AliG

Thank you. I think it’s the room I most dreamed about when I wanted to build a house

Depends how long the builders take to finish. We are very nearly there. Most work is outside now. We are just putting in retaining walls and getting ready to put the patio areas in. We still don’t have a driveway as the builder doesn’t want concrete trucks ruining it. That’s fine but one of our cars has been in my parents’garage for months and they move house in two weeks!

Don’t give my wife ideas. She wanted two stairs in the hall!

We are finally very close to being finished inside. We have been living in dust for two months. I have been trying really hard to avoid putting up pictures until it’s all done, but the stair is going in and looking beautiful. As there is another stair porn thread re glass balustrades I thought I’d join the party. Give it a few weeks and I’ll do a full photoshoot.

Biggest saving you can make is changing the kind of driveway. Resin bound is pretty much the most expensive driveway that you can build. £120ish a square metres as quoted seems about right as the costs would drop for a larger area. There are other kinds of permeable driveway. You can get permeable blocks or permeable tarmac. That would roughly halve the cost. I know that a lot of people here are looking at the costs and saying they seem high but they seem about what I would expect for a main contractor. They don't tend to price things like skirtings by saying I buy this for £x a metre and then it will take a guy 1 day to fit at £150 a day. Instead they will price it at £10 a metre fitted. They don't want to spend time looking for the cheapest sources on the internet etc. Thus you can often do this kind of thing cheaper, but it involves a lot of work. Unfortunately I think as you go along you might find further small things still not costed, e.g. does the window quote include window sills. Often these smalls things just get forgotten about until you realise that they are needed. From a quick look at the plans, you could probably lose the wall and door that create the vestibule as it is not necessary. You could also have the dressing room open to the bedroom which would save a door, between them that might save £1000. I guess it might be too late to change the plumbing, but if you swapped the en suite and the dressing room around, the en suite would have a window to the front and the dressing room doesn't have to have a window so you could do away with the skylight currently in the en suite. (I'd also personally make the ensuite wider and the dressing room narrower either way) Is decorating actually included in the various prices, e.g for the skirting and architraves? Painting is perhaps a job you cold do yourself for a decent saving.

That’s all true but a block paving road would still be safe. It just might not look good if heavy traffic damages it. As long as he puts down something safe enough to use they might be happy enough. Planners are a law unto themselves they might care and they might not. The problem is that you have no way of knowing so it’s hard to rely on them.

I wouldn't rely on the planning condition helping you out, the council have to enforce it and may be happy with what he is doing, even if you are not. It seems that it mainly relates to safety and access. I thin it would be tough to add he was in breach by constructing a road earlier than expected, certainly not enough of a breach for the council to care. it sounds like there is nothing written in the contract that stops him building the road. However, it also seems that it is quite stupid and unreasonable to do so before all 4 houses are completed. Is the relationship good enough to simply ask him why the urgency and point out it is not a good idea? It may be worth getting a solicitor to put in writing that he has sold you a building plot and you had a reasonable expectation of access for building on the plot. (You could just do it yourself, but as it is not written down I think it requires some legal advice) Thus you will not take responsibility for any costs if an unsuitable road surface is installed before building is complete. This puts the risk back on him if he builds the road. Is it really worth it for him to argue about it and not delay. Getting the other owners to support you would also help in this. As others have said I used to live in a steel that was entirely constructed of block paving, at one point we had a crane in the street to lift concrete floor slabs up for our extension and no damage was done, a properly constructed road should be able to take construction traffic. But it is better to have clarity in the situation.

We have sarking but 200mm rafters and no gap. It is ventilated from above the sarking. Putting in three lots of insulation will be unnecesarily expensive. There are three lots of cutting etc. As A_L says 25mm of insulation would make negligible difference. But it may be that yours has been specced for a 25mm gap and 200mm of insulation. The sarking cannot be air tight, it has to breathe, so that gap will not make a difference to air tightness. BTW your design has specified unnecessarily expensive insulation. K7 and K18 can be changed for Celotex or cheaper Kingspan. This will reduce the insulation level by 5% but the cost considerably.

“No later than” is a fairly standard term. It is designed to stop someone delaying doing something. You wouldn’t want the road built years after you are finished. There is nothing at all to stop them doing it earlier. I really don’t see it as open to any other interpretation. Now if they were sensible they would wait until you are finished but they don’t have to. The question I would ask is what does the contract say re responsibility for repairs of your deliveries damage the road? Sadly you could be on the hook for this.

Thanks for all the comments guys. I’ve spent the day on a plane going away for work and have left my wife to deal with the builder. I’m not being helped at the moment by getting a promotion which means I am doing a whistle stop world tour. But this is what pays for it all. Some days I would love to be on site all the time. When I was on holiday a couple of weeks ago I felt it helped a lot. In truth my wife is more no nonsense than I am so hopefully she’s getting things sorted. The builder is very willing, but I suspect lack of notice means he sometimes gets who is available not who is good. When I land I’ll see what result she got from speaking to him today. Thanks

It's not quite that bad but close in some places

I had just a quick reccie round the house. Spot lights are the plasterer's friend. In the rooms with spots either the ceilings are much better or you just cannot see it as they don't create shadows on the ceiling. I don't know at what point it is considered unacceptable. I took a picture of a room that isn't perfect but might be considered passable? I looked at the redone lounge ceiling. It was done by the guys who rendered the outside of the house where they have done a fantastic job. It is now flat but has a few lines in it as shown in the picture above. I think that is the kind of thing that could be fixed with a little sanding but you cannot fix an undulating ceiling with sanding. I'd guess around 10-20% of the plastering is poor if I look at the whole house.

We have 5% held back until the job is finished and signed off by the architect. My wife had a massive go at the builder on Friday night. We were supposed to be in last year and finally had to just move in 3 weeks ago. We are reasonably relaxed about timescales as long as things are done properly.The problem is that no matter how well the house is built and how much money you have spent, the final finish is what people will see and what gives an impression of the house. The house is now 90% painted, I have told the builder that I shouldn't have to go around checking the work that is his job. It is only now that we are in that the poor quality finish is obvious. It is by no means everywhere, but it is in a lot of places. Considering how far behind we are already the thought of having to go around and wholesale replanted and paint rooms is depressing.

The builder's argument is that it was dark when they were skimming, but I said that was nonsense as often people must plaster in far from ideal light conditions. TBF I couldn't see the imperfections then. The painters put a mist coat onto the walls which is supposed to highlight imperfections before painting, but the that wall I described as the worst one they just went ahead and painted last week. All the skimming was done some time ago, the poor standard is only coming to light now that we are in and they are painting which highlights it. In some areas it is absolutely fine and as it is a large house there will be areas that need redone, but some areas are just laughably bad. In our last house we had ceilings skimmed after leaks upstairs and they were absolutely immaculate. When shown bad areas now the builder just says that they will come back and sand them down.

Hi, We are on the cusp of really falling out with our builder. We have had to move into the house which is way over schedule, they are just finishing off the decorating. In many man places the wall finish seems unacceptable. The architect came in and made the builder reskim and repaint two ceilings. But the more I look at the walls and ceilings the more the finish looks poor. Basically the finish is rippled in many places as well as having many rough patches. I am not clear who is doing a poor job, the plasterer or the painters, but ultimately the builder is responsible. My wife wants the painters fired, the woodwork doesn't look great either tbf. They have not primed the edges of MDF in the door frames so it looks very poor compared to the ready primed woodwork. We have paid an absolute fortune to have all walls and ceilings painted as it is supposed to be a better finish, but in most places it actually looks worse than our previous house that was taped. I don't want to be unreasonable but the finish is letting down, what is a very expensive build. I noticed in my last house the painters had some kind of large spinning brush sander that they took across the walls before they painted. Here they just seem to be going around with filler and sandpaper. The builder says just to leave it until snagging time and indeed the architect has decided after some work has been redone to just do the same as he wants them to finish and not delay any further. The trouble is that we won't really be finished if they then have to come back into every single room and start sanding and repainting. I just don't understand the attitude of the building trade that you do a poor job and then keep coming back to redo it. Any thoughts on where they may be going wrong? It is quite hard to capture this in pictures but I just had a go This is the reskimmed and painted ceiling (I think they plan to further sand and paint it) My daughter's bedroom A 45degree joint This is part of probably the worst wall in the house My daughter's ceiling again

TBF it's £350-500 per worker per day based on an 11 hour day. Based on a 7 hour day more normal for builders after breaks, it is £230-£330 which seems a lot more what you might expect for a stonemason. As @nod says you can only compare the per metre costs, after that it is up to them how fast they work.

Good point, every house I have had before this one was built by a mass market builder and they don't tank the showers, they just tile and seal them.

We normally find it starts to leak after 7 or 8 years. First it starts to look bad as it gets black marks on it. Eventually you may want to replace as it looks nicer. Secondly it starts to deteriorate and the seal breaks. If you don't see this and have an upstairs shower you may not know until there is water coming through the ceiling. It's a lot less hassle to replace mastic than fix a ceiling. I'd try and keep an eye on it and try and replace it as soon as you think the seal is deteriorating.

Does the property have mains gas? If you are including hot water in bills, electric showers are going to cost 4x as much to run as using gas heated hot water. To heat 100l of water by 40c requires almost 5kWH. That means a gas powered shower is going to cost around 15p in hot water and an electric one 65p. 5 people having an electric shower every day is over £1000 a year in electricity. Thus I would definitely go for a large UVC and gas boiler (This is the set up I have gone for and I had exactly the same issue, what if three people want to have showers at the same time). The UVC doesn't have to be 500l as you can store water at 70C and then mix it with cold, but probably you are taking 400l. I would look into low water use shower heads as a way of reducing hot water usage, but I have no personal experience of these. They would also make it easier to have multiple showers running at the same time as they would reduce the necessary flow. If you can reduce the flow rate from a normal 10-12l per minute to 7l then you can have 3 showers for the same amount fo flow as 2 normal showers. That will make life a lot easier. One issue you then need to look at is your incoming water flow. If it is not high enough you would need a cold water tank to supply the UVC. However, this causes issues with the storage of large amounts of cold water. A better solution is a wider pipe to the mains, you could be lucky and already have this and have enough flow, otherwise it will be costly. We just stayed in an Airbnb and they had a big list of instructions for when you should turn the water on etc. My wife just ignored them and kept the heating and hot water on as much as she wanted. At £100 a night it is just cheeky then to ask you to mess around with the hot water. Incidentally we stayed in three Airbnbs whilst waiting for our house to complete, two of the had broken and unreliable boilers, including the one I just mentioned and the other the heating was broken on one floor. I think you are better to make low cost showers foolproof rather than a timer. So lowest cost of hot water and low flow. Similarly use PIR driven lights, LED fittings etc to stop people leaving lights on. All our bathrooms have PIR driven lights now, they are so good I have added more. As for the heating I would be tempted to get a NEST type system so that you can prevent them turning it up to 23C and leaving it on 24 hours a day. That is going to be very tempting when you don't have to pay the incremental cost.

A few general design/layout thoughts. As you appear to be working on it and have already changed the plan somewhat then I think it might be better to wait for plan mark 2. 1. The downstairs ceiling height is too low. Generally this size of house will now have a 2.7m downstairs ceiling. 2. Only the master bedroom has a wardrobe at the moment. The house is severely lacking in cupboard space. Think of how many cupboards you currently have and all the stuff you need to store and then decide how much space you need. 3. Be careful of putting so many floor to ceiling windows in a room as you have in the family room area, where would you put a TV for example. There is virtually no wall space to put furniture against. 4. The lowered ceiling areas in the bedrooms will encroach a lot, when looking at the floorspace you have be careful of the use of any space with less than 2m ceiling height. They are good for wardrobes and WC cisterns in ensuites, less good inside rooms. I don't see how you could fit bedroom 2 and 3 into the same space for example. The downstairs changes you suggest sound like a big improvement, but I agree with the idea of double doors to the hall allowing you to see through to the garden. Upstairs needs more work, maybe lose the linen cupboard in exchange for wardrobes, depends which you would use most. Does the bathroom need a bath and a bidet, would the get used? I'm not a fan of jack and jill en suites, but I can see the use if you are occupying all 4 bedrooms. If all bedrooms have an ensuite do you need a family bathroom at all, maybe a showroom. Is there one person who likes baths? Maybe put a bath in their en suite.

These are very similar but I am not sure if they are exactly the same. https://www.doorhandlecompany.co.uk/b15-satin-stainless-steel-door-handles-b15-sold-in-pairs-3044/

Can you get the stone cut into 10-20mm thick slips or does it have to be thicker? I think matching the rest of the stone would be nice.

@Alexphd1 what does your house look like? Where we are that area is often some kind of reconstituted stone, you could probably get sandstone slips or maybe granite as you are in Aberdeen. When I was looking to build in ICF I couldn't get my head around how this kind of detailing was done though. I was wary about just sticking it to the EPS. I found this on the net, but can't quite see what material they have used. I think this may just be painted. http://www.stewarthenderson.co.uk/images/gallery/icf/260.jpg

We had a hot tub on a cruise ship and the water had to be replaced every two or three days as it started to go cloudy. The heater was also broken and it had to be constantly filled up with hot water. The ship/hot tub was only 3 months old. I don't think they do well with heavy use. Admittedly it was not helped by a relative letting their 2 year old go in it. Would people not expect you to change the water every time there are new guests? That will cause a lot of work. I looked into one for our new house and decided they were too much hassle. Even relative to a swimming pool, the constant warm temperature of the water makes it very easy for bacteria to grow in them.

You can get Hormann or similar doors in Georgian panelling and a fake wood finish which looks pretty realistic. Other than the Georgian panel and the door I listed above though which don’t suit many of today’s house styles there is little available that looks traditional. Instead you could just get a flat door in wood effect. I too like @lizzie said would avoid wood for maintenance and cost.