AliG

I have this to look forward to still on my build, but as of today I am getting 100MB from Virgin so I don't have to rely on BT. This is over Ubiquiti wifi as discussed in other threads re wifi and ethernet. http://

Pretty much every day this week they have been told it will be working tomorrow and it hasn't. Today I spoke to someone in executive level complaints as I had emailed the CEO address. They told me that the problems all go back to duplicating a number in their system and so two apartments were showing on the same equipment. This has apparently now been fixed but there are other issues. Reading between the lines it seems that many problems at BT/Openreach are caused by poor systems and incorrect data input. It doesn't work if all the equipment and lines are not correctly identified. The Openreach engineer replaced the fibre modem in my parents' apartment but did not record this. My mum had to give BT the serial number off the new unit. They also seem to be unable to amend incorrect accounts but instead create one order after another each with a new account number and my parents receiving an email both their new service. Parents go on holiday on Sunday and come back on the 15th. BT say that an Openreach engineer will come on the 18th and should get the system up and running. I did query why an engineer cannot come on the Saturday considering the long notice. Then I discovered that part of the issue is that as it is a FTTH install which they have only just started, not all engineers are trained to do it. The people I spoke to today were very nice and apologetic, but really we just want it working.

If you are really concerned you should consult a structural engineer. However literally millions of houses have single skin internal supporting walls, indeed my last house had supporting walls that were just timber(it was timber framed), never mind a single blockwork skin.

This intrigued me, I don't think you can put it under the column as a column is likely to be taking a large load and have to be attached directly to concrete. I stand to be corrected though. I found this thread on greenbuildingforum http://www.greenbuildingforum.co.uk/newforum/comments.php?DiscussionID=15134 Basically you have to wrap the column to prevent the cold bridge.

Lol, harsh. My view at work has always been that there are only a few times you are in a position with leverage and able to maximise your earnings. Someone unexpectedly leaves, you get a better offer etc. You have to take advantage of these situations as you may not get the chance again. After all they'd get rid of you at the drop of a hat if they couldn't afford to pay you. As long as you are being fair and reasonable about it, at the end of the day we work to earn money so you may as well try and earn as much as possible.

I wish I had the cash to buy a site and build then. I came close to buying a plot that a bankrupt developer owned. It has a block of flats on it now.

Sadly not my experience! There are some fixed costs like utilities, but generally tradesmen like tilers and bricks change per square metre. They tend to have plenty of work so the price doesn't fall very much for a big job. I would guess £800-1000 per square metre doing a lot of work yourself and depending on spec. As has been said, there is a lot of inconsistency in what people include to calculate these figures. Do you include architects fees, structural engineer, flashy kitchen etc? It seems from what I read on here self building is generally more expensive than you would think. I am probably coming in at around £1900 per square metre including everything. Costs of things such as landscaping soon mount up. Do people include these in the build costs? It's about 4% of my costs. Other house in my street which appears to be a much cheaper timber frame build apparently came in at £2100/metre but that is just a figure I have heard. IT doesn't have all the stone work etc that has added to our costs.

If you fancy a laugh- https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/bt.com I notice that lying to customers is a common theme.

My parents have bene promised some kind of compensation. We will see once it actually works. They are extremely conscientious and hard working people and to them they just cannot understand how something can be so hopelessly organised. I notice that BT have a rating of 0.5/10 on Trustnet. I have never seen anything close to this. It is all well and good that Openreach is separately managed to BT and there is even talk of totally splitting it off, but by necessity the cable owner is likely to be a monopoly. It wouldn't make much sense to have two companies installing lines to your house. Thus it is not clear how to change their attitude. Perhaps management should be remunerated on customer service rather than profits and this should be imposed by the regulator. I suspect that when there are problems the division between Openreach and BT actually exacerbates them and I am doubtful that it actually helps consumers. I have had various gas meters, electricity meters, Virgin etc all installed in my build. All has been pretty painless. I actually went straight to Virgin for the broadband as I knew getting Openreach to install a new line would take forever and Virgin is faster. Openreach have been along with conduit that we have just put in as we are landscaping the garden. Thankfully I am not beholden to them to get an installation.

The house is basically built entirely from Porotherm. But they have occasionally used concrete blocks where the strength is useful. They are tying the sandstone blocks into the blockwork and it is a lot easier to attach things to concrete blocks than Porotherm. As it is in a porch it doesn't make matter in terms of insulation. All the blocks that you can see are fully outside walls. That area was also built after the main house. As an aside, I ultimately think that the Porotherm may have been a waste of time and money. Although it is better insulated than concrete blocks, the difference is quite marginal and the builders find blocks easier to work with. If I was building again I would either try to use ICF which is what I originally wanted to use or full fill blockwork cavity. I have not fully looked into the full fill cavity option which I didn't explore as I didn't think that they would allow it is Scotland, now I am not so sure. I reckon full full cavity is likely to have a lot less issue with gaps and air getting into the insulation than the Celotex that we have used. Another house has been built at the opposite end of the road at the same time as mine. It is timber frame with a blockwork skin. It has an enormous number of perpend vents in the walls. I am certainly glad that I don't have them.

Postcode checker is all fine, official addresses were issued months ago. Thus I cannot understand how BT managed to have the address misspelled as I would assume that they use the automated system internally. I did point out to my parents that they would be better ordering things on line than phoning as then no one is going to get your address wrong. Still BT were informed of the correct address over a month ago, yet I still cannot see an account with the correct address on it. I did point out in my email to BT that my dad has had 2 cataract operations on the last three months. They have been utterly useless. I work less than 10 minutes walk from the HQ in London. I did say that they can have a personal visit if it helps!

Thanks @Cpd They did a dry fit of the last few pieces of the arch today.

Just venting really. My parents who are in their 70s moved into a new apartment on the 11th May. They had called BT 2 weeks earlier to get broadband and a phone line installed. Somehow BT got the wrong address. Not only did they get the wrong apartment number and building they spelled the street incorrectly. My parents called them up to get this fixed. As far as I can see on BT's system they have created and cancelled three accounts all with the wrong address. Eventually they were got someone who claimed to fix it, but still the 4th modem that came out was sent to the wrong address, but they got it from the neighbour. As I expected on the day that their service was to start it didn't. If you call BT in this scenario they always fall back on that it can start at any time up until midnight. This conveniently stops you being able to complain until the next day. They called to complain and of course got the excuse that the fibre in their building wasn't working. Of course their neighbours have had their phones installed already so this is highly unlikely. Eventually an Openreach engineer came out and mucked about for 2.5 hours. Then said variously that the "Pro boffins" at BT had to look at it and it was the fault of the modem. Quite how your broadband modem would stop your phone working escapes me. I gave up and wrote an email complaint to CEO's email address hoping this would escalate things. I got a phone call on Friday night which I missed, it was 836pm. I also got an email. I was promised a call back yesterday which didn't happen. My parents did get a call and the person promised to email me which also didn't happen. They were told that the phone would work today, any time up to midnight again, but their broadband order had been cancelled and couldn't happen until the phone worked. Now they have had a call saying that it won't be connected today and an engineer needs to look at it. They didn't seem to know that this had already happened. I tried to call the number of the person who called me, it doesn't work, and the number of the executive complaints team went to a mobile voicemail. My parents just called me almost in tears. Having no phone and particularly no broadband is very difficult today. As their apartment is a concrete and steel new build, mobile signal is very poor. Truly in my entire build I have never come across such incompetency. What really frustrates me, and this is true of many large companies nowadays is that rather than own up to a problem, mistake etc, they habitually lie to customers and waste everyone's time. Rant over.

Almost there, they are mainly doing landscaping and snagging. They seem to have left this pain in the neck job to the end. We went out today with one of the pieces of stone hanging from a forklift as they manoeuvred it into place. They had 4 men plus the forklift. I realised they will have to do just 2 blocks a day and let the mortar set. Of course they said it would take three days, but they started the week before last. The archway started off narrower in the first design sketches, but I asked for it wider. Our old house had a similar arch with narrower proportions.

You're testing my sense of humour there ?

I haven't taken a full picture of the front of the house as it isn't quite finished. We are finally building the archway at the front door, so we are using the kitchen door at the moment. Due to the weight of the stone they are doing two pieces a day. I was a bit taken aback by the thickness of the stone, I think the architect must get commission from the quarry!

We have a system using the Ubiquiti AC Lite product. With 100MB Virgin WiFi awe are getting over 80MB over WiFi to a laptop. They should also have enough speed to continue to work as your internet connection speeds up, I am tempted to change my Virgin subscription up to 300MB to see what happens. I noticed the other day an article about people getting less than half the speed they pay for on their internet connection. I suspect that this is based on Speedtests done over WiFi. The reason it is so slow is often the poor WiFi not the poor connection. In our last house a 75MB Sky connection(the actual speed the fibre modem was connecting at) dropped to around 45MB over WiFi in the room closest to the router, 35MB in other rooms with Sky Q boxes and 15-25 in the rest of the house. Try not to use WiFi extender type products, they cripple your WiFi speed. Before I connected all my Sky Q boxes up using ethernet in the old house, they connected 2 wireless extenders into the system and the speed dropped to 11MB. These eat up your bandwidth. I would put a Ubiquiti AC Lite on each floor connected over WiFi. They are £75ish each on Amazon, or £300 for 5.

A small chandelier has just gone into our en suite, my wife really wanted chandeliers in our en suite and the WC. I'll post more pics of the ensuite when it is finally finished. It is one of the last parts of the house to be completed.

Yes, we are really pleased with them. I have to give my wife the credit for picking most of the lights. I picked the wall lights.

Turned the heating off to try and figure out how much gas we were using for hot water. Appears to be around £2 a day. This seemed very high, but having looked into it, it is the recirculating hot water system. The loop is around 70m long. From what I can find on line 28mm pipe loses around 50w per meter per hour. Thus it probably costs around 10p per hour in gas to recirculate the hot water. The builder also decided not to insulate the pipe as it is internal. This would maybe have helped a bit, but my reading on-line says that it is an inherently wasteful system to have instant hot water. I have set the pump to be on in the morning, after school and before bed which is when people are most likely to bath or shower, but that family is giving me a lot of grief for not having it on all the time.

@Mr Punter as requested. The poor piano has been moved all over the place and is finally where it is supposed to go. That's me to give some scale. We love the way that the lights reflect off all the glass and the floor at night. These are basically the finished stairs. They still have lights to go in on the underside of the front edge of the treads.

I got the lights from here - https://www.aliexpress.com/store/top-rated-products/342455.html?spm=2114.12010615.0.0.6d673d16SBgstF&tracelog=topselling_tab They stopped advertising them not long after I bought them, but they might be able to supply them if asked. They were a fraction of the price of the real lights. The big ones are more expensive as they have to be airfreighted. I have bought lights from 6 different companies on Aliexpress. Every single one has been no trouble at all and exactly as described/. One light was missing a piece and they put it straight in the post no arguing about it. Considering the prices it really does make you wonder how much mark up there is on items by the time they have made their way through the supply chain. It is hard to say that they are Chinese knock offs as most items of this kind will have been made in China anyway. I cannot find anyone currently advertising larger than a 700mm light in the same style. I have 2 of the 1000mm diameter ones. Here are some of the current ones on sale https://www.aliexpress.com/item/LED-Modern-Fireworks-Pendant-Lamps-Ball-Stars-Hanging-Pendant-Lights-Fixture-Nordic-Hotel-Shopping-Mall-Home/32816818288.html?spm=2114.10010108.1000014.4.2055421dADg2yt&scm=1007.13338.98644.000000000000000&scm_id=1007.13338.98644.000000000000000&scm-url=1007.13338.98644.000000000000000&pvid=8615d8be-51a5-4a19-8dbf-0de78796e7a7&_t=pvid:8615d8be-51a5-4a19-8dbf-0de78796e7a7,scm-url:1007.13338.98644.000000000000000 https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Modern-Creative-Chandelier-Dimmable-LED-Fireworks-Pendant-Lamps-Stainless-Steel-Ball-Lights-For-Bar-Restaurant-Lamparas/32816920317.html?spm=2114.10010108.1000015.5.7bea54e1fH8gQC&s=p I find it often easier to find something on Aliexpress to find something similar then look at the list of other suppliers and other products form the seller at the bottom of the page. It is not always obvious what name the product has been given. Another thing that you can do is an image search on Google.

I found this article that goes into reasonable detail about it. https://www.getwestlondon.co.uk/news/west-london-news/grenfell-tower-fire-millions-spent-14435366 It seems that the council have bought 307 homes but they are not all occupied yet. It is not clear if they have actually bought more houses than needed and are planning to house other people. It appears that they have spent around £765,000 per home. They have also spent around £25m on hotel accommodation. This is not a high amount to spend in that area where house prices are extremely high. Of course this then gets you to the question of should tax payers pay to house people in areas where the average tax payer themselves could not afford to live. This isn't really relevant to Grenfell but more of a general question.

The staircase was supplied by a company called Angus and Mack who are just outside Edinburgh. http://angusandmack.com I don't know the radius, we settled on it by looking at 3d renders until it looked right. The treads are roughly 215mm deep at the narrow end and 340mm at the wide end. They are 1100mm across with the staircase being 1200mm wide.

We still aren't quite finished, creeping ever closer. Mostly working outside on retaining walls in the garden and finally they are installing the stone archway at the front door. A couple of pictures though. We love the way that the crystals in the WC light create a pattern on the walls. Feature brick wall with arches that my wife really wanted being installed.