newhome

That’s excellent news, well done! Love it when people stand up against mindless bureaucracy and win! You can put the kettle back now

Lovely site! Will make a great spot I’m sure. Welcome, from the wild and windy east coast of the Borders.

I would also take the opportunity to summarise your understanding of what they have said at the end of the meeting and ask them to confirm your understanding if you can. Someone there to act as witness is also a good idea if you can arrange it, and I guess you have security cameras in the house that record sound and movement? ? Of course they may not tell you anything at all during the inspection.

Foundations were here already as we bought the plot after the foundations were laid which is why we were also tied to the house design, but planners wouldn’t have been receptive to a different style of house anyway as they kicked off when we wanted to change the fenstration as ‘it would spoil the cottagy look and be out of keeping’. FFS there is nothing ‘cottagy’ about this house and they seem to have completely overlooked the Swiss Cottage type house behind me that is completely out of keeping already! They are quite deep and ‘traditional’. We had more put in for an additional room too (see photo). I know that they are deep as the structural engineer insisted that I dig down to the bottom of the foundations to expose the ground beneath where the original foundations met the additional room to get the SER for the extension. He said they might be 450 - 600mm he thought. He was coming to inspect it on the Monday am so I started digging with a garden spade on Sat am. 1.2 metres down on Sun lunchtime it was too deep and the ground too heavy for me to dig further. I admitted defeat and someone came and dug the rest out in the dark on Sun night. It was about 1.5 metres in the end. Structural engineer peered into the hole and said ok. I was half dead mind

Wasn’t the whole hog clearly but this is what we had. Timber frame and ‘Supawall’ panels 9 years ago. Not sure what progress has been made since.

Is that where you are then? I won’t say what we used to call it as it’s not very PC

It’s deffo changed a lot since I used to ride my pony up there in the 70s. I haven’t been up there for a few years tho. Lots of million plus houses up there now instead of the ones that went for peanuts in the 70s / 80s. http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-59008477.html

Yeah well Row Dow isn’t exactly the cheapest road on the block and has always been fairly pricey. Had schoolfriends who lived up there in amazing houses. However, when I was a kid a bit further up in Knatts Valley wasn’t the most desirable of areas let’s say, but now most of the plots have been bought up, the original houses nuked, and the prices are well over a million these days. Wish I’d had to foresight to buy up there, but you couldn’t pay people to live up there back in the day!

Nearly there then!

It's all the same scheme so I imagine it's the same throughout the UK. My claim for a house in Scotland was just sent to Newcastle and the form to be completed was the same.

Ready or not we just moved in / squatted, call it what you will, and lived in a couple of rooms. We didn’t have an issue with access however. I did bring the build in on budget pretty much (budget, payments and paperwork were my only responsibilities initially) but in order to do that I compromised / reduced costs in some areas that I wish I now hadn’t, so don’t beat yourself up over anything, if you’ve ended up with the place of your dreams it will all be worth it when you finally move in.

Get them on the case with boxing in then! And payment in Haribo has to be good value

I had to get a Form Q to show that the roof could take the weight of the solar panels as they hadn’t been part of the original design and I was also asked to prove that they weren’t a fire risk . It does seem to be inspector dependent as a different one came round for the final inspection and tried to add things that weren’t on the original list. I complained and a third one came out who wasn’t bothered by those things and signed it off.

+1. I just filled in the completion form and they came out and did the inspection, and provided a list of things to be corrected or certificates they wanted to see before sign off. Things I thought they might be interested in they weren’t bothered about and things that looked ok to me they picked up on. It really wasn’t a big list in the great scheme of things. Once those things were addressed they came back to check and I got the completion certificate.

There are a few women on here who have the dream too and you will find lots of banter / humour on here Years ago I spoke to a Belgian friend who told me that every Belgian man was born with a brick in his belly so the dream of building their own house was part of who they were. He had built his own house already. The other thing I observed was the number of houses built next to the owner’s business, so a mix of residential and commercial premises side by side. Clearly very different planning regulations from those in the UK.

Try a different browser?

Seems like a good plan. I intend to do something similar when I get to 55. I just hope the state pension is still around when we need it to top up at that stage

Ah well I have a DB pension but considering taking the CETV if the price is right.

Great news! I guess there has to be a minimum age you can draw from your pension otherwise people might draw from it in their 20s. It increased to 55 (from 50) in 2010. And at least you can now put your money in a drawdown pot because before 2015 you would have been forced to buy an annuity (or leave it as a defined benefit pension).

Most of them round here work at the nuclear power station so they live with that risk every day

I'm still half tempted by the nuclear bomb approach

Ah, well that's not so bad then. I had visions of £300 heating bills in the summer! Finally got it to heat enough water for a bath tonight. Whacked the boiler up to 85, that heated the TS to just over 60 and that gave enough hot water to fill the smaller bath. Beats boiling up kettles to top up which is what I was doing! So I'll be doing that when I want to shower etc. in the evening and then turning it down afterwards. Won't be happening in the morning as no time to faff around with temperatures before work and I assume I shouldn't leave the boiler at 85 all the time? Those pumps (the up, down, and upside down) stay the same temp as they were before the TS was hotter (if that makes a difference).

Having said that the back door doesn't seem that well insulated (as in I can feel a draft) and the heating is always on in that room so I should probably do something about that.

It’s not fixed yet so might not quite be time. The heating doesn’t work in most of the house anyway although I am ‘losing’ hot water to the manifolds that doesn’t make it into the rooms but hopefully that will get sorted when it’s fixed. Every room is on frost apart from 2 currently.

It scares the life out of me too and unfortunately it’s my system! I’m totally sure mine would be ok if it had been specified and installed by someone who knew what they were doing. A stream of people fiddling with it compounded all the issues when going back to basics seems to be what’s required to sort it. What is it they say? Prior Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance. Great idea to get the design sorted on here. Will help others too. I'm not entirely convinced by the economics of having to run the boiler all the time (I know the output drops back as needed mind) to keep the TS up to temperature. In the summer I only need to switch on a tap, get a bit of hot water and switch off again. Not liking the sound of the boiler being on all the time just for that.