AliG

It's just not going to happen. My wife is beside herself and at this precise moment not talking to me. Airbnb over Christmas and New Year.

Touch and go as to whether we will manage to get in before Christmas. I'll be back to see what is available on Airbnb on Wednesday depending on how things are going. Christmas is OK, but accommodation in Edinburgh over New Year is going to be both expensive and hard to find. Basically we are trying to get roughly half the rooms in the house useable. We are aiming for the kitchen, which should be finished, 3/4 bedrooms and one sitting room. The temporary stairs promised two weeks ago are still not in, the stair supplier is the only person in the whole build of the house that I have had cross words with. I am a very forgiving client!

You are right, the wall gets wider as they add the Inserts, they use longer ties between the two sides of the ICF. You could add 62.5mm insulated plasterboard to standard ICF with no inserts. this would give around a 0.15 U-Value. I would not get too worried about 0.01 of U-Value here or there in the walls as you can regain it in the roof, windows or floor. The interior plasterboard can be mechanically fixed to ICF and any cables in exterior walls channeled into the EPS. In our house we found that virtually all services went in interior walls anyway. This would give around a 330mm thick wall, assuming a 100mm core. You would get a similar thickness with 0.18 U-Value ICF with a 50mm insert. Depending on the cost the extra insulation may not pay for itself.

I have some picked but as they haven't come I cannot recommend them. https://www.lumenalights.com/shop/product/ovus-650-g-dark-grey-energy-saving-post-light/ One thing I decided is that if these lights are to be left on for long periods of time I would get ones with changeable bulbs as otherwise if the LED electronics go (which they frequently do) then you will have to replace the whole fitting.

If I was doing that I would continue the first floor roof down at the same angle to hit the top of the ground floor wall, it would look much less awkward. The same as above the garage. As drawn it could look like an extension even if it is not. I don't think that you can extend both floors as the roof would then obscure the some of the solar panels on the other elevation. It would certainly require a lot of changes to the shape of the roof, again making it a more material change. As has been said though, if that wall is to the north of the window and doesn't shade it then it is much less of a worry to have it there and I would probably just leave it. It might also create some shelter from the wind sitting out there depending on the prevailing wind direction. Would you actually use the space in the drawing room, I purposely reduced the size of ours relative to the size of the house as often large houses have drawing rooms with loads of empty floor space that never gets used, especially if it is to be a rarely used formal room.

Good news when I was up there today. We have run through another 2 bottles of gas! They have 2 dehumidifiers in the kitchen, but they weren't able to run them and the heating at the same time as it put too much strain on the site supply. So the UFH had been on since Friday, it was -6 outside when I got up this morning. This is much colder than normal. It was 12 degrees in the kitchen and 15 in an upstairs bedroom with humidity in both in the 40s. I told them just to keep the dehumidifiers on in the kitchen until tomorrow so it is warm. They will start putting the kitchen in tomorrow or Tuesday. Tomorrow we can get the mains gas connect up as they put the meter in last thing on Friday. The front door is in and looking good, it just wasn't sealed up around the edges so they had covered it up with cardboard hence I thought it wasn't in. There are still a good few holes such as where window sills are to go in and around the front door. As these get sealed up it will get warmer. I can already feel the benefit of the triple glazing, you could not feel how cold it is outside standing right next to the windows. The current temperature is -2. There was ice on the outside of the windows. I am pretty hopeful we will get in at the end of next week as planned.

Thanks. Will speak to builder re dehumidifiers today. He was talking about getting some in. I hadn’t thought about the aspect of them warming the place up also.

I guess you could do this if you had a wall in line with the small ridge in the second diagram and the front area of the roof was higher than the side part of the roof. The side roof would have to be at a shallower angle than the front roof and the wall would be in line with the ridge, they couldn't share a pitch half way up as you have shown as the side roof would have to rise the same height over roughly twice the distance. But it would look very strange from the side, very strange. If you want them to look the same it would probably be much better to change the porch roof so it didn't have a ridge.

I have joined the electric revolution. Just picked up my Model X. So smooth, absolutely lovely. I had to put it in "chill" mode as they are scarily fast.

The front door is on site, I will try and make sure they put it in on Monday. I thought it was going in this week. Clearly it is going to be a big source of heat loss until then.

I had figured out that the gas heaters were a bad idea, they were using them for a few days before we got the UFH running. The wight within the insulated envelope includes 550 square meters of 200mm thick concrete planks. These have been in situ for over 6 months and were probably manufactured around 9 months ago so I am guessing they are pretty much dried out. Then we have around 1000 sqare metres of 70mm screed. That has been down for around 4 months so it will have dried out to a good extent. It has been some time since I have seen a damp area when someone put something down on the ground Then we have the Porotherm clay blockwork, most of the internal walls are made of this and there is the internal layer of the external cavity walls. However, this has insulated plasterboard on it so maybe I should exclude it from what we are heating up. This was built between 6 and 9 months ago and the mortar is only 1mm thick so hopefully it is pretty dry. The main recent wet trade has been plaster skimming all the walls and ceilings. Some of these were just done in the last few days, indeed they have not done the hall yet. It is only a few mm thick and seems to dry out after around 2 weeks. The humidity is running at around 40% with the heating on but the temperature not that high, I will see how it is tomorrow with the heating cranked up a bit. But maybe most of the drying out has occurred. It is definitely something to think about when scheduling a build and a much bigger problem due to the low current temperatures. I thought the front door would be in this week, but it wasn't when I just drove past. We have sanded and sealed the screed and started to tile, the wooden floor underlay has a damp proof layer, but they do not want to lay it yet. Hopefully the temperature will warm up with the humidity not going too high. I have suggested that as it warms up we open the veluxes in the top floor to create a chimney effect and draw the moisture out. More new tomorrow after I meet the builder

I do have an IR camera, I might take it round on Sunday, the floor definitely felt warmer to the touch. Looking at the gas use, it might be that I would need around 6 bottles over a week and a half to get it up to temperature as I reckon around 5000kwh including losses. I don't know how much heat the builders have been letting out and the massive drop in outside temperature in the last couple of weeks won't have helped. The builder has suggested doing a room at a time, but we don't have the heating controls connected up yet, so we are just running it with open manifolds.

It was an RCBO board yes. £630 plus VAT for a 19 way board

My thread followed what a nightmare this issue was for us. We took months to get building warrants signed off when selling out house and only got it done two weeks before completion. Basically the solicitor wanted all the drawings lodged with building control for any work done on the house along with the completion certificates. These will be lodged with the deeds to the house. I did not have all the drawings, in many cases I had never even seen them, and I had to apply to the council records keeping for copies. I then had to get all the little jobs the builder had not finished signed off. What I found was that everything was safe and working, but if you do not comply with the full letter of the law then the bureaucracy gets you. For example should a kitchen have a smoke or a heat detector. I had three different inspectors each produce totally different lists of things they wanted done to be compliant. I wish I had known all of this before starting any work This was the first time I had owned a house where I had extended it or done any other work requiring approval. If you do this work it will make life a lot easier when you sell the house if you get all the paperwork and signs offs at the time the work is done and keep it. Because of the ever increasing level of electrical regulation I ended up having to replace my CU at a cost of almost £1000 to get a sign off of previous done electrical work. You basically end up with a creeping need to comply with current regulations irrespective of the age of the house.

Hi, We have had the heating running for around 7 days and the interior temperature of the house was around 11 degrees today according to the builder, the outside temperature has collapsed to 3 today. This is clearly not helped by them being in and out all day leaving does open etc. Also the front door is not in so it is just a frame with waterproof sheeting over it.(It may be in now) the MVHR is not on etc. I tried to calculate how much energy required to get the house up to temperature. I reckon there is around 600tonnes of concrete and blockwork inside the heated envelope. This would require around 3000kwh of heating to raise the temperature 20 degrees. Plus any heat losses which are probably running at a few hundred kwh per day in the current unfinished state. Heating up the air will require a negligible amount of energy in comparison. Does anyone have any experience of heating up a blockwork or ICF house and how long it took to get up to temperature. We need it to be in the high teens by Tuesday for the kitchen to go in. I had not really considered this but due to the much higher weight of this kind of construction, even if it is as well insulated as a wooden house it will require much more energy for initial heat up. The heating went off at one point after running through 2 large bottles of Calor gas in a 4 days. That seems to be around 1300 kwh of gas We are restricted on how much we can turn up the heating flow temperature so as to not cause cracking. I thought this was not a problem as the flow temperature should not have to be high. This is true once the house is up to heat but starting from a low temperature I am worried that the 30-35C flow I think we are running will not be enough to heat the house up quickly.

Thanks @Onoff Looking at reviews it seems that things either go smoothly or very badly. There is nothing in between. When things do go badly then they seem to have a very bad attitude. Getting the car up the driveway would be easy. Their other arguments included that there was a step up from the drive to the garage and that there are unfinished cables in the house. The garage and driveway complaints are nonsense as I am sure that they regularly deliver to people with gravel drives and a steps at the front door. The people who moved my snooker table two days earlier had no problems. As for the cables then the power is not connected so they are also a non issue. Unfortunately as I was not there it is hard for me to argue the toss. I might well take pictures when I am there on Sunday. The key thing is making sure they deliver on 22 December or indeed we will be into the realms of Christmas being spoiled and legal action will be likely. The house was supposed to be ready to move in on December 8th. We are now looking at the 21st. The delays are probably costing me around £3000-4000. I have mixed feelings about holding the builder liable as he is working very hard to get things done, but he shouldn't have got so far behind in the first place. The original completion date was July.

They claimed there was too much work going on. They were taking down some scaffolding when they arrived. I don't think it's clear cut enough to argue about sadly. My wife pointed out that she told them it we were building the house and they had the address but they never went to see the place until they took the furniture round there. We were quite happy for them to offload stuff into the garage or a downstairs room. Of course once they have your stuff in their possession it is quite difficult to argue about it. This is the first time in my life we have ever used professional movers, we have always done it ourselves before. My wife had a go at them and they told her that they would decide what they were doing, she argues harder than I ever would. She has it in for them now. They did agree not to charge for storage, just for the redelivery. I said that they had to come back and say they were happy with redelivering before we paid for the redelivery charge.

Back at their depot with a £500 redelivery charge. I knew there would be a problem when my wife told me how awkward they were yesterday when they came to pick everything up.

Movers refused to move stuff into house today as they said it is too much of a building site. refused to drive their van onto type 1 driveway base, ridiculous its no worse than a gravel driveway

Finished packing up the old place today. Had to take 2 days off work at short notice as despite a fantastic effort from my wife we couldn't get it all done by the weekend. House still well off being finished, booked into Airbnb for 2 weeks now. Absolutely cannot go past then. A few pics of the current state of play. That may be me trying out a bath.

I believe that taking something even that is being thrown away from a skip commits the crime of "theft by finding". @Cpd clearly didn't do that, I just don't want anyone getting into trouble accidentally. A few years ago someone was charged for taking stuff from a Tesco skip. Frankly this is a stupid and ridiculous waste of police and court time as it was plainly thrown away but it still happened. So if you find something useful in a skip make sure you ask for it. I can't imagine anyone would say no, well I can but most people would be fine with it. Last week we put a chest of drawers out for the council to take away, someone rang the bell and we happily let them have it.

@JSHarris I agree with everything you said, I guess I just don't think that reaches the level really of a peer to peer lending business it is more like making a personal loan to a friend. If you started opening it up to more people though who were less well known then the risks would increase considerably. There are a few people who have been posting on the forum for a long enough period of time and that people know well enough to feel comfortable lending to, but I suspect that really is just a few people. That is really no different to lending to a friend. Although my general rule is to assume any money loaned to a friend will be treated as a gift until it is paid back!

@Nickfromwales I think we can just about squeeze in. I can't argue it's not excessive but it's a lifetime dream and I may as well enjoy living in my money as having it in the bank. I'd like to hope that the house can stay in the family when I am gone but who knows what the future holds. Really thanks for the LPG idea, without the heat we would not be able to move in before Christmas. It is on today(I think) they were supposed to have it on last Friday which would have been even better. The airbnb is a 2 bed apartment, maybe we'll enjoy that just as much. Airbnb is great in this situation, it would have been very hard to rent an apartment for a couple of weeks a few years ago without paying an exorbitant amount. This works out at the same cost as the local Travelodge. I didn't know until a week ago that getting the gas and electricity connected up did not mean we had meters so they still could not be used, luckily there was only a 6 day lead time on the gas meter. I will be begging for the easiest possible slot for electricity next week. It reinforces that I am sure we could do it better if we did it all over again. I am sure that loads of work will still be outstanding when we move in, particularly exterior stuff such as guttering and garden walls. We will also have a temporary stair and no fitted wardrobes, just the spaces where they go. I don't think will have all the decorating finished either. The family would rather stay on a building site than in a rental. I think if we had not set a fixed date when we had to move though in that the build would have dragged on for another 3 months. I'll post some pics when I am there on Sunday and you can all marvel at how unfinished the house looks despite our plan to move in in 2 weeks.

We were hoping to move in on the 8th of December, but this is just proving too tight. Luckily we can use Airbnb to tide us over for a week or 2. However we have 5 people coming to stay for Christmas and New Year on 23 December so have to be done by then. The shell is complete and we are working on decorating, tiling flooring etc. However what has caused a lot of issues is temperatures and heating. Anything wood needs the house to be warm and acclimatise before it is installed. This includes doors, floors, kitchen and staircases. On the other hand, tiles need the floors to be cold to be installed. This would not have been an issue in September as the ambient temperature was close to the normal temperature but it is an issue now. The kitchen people refused to install the kitchen this week incase it warped as the heating came on. The gas and electricity are connected up next week but we then need the meters connected up to get full control of the heating. For the moment we have just got LPG connected up and working as of today thanks to @Nickfromwales Perhaps this is useful information for other people, it seems that the timing of final finishes is quite awkward due to temperature issues, especially in winter.

The problem we would have here is spreading the risk over enough loans and calculating the expected default/loss rate. The housing crash in America in 2008 was in some part driven by lending to people with poor credit at low rates. The media and pundits would say that if you charge people with poor credit higher rates you are pricing them out of the market and being unfair. The reality is that as loss rates rise, interest rates have to rise considerably to offset the cost of this. Banks don't care about fairness just getting their money back and making a profit. Without a large pool of loans the predictability of loss rates would be very difficult. You make one alone and they don't pay you back and you lose 100%. It might be that they wanted to pay you back but got ill or lost their job etc. Over 100 loans you can average the risk of this out. Part of he attraction of crowdfunding is that the community aspect of it may reduce loss rates and I am sure if forum regulars were offered loans then they would do their utmost to pay them back, but unforeseen circumstances are a reality of life. @SteamyTea says that 0.8% per month is a "loan shark" type operation, but if they only get paid back 95% of what they lend out then it quickly becomes a fair rate of interest for the risk. Often when I read people's circumstances on here the chances are that they are a good credit and it is simply that the banks systems do not allow enough flexibility in calculating the risk and pricing the loan. Thus in these circumstances people here cold try and price that risk themselves and take on board the loan. That is fine but not easy. Who would go through the paperwork to decider the risk of not being paid back, who takes the hit, what are people's financing costs etc. I don;'t want to poo poo an interesting idea, but there is a reason that lending is very highly regulated and the stock price performance of banks over recent years does not suggest that it is easy money and they are fleecing people (in fairness some areas do make very large profits such as store cards, some credit cards, doorstep lending etc)