exceeded this cost. I also do not have any water on site for the dust suppression, and there was a lot of large lumps, that would have not fitted into the crusher without having to broken up smaller.

The roof rafters are being installed with the openings for the roof windows. LABC visits for the second time, there have been a few photos sent as well, they inspect the roof, anchors and fastenings etc. The internal walls are built up around the steel goal posts. Not as many hours on site this week were one man down, its half term here. I started a Gabion wall, filling it with rubbish stone and facing the front with nice stone from around the plot, it just separates off the garden from the vehicle parking area, holding back about 400mm depth of soil. You can see on the photo the remaining post of the old wooden fence which was behind a skip now removed. Total man days of labour for week 8 is 20 days.

On Monday the internal structural walls are up to the top of the ICF walls and are tied in to the ICF walls. The windows and doorways have extra bracing ready for the pour. Nobody on site on Tuesday it rains all day and no more prep is needed before the pour. Wednesday starts with the last minute checks ready for the pour. The concrete pump arrives on site at 12pm it takes 30 minutes to set up before the first concrete pours out. We have 4 builders onsite plus the concrete pump operator. The concrete is poured into the ICF on all four walls in stages twice round and its up-to window cill height, the ICF cills are pushed into the wet concrete and the wood boards replaced so that the pour can continue higher. A poker is used to vibrate the concrete to ensure the concrete fills the ICF without any voids. At 4pm the pour is finished and the cleanup can start. The pump driver tests out our hammer head turn which was required by BC as we are so far from the road and Fire Engines are not allowed to reverse more than 20m. I think this proves our access works and it’s all down to the driver of the vehicles, the pump driver is great if only all delivery drivers are like this. The gables will be completed later so the concrete has rebar inserted, the other two walls are trowelled level. By the end of the week one gable is braced and poured. Total man days of labour week 6 is 17 days.

Another beautiful week in Cornwall only 7mm of rain on the Sunday The week starts with laying the soil pipes then it was sand, hardcore, burying the soil pipes, laying the radon barrier, mesh and more concrete for the slab leaving a lovely surface to start the ICF walls next week. And the field was cut and baled, not as much as a normal September cut due to us moving our spoil down to the far field and tramping the grass down and making a very very muddy gateway between our two fields. Nether the less it was 10 bales for our friendly farmer Rob. Total man days of labour week 3 is 9 man days Cost to date Brought forward from blog Building Regs, Part O and SAP £14625 Refund from Architect £300 Fee to LABC for inspections £600 Foundations Weeks 1 to 3 £30,000 Total to date £44925

Summer nearly over?!! That was quick! Weather has been brilliant though! So where are we 2 months on? Here we go: Bathrooms are tiled and ready for plumbing the fixtures in. The plumber returned briefly and I now have a working toilet! Portaloo returned! Just no running water, well kinda! I got the water connected to the mains but it's not plumbed upstairs or anywhere yet. I put a speedfit valve on the 25mm mpde mains coming into the house so I can at least use it to fill buckets, barrels etc and cart it upstairs to flush the loo!! I got an offer of an upgraded Rendon MVHR unit but didn't realize it was as humungous as it was! Took a bit of work, a ramp and air bags to get it mostly into position. They didn't include the suspension bracket so that's on the way and will let me properly install it so we have access to both condensate drains at the bottom. There's a toilet and wash basin going into this room shortly..... I've been prepping for the kitchen install next - fully painting that end of the open plan room and marking studs, printing photos of cable locations and prepping the floor: I'm gluing down the bamboo floor shown. Should finish this tomorrow. I've some ratchet straps in place to keep the boards tightened overnight. The glue is really tacky - going through wipes and gloves at a fast rate!! The kitchen units were just delivered. I'm going with a green door and gold handles to complement the yellow bamboo floor and stone countertops/backsplash. I had to pour a concrete base for the outdoor air to air unit which looks after space heating. There are 4 indoor units connected to it - one is shown above in the bedroom alongside the kitchen presses! I've installed a bottle gulley in the center of the concrete pad to drain away any condensate. The headers can do heating or cooling and each have a remote. There's an app. The only thing is the remote doesn't show the current temp in the room, just the target temp you set. Also the units can do heating OR cooling, so if your significant other likes it at 26oC and you like it more around 19oC whoever sets it first wins, all others have to wait until the unit that's heating or cooling turns off before it can kick in - i.e. ambient 20oC , partner sets 26oC, you set 19oC later, your unit does nothing until unit in heating mode finishes, so yours can go into cooling mode. Makes sense, you just hide all batteries in the remotes except yours! Irish Water connected me up, a lot of bods turned up but they were finished at 3:30pm and connected me successfully. I was about to go to buy a water key but the one they installed has a plastic handle you turn so you don't need one! I had a chance to test it the next day but ran extra pipe outdoors just in case, glad I did. The valve I had bought wasn't a 90 degree open / close one, it requires ratcheting down to fully shut so it would have caused some damage until I realised that! Was very handy for mixing 8 bags of ready mix cement though! They come back to install a water meter later, nice of them! We don't get charged currently but it's a nasty topic and caused a lot of marches to get the Government to back down. Now we've a very expensive quango and no water fees! Great, huh?! (ROI) The Aquabox for the mains water arrived so I've been shuttling that around the ground floor until it's installed. That pumps water around the whole house and will be located downstairs in the utility room alongside the heat pump hot water cylinder I'm getting shortly (separate space heating/cooling & hot water systems). No injuries to report - Pilates is really helping the back. Still waiting on mains electrical, no date yet, 16 weeks is end September. Had a survey done a fortnight ago but nothing since. Hope to finally move in by November as the site insurance is up and 2 years in place, they may be reluctant to extend so I'm prioritizing items that must be finished before then vs ones that I can do later. Time is going by fast as as hard as I work there's always more that enough to do each evening and weekend. I've a weeks hols at the start of September so catch up and have a few days left I might take later that month but we'll see. Best of luck to everyone else with their projects. I don't know how to all do it!!! Or did it!! Onwards and upwards!

Great progress by the groundworks team in sweltering conditions this week - laying concrete blocks in the sun when it’s 30deg C and 80% humidity can’t be any fun at all. Despite the heat, by the end of the week our foundation walls are in and ready for the block and beam floor this coming week. We can really see the house take shape now, although quite a few of the foundation walls are just there to support floor beams and won’t appear as internal walls above the floor. As expected, it all looks a bit too small at this stage. It always seems to be the case that the foundations make the rooms look small. They’re definitely the right size on paper, so I’m sure it’s an optical illusion at this stage (hopefully!) The foul and rainwater drains are also now in place. Our Building Inspector ideally wanted the SVP to come out through the roof above the bathroom but since that roof is covered with Solfit PV panels (https://solfit.co.uk/domestic-solar-panels/) that can’t be penetrated, we eventually agree to put the SVP up the outside of the north facing wall. This is the wall that isn’t really going to be seen from the entrance, front parking areas or garden and we’d really prefer not to penetrate the roof with a soil vent if possible. So, everyone’s happy. The ‘spaghetti’ in the bottom left corner is where all of our external service ducts come into the plant room. 17 ducts in total, including two spare at present, (I may have over-catered): Power to ASHP Power to garden Water pipe to garden Water pipe to workshop Power to workshop Lighting circuit - switched external lights Data to workshop Live power supply in (SSE - single phase) Fibre in (Openreach) Water mains in (Wessex Water) Power to sewage treatment plant PV panel in PV panel in Power to EV charger Data for CCTV Spare 50mm duct (to workshop) Spare 50mm duct (to workshop)

Our groundworkers arrived on site as promised on the Tuesday after Spring Bank Holiday. Raining all day of course! Though tbf it’s fairly light rain. They made a good start removing a concrete slab left over from a long-demolished, clearing the oversight and creating a temporary spoil dump site on the paddock. Three issues this week: An unexpected armoured cable is discovered on day two - our groundworker Marcus is unsurprisingly cautious. Quick call to our electrician Nick. Nick thinks it’s probably the a redundant feed from the neighbouring house to what was their workshop - should be fine. He comes to inspect it and concludes it is dead. We explain that the groundworkers have asked him to cut it if it’s safe to do so. “You want me to cut it?” he asks, slightly incredulously. Yep. Nick angle-grinds through the cable - cable is dead, electrician is still alive - problem sorted. Second issue: We found out on Thursday that the Building Inspector unexpectedly wants a “Structural engineer to design depth of foundation due to clay soil and the nearby oak tree”. Both our architect and groundworker expected that the BI would be happy to agree the foundation depths based on the NHBC tables. But no, the BI is no longer allowed to do that he says. So, we are in a hole so to speak but just not sure how deep a hole... A rapid scrabble to find a SE who is able to help and help quickly, as we want to dig the trenches next week. On Thursday we got hold of a chap we used for another project 15 years ago - he thinks he could help in short order. We await a result. Third issue: We had hoped to keep the existing timber double garage for the duration of the build, for storage through the build. But the groundworkers are worried about access and off-loading our beams for our B&B floor. The timber frame and window companies also think the space is very tight. I conclude the garage will have to come down - now. It was a mistake on my part to try to keep it; we could have dismantled it carefully during the ‘phoney war’ ahead of construction proper. Annoying. Fortunately our PP includes demolition of this garage so, we are fine on that front. Our chippie knows someone who may want it and will dismantle and remove for nowt at their expense, hopefully in the next two weeks. Failing that the groundworkers will knock it down with a digger, but it would be a shame not to recycle it. Edit: The SE has come back with the foundation calculations over the weekend (what a hero!) so we should be all sustems go for digging the foundations next week. Hurrah! Pre-start "One day my son, all this will be yours" Making a start. In the rain obvs: End of week 1. Happy with that!

Weeks 35 to 39 The build is close to our existing working barn and home, close enough that as a Cow Shed power and water was fed from the working barn. We have renewed the power cable and water connection so that the new build with its 7.5 kwp of solar can power the working barn. With the solar on the roof the plant room became my priority to get the CU and wiring ready for the solar installation to continue. This meant us plaster boarding in the plant room, a new plaster board lifter up to 16ft for some rooms, and me watching loads of U-Tube and learning a new skill of paper taping and jointing, drylining. We have knocked old plaster off solid brick walls and put up a small amount of square edged plasterboard for a plasterer back in Manchester but never used tapered edge plasterboard or had to think which way round is best to hang it on stud walls and around windows. To make things a little easier for a first timer I used ready mixed Knauf Fill n Finish, this sanded easily and I didn’t have to waste time thinking about the consistency of the mix. I really enjoyed the process, I wasn’t quick, I wasn’t perfect, but the end result is very good. I did get a few blisters in my first ceiling joints, but I know why and I solved it and overall I quite impressed David with my new skill, so much that later on I can do other more important rooms. The main problem I had in the plant room was its size, a small room with a high ceiling in parts, the tall step ladders wouldn’t fully open width ways and then when they did open fully I was not close enough to the wall/corner. Just moving the ladders around was muscle building but our smaller ladders were not quite tall enough. Once I had painted the walls I handed the room over to David to do the wiring. Back in Manchester we have an Industrial and Commercial Electrical business and David was the NICEIC qualified supervisor for the business, he has now handed that role over to his younger brother but still has the knowledge (once checked the new regs) and skill to get the plant room wired ready for the solar to be finished. That meant he had to stop cladding and come inside the build so I went outside to get ready for the renderers who were coming to render the North wall. Due to the change in ground levels around the building, as it’s situated between the field and the concrete farm courtyard, I wanted to protect the walls with stick on waterproofing, that the renderers batten over. There are so many variants out there of sick on or paint on waterproofing membrane but not many that say they have no solvents or can be used on ICF, most of the small print says block or concrete. I chose Newton Hydrobond SA as it acknowledges its use in ICF builds, but the warranty is provided by the waterproofer ie me in this case. Once the soil is level with the build there will be a gap between the ground level and the render I hope to stick on the roofing slate I have saved possibly with tile adhesive. The walls currently being clad will also eventually be waterproofed below the cladding but I didn’t want the stick on membrane getting damaged and the ICF needed protecting from the sun so as a temporary measure for the ICF walls and a permanent solution on the concrete dolly block, in the area we park the cars I have painted on a bitumen membrane. David will love that I am now sharing my ‘kitchen utensil methods’ with you all, for the sticky black paint I used a washing up dish brush (also good for patio grout, and bathrooms), Its stiff bristles worked the paint in well and long handle kept me relatively paint free and I can also recommend a spaghetti measure that has various size holes and spoon end for stirring paint but his favourite one was me tiling the bathroom and trying to get the grout up between some wood cladding and a tile, a wooden spoon was used, in my defence I was very tired. So now I’m back collecting stone from our excavation piles to fill the gabions and next week when the weather is not supposed to be as sunny I shall be inside continuing with the insulation I’m on my 3rd pallet of Rockwool and soon will have completed two thirds of the roof, next is PIR insulation. A bread knife is great for this as I have to cut various shapes out of the insulation for the eaves, steel ridge beam and the join of the flat ceiling collars to the sloped ceiling rafters. Before the windows were fitted the openings were covered in roofing membrane so this was a cold job and the daylight hours limited my progress, now I’m extremely hot in the loft wearing a polo shirt as protection against the itchy insulation. I’m nearly done for now as I can’t reach any higher in the vaulted lounge/kitchen until we insulate and screed the floor then I should get another row completed before handing the job over for the last bit of insulation and the plastering from off a scaffold tower. May 2025 front cladding completed and March 2023 before we knocked down.

This blog post is out of order, I’ve lots of other content yet to post, but thought it important to capture in the moment. I’ve spent the last few days preparing my en-suite floor for tiling. cut out the 22mm p5 chipboard ready for the shower former. plumb the 40mm shower waste to a 50mm solvent weld pipe, which was a smaller size than the 40mm solvent weld adapter I had. Turns out compression fittings are able to go from 40mm solvent weld (42mm OD) to 40mm OD shower waste. add batten and 18mm plywood level with the post joists, prime chipboard with SBR. Lay 12mm tile backerboard (could have got away with 10mm, but went 12mm to match the walls, less waste) on tile adhesive, and screwed at 300 centres. Install 22mm lussostone former on top of the ply, on a bed of tile adhesive. Use a CT1 like mastic for between the joints for waterproofing. Lay electric UFH at 100mm centres, just to take the chill off the tiles, not intended as a means to heat the space. set packers to level, ready for self leveller. Foam gaps. Pour flexible fibre self leveller, trowel to packers, spike roller. (Note, the fibres really gnarl up the roller, need tclean between buckets) Grout flout tile adhesive over the former to the built in falls. Self leveller would ruin this. Dry lay marble tiles and cut to falls. I was using an electroplated marble blade in my grinder, meant to reduce chipping, but went blunt real quick and ended up ruining a couple tiles, switched to a turbo blade that was actually pretty good. In the future i wouldn’t use the electroplated blade. Tonight I’ve just started to tile and really struggled. Because I self levelled the room and not the tray, I built up 7mm up to the edge of the former, but only spread 2mm adhesive over the top wires in the former. That leaves a 5mm deficit, that needs to be made up over the whole former whilst tiling. That’s a lot of adhesive if you add in 3mm adhesive bed going over the rest of the room. I laid 3/4 of the former, but I ripped 2/4 back up again, I was using rapid set adhesive and i wasn’t able to get it to a standard I was happy with, joints out of line, excessive lippage. if I were to do it again (I’ve got 2 more formers to do), i’d sacrifice a dead level room, to reduce build up at the edge of the former. The former is designed with built in falls, and by building up, I’ve destroyed this. I could have also gone 2-3mm lower with the self leveller and still achieved a level floor, given 3mm adhesive would still be applied over the top of the bare UFH in places. what a nightmare!

Weeks 27 to 34 Cladding After securing our planning permission I arranged for a few samples of wood cladding from various trees and from a few different suppliers. I propped them up in the sun and watched for months as they changed colour and silvered off. We made a short list of which we liked, something with a definite grain pattern so not Poplar, not too knotty so not pine, thermally modified wood as it is less prone to shrink and swell and as it’s no longer sappy less interesting to insects and lighter for handling. We also wanted tongue and groove with secret fixings through the tongue and minimal fixings elsewhere if necessary, this often varies by supplier some say screw, some nail very few actually say nail gun as it can damage the brittle wood. We decided Ash was our favourite and got a few quotes from different suppliers, unfortunately when the time came to order prices had increased and we had to rethink as delivery became a big problem. We wanted it delivered by Hi-ab but most said the charge for hi-ab to us would be quite expensive or that they didn’t offer that service or it would be delivered to a hub then onto us and they couldn’t guarantee against damages. Read the delivery small print if you are thinking of having wood cladding. As it’s just me and my husband we weren’t looking forward to manually offloading the wood whilst the driver was waiting to make his next delivery and as no specific time frame for deliveries were available we couldn’t arrange for help offloading. A local company in Somerset could deliver by Hi-ab at a reasonable cost but it would be knotty pine. We really didn’t want pine but as it was cheaper and the delivery method ok we reconsiderd but still couldn’t make that final decision. Then I found Russwood after initially discounting them due to the fact they are in Inverness and we are in Cornwall and at the time I had at least 4 other companies all based lower than Birmingham some much closer to us. I spoke to Russwood and discussed delivery with them and discovered they deliver by Hi-ab on a big double length trailer but arrangements could be made that half of the trailer was left in a local lay by if necessary and our wood came on just the front half. They offered us Thermo Pine but it is slightly different the knots are fewer than on other pine samples we had from other suppliers Russwood describe them as butterfly knots, through the length of the knot rather than across the heart (round knots), you do still get some round knots. The tongue and groove is better designed in that each piece is fully pushed to the next but on the hidden side has room to expand. Most other tongue and groove needed a few millimetres between each plank for expansion which would slow the process down of putting it up and a bit more fiddly in general. Another difference in our wood is the face edges are rounded it gives a slightly more finished wood that could easily be used internally as well. As we we’re saving quite a bit on the Ash price we decided to over order enough that we can use some on the overhang, I don’t think we know yet how much spare wood we will have. A few comments from my husband are that it goes up really nice, screwing in the groove on the tongue with electric screwdriver so most fixings are hidden. It’s all fairly straight and not warped, some damaged pieces by handling but can be sorted into useable lengths over or under windows for example. On a sunny day he is enjoying this job. Cost to date Brought forward £207626 Cladding £5357 Cost to date £212983 I have noticed the Suffolk meet up chats and thought that If anyone is interested I could have an open day once we have done some more cladding and the rendered wall is complete and hopefully solar installation finished. The renderers are due to start soon so I was thinking May or June. It will only be for Build hub members so just PM me and we can all discuss dates that suit a few of us. If nice weather BBQ outside in the Bude sunshine.

The week starts with the removal of the external walls on the rear half of da bungalow. That’s the fun bit. I’m armed with two chainsaws and a reciprocating saw (aka sabre saw, for some reason). I bought the sabre saw as Steve the builder recommended one for demolition. When I bought it I knew it would be useful, but I knew my trusty chainsaws would get more done quicker and easier. It’s not easy working with someone who’s right every damn time. Sigh. So the chainsaws remain at rest while we quickly get into a rhythm of joist then upright removal, working our way along the frame till the only part of the rear half standing is the chimney and it’s wings (and our neighbours wall are still untouched ….yay!!). The pile of wood at the front of the plot is now clearly tidal. We cut wood, the tide flows. The ‘wood man’ comes, the tide ebbs. The cycle disguises the sheer volume of wood we are handling. It constitutes an awful lot of skip savings. Next day it’s straight back to heavy spade work for me, knocking of plaster and trying to leave the metal lathe mesh stuff reasonably clean to make later processing for recycling easier. In the process I discover previously a hidden window and a door - it would be fascinating to understand the history, the sequence of events and the reasons, but we can only guess. Steve is straight into heavy hammer work taking down the chimney and wing walls, and he discovers thermalite block so that chimney isn’t original either. Most interesting. Nobody tells you about the dust when you talk about demolition. I thought I’d done dusty jobs before but not like this. It’s like you bath in it. Everything on site is coated and one touch leaves my hands feeling almost ‘smooth’ in a strange kind of way. The dust masks that started off annoying are now comforting, I now start the day clean shaven to help them work better. But they discourage hydration as lifting the mask up to drink means putting a sweat soaked mask back on one’s face. Less than ideal. Warm dry weather makes it worse, and when a stiff breeze gets up it really is the limit. My goggles fully protect my eyes from dust. Unfortunately they also protect my eyes from seeing anything, as they mist up in seconds each time they are cleaned. I sprayed them with de-icer and that did help - it trebled the time it took them to mist up - sadly that still only made about two minutes. So, back to specs type protection it is. The high velocity flying bits are deflected but the fine dust floats round and gently crusts, aided by the breeze which isn’t enough to cool me but is easily enough to ensure dust gets everywhere quickly. Skooby (trusty steed, or cheap ancient Skoda on her last legs bought for the build, depending on one’s point of view) now has a light gray interior. Not just from my clothes, though that would be enough, but also from the stuff piled in her for the tip runs. And the litres of moisturiser I get through is crazy - we never budgeted for that - the dust dries the skin like mad. But, one just carries on. So having removed the back half the question is what to do next. Steve is logical and methodical. So he advocates carrying on removing the rearmost and working our way forwards. That means the dunny. But I still have a bladder, and age dictates that that bladder is attended to regularly. And I’m tight and we’ve nowhere sensibly to put a rented thunderbox anyway. So the score on that one ends up as Common sense: 0; G’s bladder: 1. So, after adding some diagonal bracing ‘just in case’ we bypass the loo and work forward. Yet another carefully considered risk assessment debate ensues. These consist of Steve standing and looking for a bit while I remain silent. He then says what we are doing next and I say yes Steve. Simples. In this instance we are going to remove the lintel above the old front door as otherwise when we remove the studwork near it there might be instability, as one end rests on a tiny masonry pillar held up only by studs. It takes an hour to drop the blockwork above and the large catnic lintel we discover. More to clean up and sell, if only I could lift it. Then, finally, it’s back to studwork removal time. The ‘wood man’ has been again so the wood tide is thankful out, so there’s space to put the wood mountain. Another excellent four days, so much so that we all take the Friday off. It turns out that being at home on a day off is emotionally, much easier than visiting site. A few jobs need doing around the house which helps, but it’s basically ok. It tells me that I could never live on site and have any peace of mind. I already spend a lot of time thinking things through/worrying myself into a fizz when I should be sleeping, and I think that would be massively greater if we lived either in site or very close nearby. The 20 minutes in Skooby as she grumbles along is vital to prepare for the day and then later, to help me start to decompress. It’s easy to think about one’s muscles needing rest, but not so easy to think about one’s head, but I’m trying, and it seems that that drive, and a soak in a scummy bath, is as vital as talking the day over with J. It’s like mentally putting one’s tools away, clean and tidy. Cooking helps too… Saturday it’s time to get all the lead, the house wiring, and (as it turns out) 80kg of gas boiler to the scrap yard - no wonder the boiler was so hard to lift!

I've two last major areas to details for air tightness and insulation - this post relates to one of these - a single rear Oriel Window, an architectural feature that juts out from the rear of the building and is finished externally with a metal standing seam. The plan agreed was to create a 20mm lip of metal for the window to sit against. I was right about to commence work when I noticed dampness and beads of moisture and sure enough despite the window being surrounded by a later of insulation, because I didn't think through this detail on the inside, the 2mm metal is bringing in the cold outside and condensing - even though the inside is only 5-7 degrees or so! It's happening all 360 degrees around the window and dripping down to the bottom of the frame too. Obvious in retrospect why this is the case now and lucky I'm aware now due to the time of year so I can address it. I have other metal in the form of an I beam supporting the side of the porch cantilevered outside (80% inside, 20% outside) but this is dealt with by the timber frame company using a thermal farrat - the beam is in two parts and bolted together through the farrat reducing cold bridging immensely. I'm keeping a close eye on this internally during this cold spell to satisfy myself. Anyway, if anyone is to blame for the detailing it's me, it just happened and I had considered angle grinding off the lip to get a better seal as the 2mm metal meanders a bit making it hard to pin against the window frame with rigid insulation or squeeze sealant / spray foam either side of the metal continuously. The window company didn't recommend the angle grinder as the lip provides a water barrier if the external sealant fails. The company I buy my gutex and air tightness products from were confident that covering the metal lip with insulation and using tape would prevent air circulation and address the issue. So, onto the fix: I'm working with Gutex for some areas of the build, a wood fibre board. Messy when cutting (accumulates inside my circular saw) but easy to work with. Not cheap but I'm trying to stick with breathable, natural products and gain experience in their use. I've used Multitherm which is a T&G product around the windows, this time I wanted to use Thermoroom which is a non flexible flat product (no T&G) that I could stack up around this opening. I plan to finish off with a fire rated (A/B) oak veneer rather than plasterboard so needed batons to attach to (main use for this ply is around the internal picture window separating the kitchen from the bedrooms, hence the fire rating but it will match nicely if use in this other area too. I'm going for an air tightness test soon so my current finish is intello plus only so I can inspect and pinpoint leaks. I packed out the Moy Metac flexible insulation and then cut a few Thermoroom boards to size. The board is a lot smaller than the Multitherm so I cut them in half minus 20mm to get the width I wanted and they stack at 50cm heights on top of each other. Battons to secure although I'm finding it hard to get 150mm screws through the baton at times and then through the gutex to bite into the wood frame beneath. When I could get my weight behind it it helped but overhead was a nightmare. Ended up drilling 5mm holes as the top 50mm of the screw was unthreaded and I just wanted it to bite the wood 120mm away and clamp the baton, this worked fine but I've 180mm structural screws to use under the vaulted ceiling later! Drill was set to 15 but still rapped out a lot of time, any suggestions?! SDS with a clutch?! Needed to get a lot of speed up and push force to work. Once the batons were on I filled out the spaces with 50mm rockwool and stapled on the intello plus and tescon vana joined them. The lighter blue tape is tescon profil which has a separated backing allowing you to seal onto the intello first and hinge the tape 90 degrees before removing the 2nd backing to seal to the window. So all 4 sides are now done. I've 11mm OSB on the floor of the opening rather than batons, this sits on 60mm multitherm on top of 25mm bosig phonotherm, a structural insulation board I had spare offcuts for. As this will be sat/stood on a lot I wanted something more secure to sit the plywood on. Now, it's just a case of monitoring and checking if any evidence of condensation still occurs, maybe peeling back the tape in one or two areas and quickly checking but I'm happy for now! Lots more to do. I've to figure out the 6 x Velux openings next and box out about 400mm of splayed / insulated / air tight spaces and close off the last part of the roof. More tower work for me so!!

The builders scaffolding came down and the roofers scaffolding went up all to plan. The new roofer has a good gang and they are working well on the roof. The weather hasn’t been great, we have had three storms Bert, Conall and Darragh luckily no damage to the build. We are approx 615ft above sea level and about 2.5miles to the coast as the crow flies so we get a good breeze coming in off the Atlantic. The wind has Brought with it some very cold spells that and the shorter daylight hours has meant progress has been a bit slow. The roof has been battened, breather membrane and counter battened, eves ventilation and we have some nice joinery on the gables, facia, tilt fillet at the eves for the last slate row and overhang. The slates are looking good and I’m happy with the hooks they are using, sometimes they are quite visible when the sun catches them but these have black tips that blend in nicely. The overhang also has some nice leadwork. The solar panels have just arrived and work will continue next year with the installation. The MVHR vents are installed and the Velux windows are installed, one window still needs its flashing kit completed and slate around so is covered up for now. Whilst the scaffolding is up I have managed to give the bargeboards 3 coats of wood protection with black stain. Finding time when its not too cold for the stain which requires 5 deg plus and keeping out of the roofers way has meant a little at a time but the gables are done and the facia on the North side is done with just the South to have another 2 coats. Im glad I’m doing it now not just because the scaffolding is up but also any drips of the very watery stain are not going on my cladding. We are ICF as you know and we have to be careful that the preservative is solvent free or it would melt the ICF blocks. Whilst the scaffolding is up we have also put the counter battens and insect mesh on the gable ends ready for the cladding next year. We purchased the insect mesh quite wide to go from the battens to the inside of bargeboards. Next job whilst the scaffolding is up is run some sealant in the small gap between the slates and the gable ladder, I have been told this is not done on most sites these days but due to our location the roofers have suggested we do it, so I purchased a huge box of baby wipes ready, I’m sure I will use them when we seal the windows as well. I have moved two empty slate crates just off to the left of the camera and started filling these with the half cut slates and the broken slates. The plan is to may be use the half slates around the bottom of the walls above ground level before the cladding starts, I’m hoping sticking them on will be the easy option, the broken ones will be crushed more and used as mulch on the ground around the edge of the building. We have paid the window deposit and the window openings have been measured, for one sliding door and 10 windows it took apx 3 1/2 hrs to measure the openings and discuss the window placement position and the sill positions and depths, and the sliding door placement taking into account the ffl after the insulation, screed and wood flooring. Some walls are being rendered and some wooden clad so the sills are different depths. We have 3 windows on one wall that face down our field and I wanted them levelled with a laser as well as measuring as these will be a big feature. We paid apx £700 for the measuring service and it will have been worth every penny. The windows are due in production towards the middle to end of February so hopefully before the end of March they will be installed. The cars that managed to sneak onto the photos for this catch up include our own Jensen FF back from the painters and a local customer popped their Jensen 541 in for a quick service.

At the beginning of Week 5 the scaffold arrives. The ICF walls get past window header height so they can be boxed in first with the ICF to close the side jamb, header and cill then the wood brace for the concrete pour. The internal structural walls are started and tied into the ICF. These are to support the steel roof beams. Its good to stand in the open plan kitchen and lounge area now and get the scale of the room, the three windows look down our field to the East and the slider door opening looks out South towards Dartmoor, visible on clear days. The kitchen may look a bit dark but it will have 4 velux windows that as well as providing light help to zone off the open plan area. The photo from the scaffold shows our workshop in the big barn and beyond that just visible is our current home. The weather has not been too bad during working hours, a mixture of sun shine, rain and strong wind with gusts of over 43mph so I will be happy to see the pour next week. This week the car is our own Jensen Interceptor my husband took it out in the sunshine when he went to our local ‘Men’s Shed’ in Holsworthy. Total man days of labour week 5 is 23 man days.

How things can change on a six pence! After deciding to go for the ASHP, I had a couple of local firms in to quote. CVC did come back with a quote of around 20K but without a site visit, I was worried things could add up and that seemed too much. see the whole ASHP saga here; So next week, the new ASHP is being installed. And the unit is going in the back garden, under the kitchen window. This is not where I wanted it to go but the company were adamant that we could not have it at the front of the bungalow. And with certain changes in the pipeline, I am not sure now that we will be doing the extension at all. therefore I am going with the easy option for now. If at a later date, we DO decide to add an extension, we'll just have to move everything. 🤔 The reason for the big change is that the property next to this one came up for sale and after looking at it, we decided to put in an offer. It is larger than our current bungalow and while my parents need help and care, it makes sense to be next door, rather than a 20 mn drive away. It ticks all the boxes for our current situation, garage, workshops, as well as being next door so seemed the right thing to do. We now have a complete chain so are just waiting for it all to happen - hopefully January 2025. Fingers crossed! Looking to the future, we will have the option to choose which we live in and which we sell. OH prefers the new one already....... and we arent even in yet. 😁 I'll update things once the ASHP is in. I just hope it works as well as they say it will.

On Monday the second gable is poured and most of the internal bracing, corner bracing and window shuttering is removed. Tuesday rains all day so no work on site. The internal floor is under 1 inch of water with no way to escape, without us brushing it towards soil pipe. Good to know we are airtight at the floor/wall joint. The steels are installed, we were supposed to have wooden roof beams but somehow this was not calculated by the architect who insisted the roof truss company would do the calculations later. The roof truss companys only want to do the calculations when they know you are ready to order and they said the beam spans could not be done. So on the last minute we had to go back to the SE who worked out our steel beams and the total cost of roof went up £8k. I wish the architect had suggested the SE looks at the roof calculations earlier but unfortunately we just have to move on from this, and up to this point we have had no other extra costs. Since we are no longer working with the architect I have had to find a new SAP assessor who I can engage with as the build progresses. We have been discussing how changing the steel beam might change things as the vaulted ceiling can now be higher if we want. This gives us more space to heat up. I also wanted to know the effect of not putting as much solar on the roof or not having the wood burner changes the SAP results. Since having a smart meter fitted at home we have reviewed our current electric usage and decided that less solar (7.5 kwp instead of 11 kwp) but with the ability to add a battery. Also I think aesthetically one row of 15 panels will look better. Total Man days of labour week 7 is 16 days. Total to date b/f £44925 New Design Stage SAP Calculations (previously done by architect) with ongoing advice about changes that will affect the SAP and to include the As Built SAP documents and EPC at completion £720. It does seem a lot compared to online prices but for peace of mind knowing that we can if we choose to only put 6kwp of PV on the roof instead of 11kwp, is an overall saving. Total to date £45645

Generally a much less stressful week than last week with lots of great progress but all is not perfect - see below. Heating Last week's drama getting the UFH pipes laid just in time for the screed pour seems like a distant memory but as there had not been time for Ken to fit the manifold and pressure test, he came on site on Sunday evening (roping in his Dad as a helper) to get that done. Thanks Ken - and Ken's dad! A neat job completed... ... just in time for Paul and Shaun from Air2Heat who arrived on Monday to install and commission our Panasonic ASHP and cylinder - kit which also arrived on Monday. It's almost like it was planned! We have opted for a 7kW Panasonic Aquarea L-series Bi-Bloc with a 300 litre Panasonic cylinder and 50L buffer tank. We're really impressed by the speed and neatness of the install: it's almost a shame the pipework has to be hidden behind the insulation. The external unit looks great and seems incredibly quiet - even when heating up that 300L cylinder from scratch. Although the heat pump is working we can't use it in anger at the moment as we have to have a slow temperature ramp up to prevent the screed from drying too rapidly. The screed itself does seem to be drying out nicely with no issues. None of the zone stats are fitted yet so the UFH is operating in open loop mode but in reality there is no demand anyway. I would thoroughly recommend Paul Thorney at Air2Heat as an MCS ASHP supplier and installer. He has been super-helpful throughout our heating journey. Initially he was just going to provide an MCS commissioning umbrella service but his price for supply of the kit was good and in the end we asked him to do the install as well - and we're very happy with the result. Rendering Although the weather has been 'iffy' at best John Wheeler from Caesar Spray-Rend managed to find a window to prime our base coat and then spray the Ecorend Thin Coat topcoat in 'Scotch Stone'. Again, we're very pleased with the result. Once the timber cladding goes on the other sections (later, later!) we think the two finishes will work really well together. Before topcoat And after: John also put a sand and cement render round the block-work below DPC to tidy that up... Although Troy seems more interested in the stray soil-pipe bung than the render: Electric 1st fix ...has started! Unfortunately 1st fix electrics is not particularly photogenic but here are the sparkies Nick and Darren pretending to be hard at work to prove it's underway. More on electrics to follow in the weeks ahead, I am sure. Decision time So, good progress on a number of fronts but it's not all been plain-sailing. I have had to pull the plug on the team who were supposed to fit out additional wall and ceiling insulation. They were supposed to complete in two weeks back in early August but the work didn't progress as well as they'd hoped we agreed they'd need to come back for a week with a bigger crew to finish off. They were due back last week but had to postpone by a week. Then today, I find they can't make tomorrow and there's a lack of clarity about when and if they'd be in next week. Unfortunately, we cannot afford to be chasing a slipping milestone because the ceiling insulation has dependencies: 1st fix electrics and then the plastering, both of which are on the critical path. So I had to let them know that we weren't continuing with them. They took it quite well to be fair; I suspect it may have been a relief. We are now going to switch to Plan B... just as soon as I have worked out a Plan B. Seriously: always have a plan B. Actually we have a plan B and a plan C, either of which will protect our schedule - we just need to decide which is the more palatable because they both have some downsides: either through higher costs or by reducing our planned insulation levels (which may be a bit OTT anyway). In summary, Plan B - get the plasterers to fit insulated plasterboard; Plan C skip the additional roof insulation and let the u-value for that element increase from 0.09 to 0.152. The latter of course still satisfies building regs and has a surprisingly small impact on heating requirements according to the Build Hub heat loss spreadie. Conversations with our architect and SAP man next week to help decide. Watch this space for further updates. Overall though, we both feel the we have made the right decision, and usually in these situations the danger is 'going with the flow' when the flow is really drift. And finally For the eagle-eyed amongst you who spotted that some plasterboard has magically appeared in the plant room... Have the plasterers started already? No - they don't start until after 1st fix, of course, but the plant room presents a 1st fix v plasterboard conundrum - so who did we manage to rope in for some impromptu 'boarding out'? Why, none other than Mrs P! Seen here in action: Great job Mrs P. - good to see you wearing the Benpointer team hoodie! Dashboard: Contractor days on site this week: 15 (I'm not counting Mrs P!) Contractor days on site since build start: 264 Budget: No change. Plan: Still on track to move in by Easter 2026. Issues and worries closed this week: Worries about the ceiling insulation crew's ability to keep to the schedule. Current top issues and worries: Replanning the approach to ceiling insulation. Plan B or plan C?

Time moves on and so does the build, albeit much slower than most of the builds featured in blogs. Over the past 4 months we have dug out, cleared and prepared our 2nd phase ready for the groundworks, as in all the stuff that goes in the ground, costs lots of money and is never to seen again. The next wall to be replaced and the old roof to be removed. This is one of the original walls, but it only had 200mm foundation so was not saveable. Cleared Trenched, this is where we had to get the SE to visit, he said we had clay and needed 2.4m trench originally. The BCO visited and said 'you're having a giraffe'. A site visit was arranged between the two of them and 1m was agreed. Of course this cost of circa £500 for a bit of paper from the SE to change the original drawings. Concrete pumping, these guys were brilliant and come greatly recommended. I think G&J had the same peeps. Certainly beats the previous trenches which we raked despite the extra cost Then we needed to dig down for the insulation and floor pour. BCO cleared us to use our own sand for blinding. Then insulation, DPM, more insulation & mesh And the next pour, again with the pump, in 30 degree heat. 22 cbm of the stuff. and our new levelling tool, a bull nosed float, hired for £17 for a week, which gave much better results than our previous raked floor in phase 1. It will, of course, be screeded with UFH when we get to that stage, but lots of walls to be built first. And drains and windows and doors. As per one of my other posts we did have some blocks knocked over for the single wall by the pipe, but looks like that is because of light blocks and hot temperatures. We also had to keep some of the existing foundations and walls as this is a conversion so we need to sort our drainage with those. Talk again when walls are up, in about another 6 months probably 🙂

We’re starting our build so I thought I’d attempt a blog. I can’t promise to keep it up throughout the build but I start with good intentions. Apologies for the inevitable typos along the way. A bit of background: We have previously done a lot of alteration and refurb projects for our various homes over the years, the most recent a major eco- refurb and extension of a 1960s bungalow. Last year we decided to bite the bullet, sell the house, buy a plot and build. We sold in October, bought a plot in November, and engaged some local architects to create a design to our brief. The plot is 0.85 acre on the edge of a Dorset village. It already had PP for a conventional 3-bed chalet but we wanted a near-Passivhus contemporary single storey house with vaulted ceilings - incorporating low u-values, ASHP, UFH, 3G windows, MVHR, PV, batteries... just about everything we could think of to make the house comfortable and sustainable. We’ve opted for off-site timber frame construction, clad in a mixture of timber and render, zinc roof. I am sure more of the construction details will get covered if and as I keep the blog going. I am a retired IT project manager so have decided to self-manage contractors rather than employ a Principal Contractor. I’m also a wheelchair user so, much as we would like to*, we won’t be doing much of the hands-on build ourselves (* Mrs. P. may not agree with that sentiment). We applied for fresh PP on the 28 January 2025, received permission on 1 May, and our architects submitted a building regulations application a couple of weeks later. We broke ground last week (see the next blog entry for details). For now, I attach a floor plan and some elevations to give you an idea of the build.

Clearing the site… (Last weekend I didn’t think there was enough for a blog entry. But this weekend, after a week and a half at groundworks it turns out I had more in my head to clear out than I realise, so it’s a bit longer than expected…) After the grunt and sweat and fatigue of manual demolition it felt like one big ‘Hurry Up -Wait!’, the wait partly imposed by Steve (semi retired builder) being on holiday. The plan was to start groundworks at the beginning of May when neither Steve or Bob (structural engineer) were on holiday. We had a window of nearly two weeks between Steve’s return and Bob going on the 12th of May. But events transpired so we ended up with Kev the Dig starting on site on the 7th. The best laid plans and all that. Steve has a 1.5 ton digger, and he and I could have done the lot, albeit more slowly than we have. But our party wall agreements and our site insurance all required “experienced (tick) and insured (cross) contractors”. So I’d cast around for recommendations and ended up with just one recommendation, Andy the Boss and Kev the Dig, so I got a quote from them. The cost was one of those ‘Roy Schneider’ moments, from Jaws as he sat on the beach and while the camera zoomed into him and the background got further away. But it seemed like we didn’t have a choice as we didn’t want to just google random dudes. So throughout the demolition we had this big looming cost slowly trundling towards us in my mind. Demolition was all consuming, not because of what it was so much as the sheer full on-ness of it, the constant intoxication of elation and fatigue. And that meant I put insufficient time into looking at alternatives, even though we are ‘cashflow challenged’ in getting to watertight. Over and over again I’m learning that the building world takes ‘just in time’ to the ultimate limits. Days before we are due to start I suddenly get given several recommendations of good guys who will happily work day rate and so I arrange to meet some on site for them to have a look so I let Andy the Boss know that we simply couldn’t afford it. Turns out being dead straight with peeps (which in fairness is always our intention) does pay. One quick phone call and it went from me saying “really sorry we can’t afford you” to “yes we understand the risk of day rates but we are really happy to work at those day rates”. So on the 6th Andy the Boss and Kev the Dig turn up with a 2.5 ton digger. Next day Kev the Dig and I start pulling up concrete and scraping off the site. I say “and I” in a kind of loose, hanging round on site, tidying up a bit and wondering what exactly I should do, sort of way. I wasn’t really needed most of the time. I did dig to find the sewer pipe a couple of meters in from the road, cap it off and note position. Will be interesting to see if I can easily find it again. We discovered some bigger than expected lumps of concrete, which Kev dealt with by lifting one end up and dropping them. Later one of our neighbours shared the fact that they could feel those bits happening as they sat at the far side of their house. Scary. Kev suggested we take some of the big heap of stuff we’d saved for floor make up (which I’ve learned to call “crush”) and spread it at the front of the site as a sort of parking/lorry bearing area. Damn good idea, I should have thought of that. So I did have a role to play. My role was from time to time to say “yes Kev”. At least it made a change from “yes Steve”. Kev was very considerate to the neighbours, stopping when he noticed excessive dust being created and sending me round to conduct neighbourly relations. And our poor, dust covered, deafened neighbours continued to be rather brilliant and tolerant. Another example of how fantastically lucky we have been. Thursday lunchtime saw Kev suggest, politely, that I was in the F way (technical term), and that he’d be quicker if he could shut the fencing and not constantly be checking that he wasn’t about to flatten anyone. So I went home and in truth not being on site that afternoon or the day after as Kev did his thing was tough. But when J and I went to site on Saturday it turned out that the world hadn’t ended without me. Actual founds… On Monday Steve and I set out the profiles. What a whole new experience, and I found it a lot more stressful than I had expected. The implications of making a mistake just didn’t bear thinking about. Steve sighed and shook his head at me on a very regular basis but we eventually got there. Then Tuesday Kev the Dig was back, so we started digging in the north east corner. Exactly as indicated by the test holes we hit good ground just below the surface, excellent for our shallow founds. Then the digger straddled that trench to do the south eastern corner. Soft ground. Damn. We at first thought we’d just hit a soakaway, and we did pull out bits of concrete and pipe. We had no choice but to fill in the north eastern corner trench again and get seriously stuck in to the other rear corner. We went down about an extra 600mm, which in the scheme of things is not that huge, and the soft bit was less than two meters long though of course one digs more than that to make sure. So it’s at this point that the warranty surveyor turned up. I’d requested that they attend the next day but they had staffing issues, and as I had previously agreed with the lead surveyor that they’d work partly off pictures if need be, I agreed an inspection as late as possible on Tuesday afternoon. That turned out to mean 12:00, as he had to get home (two hours drive) to pack for a holiday. Sigh. At this point we’d dug about 7.5m of our circa 72m (linear) foundations. His only comment was that he thought we’d need another inspection. He was on site about 10 minutes, and I learned more about his impending trip to Turkey than he did about our build. I got a call from him that evening confirming that I’d need another inspection and that we should cut off the little ends of roots that we’re sticking out of the first few inches of topsoil around the trenches. Roots in the trenches I could understand being a concern, but hey ho, just say yes and try and smile. Anyway, not long after that visit our BCO turned up, also early. But oh, how different. In a lovely way he gently interviewed first Steve then Kev the Dig. I can easily imagine many don’t realise he is interviewing them. He didn’t need to interview me, he didn’t need to. From previous phone calls he knew what a well meaning numpty he was dealing with. We talked about the soft ground we’d found and what we’d done in response; I talked him through the overall project; we talked through the drainage plan (which as a result needs to be redone); we talked through how we had managed and continue to manage risk to the neighbours; and we talked through the floor build up and the placement of insulation and DPM. And it appeared we passed muster. Most pleasing, our founds have BCO approval. The rest of that day passed in a blur of digging and moving spoil to the front of site ready for a grab lorry next day. As part of that we found an unexpected big lump of concrete underground, half of which needed gunning out. I lay awake thinking about the build sometimes, well, mosttimes. That night it occurred to me that during all that shenanigans we’d not rechecked the exact location of the founds. Our outside edges are 900mm wide with the walls placed very near the edge. That means that the placement of those founds is critical - kind of a tolerance of +50mm/-0mm type of thing. Next morning at site I annoyed everyone by checking. 100mm out on the deep bit, less further along which could thankfully be sorted with the digger, but not the deep bit. Oh. So, with a pour booked for the afternoon and Steve and Kev fully employed digging ready for that I searched the employee list for a mug to pop down the 1.4m trench, remove the shuttering on one side and manually spade off 4” and shovel that spoil out all in double quick time. The options were somewhat limited. It was either me or me. That’ll be me then. And after that it was my turn to attack the big lump of concrete with the breaker after Steve had done the first half. Tough morning. But the humour helps, as illustrated by the message Steve sent J. Humph. Getting that done, getting all the stop ends done ready with starter bars, etc. was more time consuming than we had allowed for. But it was ok, I was in control, it was agreed that I would call when ready for the concrete lorry. Only it transpired that Kev happened to be on the phone to Andy the Boss and he told him we were ready for concrete far earlier than I would have done. Massive stress and much gritting of teeth and we did get there, but it was very touch and go. Not doing that again. Thankfully J was onsite to instil a little calm and perspective. And to keep Steve chatting when I needed him to accompany me in running round like a headless chicken (and help me get the stop ends right!). The thing is Steve knew it was all going to be ok, and that I was panicking over nothing. Shame I didn’t! The pour itself was über manic. It was agreed by a majority vote that I was to be in wellies in the trench removing props. (Steve and Kev voted for it to be me, i.e. not them). It’s a bit like an old black and white army film comedy where they ask for a volunteer and everyone but the prize idiot takes a step back while the officer looks away. I had no idea concrete could move so quickly. Struts I had hammered home with every ounce of strength simply slipped out of position as the concrete pushed sideways, but then had to be instantly grabbed and thrown out before being enveloped and lost forever. Down the 1.4m bit was the worst by far. Definite feeling of peril, even though all I would have had to do was stand up and let the guys pull me out -so only my wellies were in any real danger of being entombed, but still a bit scary. So next day I quietly ensured that all accepted that the next phase would be less stressy and better controlled. First diversion from my plan was the ply shuttering. Earlier in the process I’d asked about its removal and was told it was up to me, it could be left there but we could remove it if I preferred. So when I asked if our first job was ply removal I was told that it was too late, if it was to come out it has to come out straight away. Another Oh. Second diversion was another soft bit, opposite the first one indicating that there appeared to be a seam of soft stuff running across the rear of the houses, perhaps thats why they are where they are, to avoid building over a small brook. Either way we dug past it and ended up with a mirror of the other side. This time I tied rope to the lowest struts. Not being down there for the pour again. In hindsight it’s entirely possible that I needn’t have been in the trench at all, but it was effectively a leg pull for the grockle. I did mention previously that the build process is so full of laughter! That evening a small bunch of Suffolkian (carefully how you pronounce that in polite company) buildhubbers met in the pub near our site. As I lead the 47 seconds long site tour (errr, here’s a filled trench, here’s and empty one, and heres some dirt) I realised that the only thing I had to show off was how close the pub was. The safety brief before entering site was longer than the tour - “you should all have hard hats, boots, hi vis and gloves on but you know that so it’s your own bloody fault”. Oh well. It was an interesting evening and I enjoyed my nachos. Because the concrete was ordered for 10:00 the next day we had ample time to prepare. Only to find that they couldn’t get to site till 12:00. There’s one thing more stressy than being tight for time for a pour, and thats dealing with two keyed up impatient builders for two hours with little that can be done. Between the first load and the second we needed to dig a small foundation linking the previous pour to the current one, with the concrete from today’s first pour held back by ply. That we did just in time (providing the stress fix that groundworkers appear to enjoy). That ply did have to come out to allow the two pours of the day to meld, and that took a surprising amount of force. After a late lunch with much planning talk, Steve set my homework (tidying, moving stuff, ordering), and even after that I got home a little earlier than usual, with two thirds of a set of foundations. Behind schedule but still pleasing.

I hadn't realised that my last entry was in Nov last year. Where has the time gone. As with many self builds, particularly those on a DIY basis we have been very subject to weather slowing things down, not that it could be much slower. But, in fact compared with last year we have done loads. The NOT wall (the side of the barn that was open) is now a wall. This wall is 16m long, with 4 lots of French door gaps. double skin block with 150 cavity and 4 heavy lintels. It then turns the corner to head south. We also had a big overgrown bank which we dug out and cleared. Then out next door farmer came and took away all our soil spoil which we didn't need for some holes in his field. About 40 ton we think. And in the process flattened the bank. I then planted a hedge and seeded the bank. Inside what was the barn we have started digging down, in total it needs to go down 500mm so this is just a start The back bank needed digging back to allow for the digger for drains when we get to that stage. And finally in March we've started taking some of the remaining roof off, to be the stables roof in due course Hard to believe this has gone from bog to beach in a couple of months. Once the roof is dismantled then we can start with the trenches for phase 2 of the build. Thanks for reading. See you next time,.

The last bit of soil pipe and inspection chambers that are close to the house are completed. The ICF is delivered and by the end of the week we have the start of door and window openings. The insulation is extruded polystyrene XPS 100mm each side of the concrete cavity. U value of 0.14 The windows have rebar in them before 50mm insulation closures are added. At the weekend we had a yellow wind warning for the South West, our home weather station recorded top gusts of 40mph. I’m pleased to say the R-wall ICF survived with no problems. Total man days of labour week 4 is 22 man days split between Groundworks and ICF builders. The build is going on very close to our workshop entrance which makes the delivery of vehicles and test drives limited. This week we took delivery of a previous customers Jensen CV-8 which now has a new owner who has sent it to us for further works over winter.