Nelliekins

@Ferdinand we got planning permission for reserved matters 18 months ago, based on outline permission from 2015 IIRC. As it happens, we had already been told by the planners themselves that CfSH was unenforceable... Their (cunning) solution was to include a planning constraint to achieve 19% more efficency than the DER/TER that was previously mandated by CfSH level 4, which our planning officer said would make us effectively as energy efficient as a home that achieved level 6 (but without all the woolly bike shed nonsense). Regarding the insulation, it's 50mm of PIR under the floor and 125mm of EPS70 over the floor (and under the UFH set in Tarmac Topflow). It was what the EPC consultant advised would get us through planning, so we blindly stuck to it. Its got a U value about 0.14, which isn't great but will suffice. Our roof is designed to be 0.1, and the walls 0.17. Glazing is pretty good for double glazed at 1.2 (which would have been better if we hadn't sunk so much money into groundworks). Neil.

Hi Nick. Not sure the moderators want a photo of them on here! ? Besides, it's too cold for that kind of malarky - there would be condensation all over them in a flash! So @Ferdinand said to speak to @PeterW about the blog... What happens to my (apparently well-regarded?) introduction? Should I just write the blog, and put a post at the bottom of here directing anyone who wants to share more of my suffering to the blog? Buckle up, it's going to be a bumpy ride! And don't worry, I am away from the build for a few days (enforced break to see family down south) and so plenty of time to get onto heating design! FWIW I have lurked here for many months, and fully intended asking you guys about my ideas for heating! ? Neil.

Ooh good questions. 1. We have 125mm of rigid insulation between slab and concrete floor - Building Control signed off on that quite happily (as did the planning dept, who get to stick their oar in since we have a planning condition that states we have to match or exceed CfSH level 6 in terms of overall TER/DER/EPC... Otherwise we can't live there!) 2. Ground level is split 50/50 between an internal floor over the basement, and 175mm of rigid insulation on the "non basement" side of the house (50mm below the block+beam and 125mm above). 3. We are watertight, first fix well underway, kitchen installed and part plasterboarded. I am doing the plumbing, electrics, heating design (although I am at an impasse with that atm) and lighting design (we have to have 100% LED lighting as another planning constraint). Neil.

Hi Ferdinand, Thanks for your kind words. TBH I was just writing a brief summary of the events to date, and would then give me a reference point for the multitude of queries that are building up as I approach completion of the build. I've already glossed over some of the anecdotes and minutiae that have sent me round the bend. If there's an appetite for my ramblings here, then I will gladly look to make it a blog (albeit written with the benefit of hindsight, since the events documented so far are all from a year or more ago!) As for pictures, those I can supply by the bucket load once I migrate them from my old phone... Neil.

OK, so we have a hole in the ground. It's a biggish hole - the basement is only half the width of the house above ground, but it's still 20m front to back and around 5m wide at the bottom (and battered slope on 3 sides at around 30 degrees). By this point, I have also spent over 8 weeks arguing with my structural engineer about some of the steel he's put into the ICF parts of the build. Arguing to the point that I get my builder-turned-consultant to meet the engineer to explain what he wants by way of reinforcement is neither possible nor necessary. The engineer refutes this opinion, so I get the ICF manufacturers to tell him he's mistaken, whereupon the engineer withdraws his services and threatens legal action if I use his designs... Even at this point, he hasn't twigged that I couldn't use his designs any more than I could fly by flapping my arms a bit. (In case anyone thinks I am being harsh here, the engineer has specified 16mm steel every 150mm vertically in a Logix ICF block that spaces the steel every 203mm. There is no physical way to insert at least 5 of the steel loops because they fall in exactly the same place as the plastic webs that hold the ICF blocks together, without which the blocks simply fall apart.) The next engineer took 3 days to spec the steel reinforcement for the same columns, and came up with calcs that justified 12mm steel every 203mm - fancy that! The lesson here is to find an ICF specialist engineer not just a regular structural engineer - it will save time, money and possibly your sanity in the long run!) The 300mm slab gets poured - another mistake: we should have insulated under the slab. However I didn't think it'd be cost effective because we were 3.5m below ground and therefore insulated by Mother Earth already. If we had insulated under, our energy bills would likely be quite a bit lower, but you live and learn! Oh, and maybe I should have paid more attention instead of getting all giddy like a teenager at prom, because if I had I would have noticed the groundworkers slopping waterproof concrete (that cubed as C68) into the sump pit at the back, where the perimeter drainage emptied into! Have since had to break that slipped concrete out with SDS chisels and a breaker bar... December 2017. We build the ICF walls for the basement. 10" thick with 2 faces of 12mm steel debar at 200mm centres both horizontal and vertical. Our onsite training in ICF construction has the boss of the ICF firm himself on site, helping to build the walls... Except he misread the plans for the house. At the back of the basement, we have a lightwell, which serves as a 2nd means of escape from the basement, but it's clearly an external area because there is no house above it... Only our onsite training guru treats this as an internal wall, and has us construct a T wall joined only by pockets of concrete, instead of a full joint that would be watertight... My fault - I should have realised at the time that this was idiotic, and would completely negate the point of using waterproof concrete because there would be a gaping hole in the back wall of the house (which we are still fixing now, though having internally tanked the basement at least the water isn't visible any more!). January 2018 arrives, and we pour the rest of the footings for the house (the basement is only half width). All goes well, apart from a tremendous excess of concrete dropped into the concrete pump hopper. He dumps it in the front garden (and nearly a year later, it is still there - I call it "the monolith" for no other reason than it's about 2m long and weighs around 5 tonnes). Then the house starts to fly up (comparatively!). Well, once the ICF blocks arrive anyway... But at this point in the build, I am getting very used to delays, even if it does take 11 weeks for the blocks to arrive from Dorset...! Tune in next week for another thrilling instalment!

Hi all. 2 years ago, my wife and I put in sealed bids for a 3 bed detached house - which needed a lot of work doing, but had plenty of space to extend - and the plot of land that used to be the side garden of the same house. Our plan was to extend and renovate the house, and have a nice garden for our 2 girls, my observatory, etc... Only something didn't work out to plan. We got the plot, but NOT the house. So we decided to build a new house. We are fervent Grand Designs watchers/readers, so we thought "ooh let's do an ICF build". We found a specialist ICF builder, recommended by all the big ICF firms in the UK. All our plans seemed foolproof - good builder, decent plot (11m wide and 55m deep, perfectly level) and me to project manage (I have project management skills from my day job developing software). What could go wrong? A good question... Here's the list (actually this is just the first part of the list - there will be a LOT more to come in later posts) : 1. It took 5 months to complete the purchase because of issues relating to the deeds for the neighbouring house, and party wall negotiations, and things of that ilk 2. Having taken 5 months, our builders had moved on to another job, so they would only be able to advise, rather than do the work. That meant I became the builder (albeit only part time because I was keeping my day job) 3. Local planning dept prevented us from accessing site (we had to cut down a hedgerow to get access, but we had now entered bird nesting season) until August - another 3 month delay 4. Our groundworkers had to move onto another job because of this 2nd delay, so we ended up finding a firm from 40 miles away to do the works,... But finding them meant more delays, so we didn't break ground until 9th October 2017. So 10 months had elapsed, which was pretty much our projected build time for the whole project... Now we were digging out our basement (oh yeah - my wife thought a basement would be a good idea) in the horrendous rain from the end of last year. We were short on money so had opted for a battered slope excavation, rather than sheet piles (2 separate firms had suggested prior that any sheet piles would be sacrificial because we'd never be able to get them out of the ground again - more on this later). 2 months and 74 wagons (of the 32 tonne variety) later, and we had a hole (2 actually - one in the ground and a bigger one in our finances!) Oh, those sheet piles we couldn't afford... We ended up with 22 sheet piles in at the front of the excavation to shore up. This was necessary because the 13-tonne excavator was trying its hardest to slide in the mud into the hole we dug, and the clay banks kept caving in. As it turns out, the sheet piles came out fairly easily. So if anyone tells you sheet piles are going to be sacrificial, they're probably lying so they can sell you steel. We pulled ours out with the excavator, but if necessary we could have cut through next door's phone line and got a 50T crane on site that would have plucked them straight out of the ground, and the cost to repair the phone line -and- hire the crane would have been under £3k as opposed to £50k for the steel. <deep breath, before part 2>