AliG

Two layers of OSB must make a nice difference. I am guessing that wider studs help also as they might be stiffer. Of course not many people have the experience of different systems to compare maybe.

There are plastic water pipes all over the place inside our walls and mainly ceilings. Not aware of any rules on where to put them and never hard of putting metal tape on them, someone might just be doing that to make them easier to find. You would only chase them in if you needed to hide them, normally they are surface mounted behind the plasterboard. Is your issue that you plan to wet plaster blockwork so need to hide the pipes? I can see if you had radiators you would want to use a consistent routing system so you know where the pipes are likely to be. Don't see why copper would be any different, although I don't see why you wouldn't just use much cheaper plastic.

I am using my time working from home to try and finalise the plans for my parents' house so that we can hopefully get started asap once life gets back to normal. I have spoken to a couple of timber frame companies and I also chatted a bit to @Jeremy Harris re his MBC frame. I am seeing frames with 140mm, 184 and 235mm studs as well as the 300mm twin wall systems as used by MBC and some others. We have drawn up the plans with a 400mm wall thickness, and have a width restriction. So we could use a 300mm frame plus render board, or we could use a 140mm frame plus PIR and rockwool or a thicker frame from some suppliers. Having run the heat input calculations, the wall u-values don't make much difference. The house has a lot of glass and I plan to have around 0.1 on the floor and roof. Thus whether the walls are 0.11 or 0.13 or 0.15 hardly makes any difference to heating costs. I am thinking more about other things such as noise, sturdiness etc. Jeremy has said how quiet his house is for example. My last house was timber frame plus rendered blockwork, but I think it was only a standard 90mm stud as mainly used 20 years ago. The house was quite noisy and creaked in strong winds. So would I notice a big difference between different stud thicknesses and different cladding systems or is it more about the detailing and the sealing of all the gaps. Also looking at the quotes as they come in, we could end up with quite a lot of steel, should I be worried about the cold bridging or can it be well insulated within the frame? One more question (copyright Columbo) - Most of the timber frame systems seem to allow for a 35mm batten then plasterboard to create a service void. If we avoid pipework and sockets on some outside walls to remove the void would we notice any other diffference? Does the void help to reduce noise transfer through the wall for example?

It could, tbf I think there is a bit of chicken and egg. People go where the money is, then a network effect generates more money, so more people go etc. Maybe this cycle will be broken by this. We are finding working from home relatively easy. We were in the lucky position of just having moved to use Microsoft Teams a few weeks before this. Really in a service oriented business you can pretty much work as normal. Definitely not the same as fixing power lines! However, I am not sure things are as straightforward as it seems. With everyone working from home it is working very well. It may be that if some people were together in the office and some people were at home it would be more of a struggle to keep everyone equally involved.

Maybe we just closed the office really early, for most people the last day was the 12th of March. A very strong argument was that it was a bad idea to be asking people to come to work on the tube in London. A few people continued to go to the office who walked or drove until it was totally shut down two weeks ago. Clearly if you work somewhere where you couldn't do that you have been taking more and more risk, especially in London. I have already brought up I do not see how we reopen an office in central London if most people have to take the tube to work at any time in the foreseeable future.

I saw the story too. I think the main concern is that they have less staff to fix things if they break so it may take a bit longer than usual. Thus if you are in the countryside and a bit more prone to power cuts then you might worry that they take a couple of days rather than a couple of hours to fix. I don't think it is a matter of having a generator, but a vulnerable person might need to keep warm all the time for example. I do think they might have put more language in it to say that they aren't expecting anything and it is precautionary. As the weather improves and the chances of builders cutting through cables by accident have collapsed I don't think there is much to worry about. As an aside, is anyone else seeing massive numbers of colleagues self isolating due to possibly being sick? Everyone in my company is working from home and everyone is fine, I have read for example that an enormous percentage of the tube staff are off sick. It is hard to see why? The DM comments were as usual ridiculous, numerous people blamed it on wind turbines and said it would never have happened if we still used coal.

Good luck. I have quite a few money saving ideas below. TBH most people overspend in here for nice finishes, nice specs etc and could build cheaper if they wanted to. However, in saying all that I just don't think you can get close to this budget in Surrey. In saying that kitchens and bathrooms are costly, so you can probably get down to below £1000 a square metre ex these especially doing some work yourself. A lot will depend on the groundwork/foundation costs. It looks like a relatively simple design which is good. The main savings are reducing the spec and doing stuff yourself. Spec - So cheap PVC double glazing, plain doors, white plastic sockets, bog standard skirting, cheap guttering, soffits, concrete tiles etc. You could use an electric boiler. Now these are expensive to run but you won't need a gas supply and this could save £2-3000 including installing the boiler. The other area to save money is hard floors, tiles etc. These are nice but expensive, simple OSB floors and carpets/lino which you can always upgrade in the future. Pendant lights instead of downlights, you could probably lose around £1000 in light fittings that way. The two simplest jobs are probably putting in insulation and painting, painting yourself would probably save £3000ish. A big saving would probably be to go open panel and put the insulation into the walls yourself. As I understand it from the quotes people get on timber frames, they charge quite a lot to add the insulation. However, this is perhaps compromising on the spec. Can the dormer wall not be insulated with rock wool rather than PIR, this is massively cheaper. Or actually, why not insulate with rock wool between the rafters then the doors to the eaves won't need to be insulated. There could be issues with condensation that have to be considered here. Again you could install this insulation yourself. As the house has a lot of roof, insulating this with a lot of roockwool will be cheap yet keep the insulation standard of the whole house up. I reckon that you might save around £15,000 not doing upstairs, but you'd have to pay VAT when you do it later and it would be more expensive and disruptive. I think though if £100k is really the budget, building to the minimum spec you might just get the building plus downstairs fit out for £100k.

Thanks, I assumed the government paid it as people keep saying it is a benefit of higher employee NICs. I stand corrected.

Your point is well taken @DamonHD in that originally the tax system was designed for different kinds of business and what has happened is that some people have started to organise their affairs for tax purposes not business purposes. I am not sure whether this was due to the tax difference getting larger over time or due to people just getting more creative with their taxes but I think it should be fixed in the interests of fairness. I would pay more tax so I am trying not to act out of self interest.

They tried to fix this before and there was a backlash, but I think this time it will get sorted out. Self employed pay less tax than employed and often they argue that it is due to lack of holiday pay and sick pay. Holiday pay is paid by your employer and not the government so this argument is nonsense. Even SSP although it would be paid by the government, employees generally have better sick pay because their employer pays it not the government. The average person is only sick 4 days a year in the UK. I am a partner in the company I work for so benefit from being classed as self employed so not paying employer's contributions on my wages. This is just bizarre that a partnership benefits from this. The systems should be brought together so that people do not alter the running of their affairs for tax purposes. Self employed, partnerships, employees etc should all have similar tax arrangements. I have a friend who works as an IT contractor. Because he works in IT he buys himself a top of the line computer to play games on every few years and claims it against tax. He was set up for years using an employee benefit trust and basically paying no tax at all. An employed person earning £40,000 per year pays £3,764 in NI and £5498 in tax. Their employer pays £4,561 in NI. A self employed person would pay the same amount of income tax, except they could probably get some deductions not available to an employed person. Their NI bill (Class 2 and Class 4) would be £2984. So the total tax and NI on a self employed person making £40000 a year is £8482 versus £13823 for an employed person. In reality the self employed person would effectively be paid the employer's NICs and then pay some tax on them. What do you get for your extra £5000+ a year - 1. The average UK person is off sick for 4 days a year - Let's call it a week £92 of SSP. 2. JSA - £73.10 a week if you have savings of less than £6,000. So for many people, nothing. Another way of thinking about it is that the self employed benefit from probably roughly 98%(Other welfare is about 3% of government spending and self employed are still eligible for some of this) of government spending but pay considerably less tax than employed people. On top of the calculations above they can further reduce tax liability through the use of dividends and CGT.

They do have a very high load bearing capacity which may have been why they were chosen as my upper floors are 200mm concrete plank. The lack of expansion joints is nice, I have a 30m wall with no joints along one side of the house. Also I don't like perpends which you need with timber frame and blockwork outside it. I actually checked the best practice guide and it shows windows just attached with straps and small screws. This may work for a small UPVC window but some of my Alu-clad 3G windows weigh over 150kg. In this case it does say to use wood as we have. Vertically the blocks are ground flat which helps keep them in line, however, horizontally they are not, the builders showed me that some were bowed way out of flat. This didn't matter as we have plasterboard over them, but could cause some issues. Most manufacturing industries tend to study things until they find the best way to make something, it is surprising that this has not happened for building and there are so many competing methods. I would love to see some studies on he different methods. No one method will be the best as not all houses are the same, but you'd think there would be more standardisation.

That’s me. The Porotherm was recommended by the SE. Really though having looked at the specs and the build I don’t see any benefit versus any other blocks using a thin joint system. The blocks were laid by normal brickies. They flew up on a straight wall with no openings but they struggled when it came to cutting openings. In the end the blockwork took massively longer than expected to go up. The blockwork has a parge coat for air tightness but there are still all the issues you get around windows and joints that require good detailing by the builders no matter how you build. The main issue they created build wise was attaching the windows to them. They crumble when you put fixings in them. For some things you can drill a hole and fill it with adhesive but windows have so many fixings. In the end we had to put ply frames around the window openings to attach the windows. We have a cavity wall 100mm porotherm 50mm gap 100mm pir 100mm block 37.5mm insulated plasterboard on dot and dab. The quoted u value is low. I wanted to build in ICF and think it would be much better, I just couldn’t find a builder who had used it before. I would actually stick with timber frame unless you need to use blockwork. We have concrete upper floors so it was necessary. There might be a big efficiency benefit on a single skin wall but that would be a quite unusual build.

We asked the cleaner to stop coming and stopped going to the gym but are still paying them as I am still being paid and they need the income. I was not impressed at all with a work colleague who said they might let their nanny go as they are working from home.

I’d hope people have the integrity to not claim if they are still working and earning. But no doubt some will whilst others struggle. I looked out the window today and the guy who laid our grass was in the garden I spoke to him about taking over looking after the garden a couple of months ago. He subcontracts to another company who have been doing it poorly. They didn’t really want me to switch to him but I got an email yesterday saying he could take it over as they only have one member of staff working. We had a discussion about how he planned to work as he works outside on his own so there is no reason not to work. This is in line with government policy. I asked what had happened to all the staff. He said they were given the choice of 80% pay at home or 100% pay and working. All but one member of staff chose staying at home.

Can they not do it from home based on pictures?

No you can set up an account for free. If you paid for a Prime account you do get access to a lot of TV and Music as well as reduced delivery costs for a pretty low price per year.

I think that on our drawings they said they would insulate it in areas where they had lots of pipes together. The things I have noticed are - 1. Make sure the manifold is well hidden, they are pretty deep from the walls and the UFH people will just stick it somewhere which may not be where you would feel it was best hidden. 2. The manifold gets warm and puts out heat, you can save a bit on heating if you put it somewhere in a room that will need heated more. Most of ours are in spare rooms, if it was in the wardrobe in an occupied bedroom it would pretty much heat that room. 3. On the other hand of course don't put the manifold somewhere likely to get too hot as you cannot turn it off. Hot water can circulate to the manifold when it is not in use and when only one circuit runs the whole thing gets hot and warms up whatever room it is in. 4. Manifolds contain a lot of moving parts and something will break eventually so make sure you can get at it for maintenance.

As @Declan52 said Firetvstick is the cheap and easy way to make your TVs smart. 4k one is the best choice as the original one is too slow. The normal price is £49.99 but they are reduced all the time. https://uk.camelcamelcamel.com/product/B079QB9BD7 Not only can you watch the various catch up services but you can also watch Freeview over an app without an aerial which might help if you don't have coax to where you want to put a TV.

You need to get with the 21st century guys. You can stream it on All4 or your Sky/Virgin/Youview box if you have one

Edinburgh Council say that they will be in recess from March 20th to April 27th. My parents' house was supposed to be up for the April 22nd committee meeting, it isn't clear if that is happening or not, I wouldn't have thought so. I am not sure why they cannot do committee meetings by conference call. I am working from home as of last Friday, we have meetings every day, we just aren't in the same room. Clearly this is sudden and unexpected, but if it lasts longer than 1-2 months they need to find ways to keep normal life going. The more things that can work as normal the better for the economy and for everyone's job out the other side of this.

New series started last night. Once again a build with the bare minimum of insulation. It looks like blockwork with 100mm of rock wool, does that even meet building regs minimum? The Rockwool website says a u-value 0f 0.29. I would think they leak air also. I couldn't see any other insulation in the walls. Roof looks like 200mm PIR so that is better. I do like the red cedar cladding, probably because we have some of that under the porch and balcony. Really like the decoration inside the house.

Trades are expensive but not crazy in Edinburgh. It’s the land that’s expensive. There are so few self build plots it’s difficult to buy a plot and build a house for less than the value of the house. There is also the time aspect of getting through planning which can be slow. If you want to pm me @Drunkenmunkey I can maybe give my opinion on the plot you are looking at and possible costs.

Just wash your hands when you come in from outside, once they have been washed there is nothing to worry about, at least in terms of surfaces. If I go out I am carrying a pack of surface wipes to wipe down the handle on the shopping trolley or basket. I am now working from home and plan to go out as little as possible which isn't exactly a hardship for a few weeks. I know not everyone is lucky enough to do this, but the cost to reduce your risk is pretty low.

I was about to say the same thing until @Temp beat me to it. Almost all supply contracts seem to have language similar to this and it is totally unerforceable. I think I quoted something similar in a post about a similar issue previously. Basically you cannot just wish away your liability for negligence by saying so in a contract. Imagine where that would leave us.

I’d love to see the skirting price list with “council style” ?