recoveringbuilder

It has no turn at all , just straight up, it should have been next to the wall and had a cupboard under it for the ufh manifold but as it is we’ve had to cover the manifold with a radiator cabinet, I don’t know what he thought about the ceiling, it’s cathedral but has a lot of angles going on and therein lies the problem, the picture I put on is what you are faced with when you walk into the room , which is meant to be a dining room, we have the pellet stove on a feature wall and the space from this to the staircase being reduced by around 2 metres now means when you sit at the dining table you either can’t get your chair back very much at the stair side and at the other side if the stove is on your getting roasted !

@joe90 he is a man in his 60s , has been an architect all his life, we used him on our last build back in 2007 but I think he’s losing it, have spoken to another couple of self builders in the area and he has made mistakes with them too, one stopped him in his tracks as soon as it was discovered the other made him pay for putting the job right, I think I was lax in agreeing to this set up and I’m quite angry with myself for letting it happen but I think by the time I got to this stage after having to fight SP energy and the problems we had with Scottish water I had just lost the will to live! the problem now lies with whether or not it complies with BR , since I stupidly agreed to where it has been positioned I think if it complies I won’t have any comeback on him although it could be said I don’t have the house I was meant to!

Insufficient headroom

He didn’t do sectional drawings to my knowledge anyway @ProDavealtough maybe he did and we just never saw them, it has been said that because he hand draws his plans this is why it happened, if he’d done cad drawings we believe it would have flagged up at the beginning that it was never going to work. I’m not being petty about this, the position of the staircase is horrible and when you walk into the room you only see the back of it which looks like a shute in a play park, at some point whether we win this or not we are going to have to change it, it’s also very steep 42.5degrees, so much so that I won’t allow the grandkids to go up there.The ideal outcome would be to install the one he designed (along with the staircase company) that had the turn in it, I just feel that it would be a bit rash of us to fork out all this money without trying to get him to take responsibility for his expensive mistake. There’s no way that the original position could ever be achieved and I just wonder if he really didn’t understand how his roof design was going to be built and the angles that would be there thus interfering with the headroom

This is the elephant in the room as far as our new house goes and it is quite literally an elephant in the room. I’ve mentioned this before as some of you may remember but it’s one of these things that won’t go away and is really bugging me. So when we were building and came to the stage where we were getting measured up for the staircase ( which we had paid as part of the kit) the staircase company discovered that the staircase could not be situated where the architect had it on his drawings, not as a straight flight anyway. The architect became very nervous and paid several visits trying to work out something that would work and eventually came up with a design which would keep it starting against the wall then turning and ending up half way along the mezzanine so it would not encroach into the room . The staircase company did plans for this and all looked as if it would come to a satisfactory conclusion however once it was priced up they were looking for another £5.5k, now as I said at the start we had already paid for the staircase that should have been installed so I went to the architect and told him I expected him to foot the bill for the extra over however he was having none of it and said that if he’d designed the proper staircase to begin with we would have had to pay for it anyway but as I tried to tell him I probably wouldn’t have paid £11k for a staircase and would have gone for a cheaper option but now 7 months down the line with all the other oak doors and finishing all in situ it would look odd to put in a cheaper staircase. we were getting nowhere with him and quite frankly didn’t have a spare £5.5k so we got him to look at other options. Eventually he decided if we brought it out 1200mm from the wall we would get the desired headroom and he agreed to pay £1100 for the extra glass balustrade and oak handrail that would be required ( at this point I threatened him with legal action if he did not) I agreed to this as I was getting fed up waiting for the staircase and it seemed the only way to get it all sorted. so we’re now a year on from the staircase being installed, quite frankly it looks ridiculous and has reduced the usable space in the room by 2 metres and it’s really putting me off the whole house. the house isn’t signed off yet as our garage is on the same building warrant (another mess he’s made) and I’ve been looking for solutions to this. I had the engineer out to see it and he agreed it wasn’t right and suggested I get another architect to look for a solution. When the other architect came out he wasn’t happy with it either and he was of the opinion that it still didn’t meet building regulations and suggested I got the building control officer to come out and check it. I did this and got a rather whether or not chap who didn’t have a tape measure (!!) to check it, I offered to get him one but he mumbled something about it not being that simple and concluded that he would pass it as it stands. We needed to get a temporary habitation certificate and for this we needed an amendment to warrant in respect of the staircase and I contacted the original architect to do this which he did immediately without charge. we had decided that we would then wait until the garage is finished and all signed off then we would revisit the staircase problem however I had occasion to speak to the other architect the other day and he asked how I had gotten on with bco, when I relayed everything to him he said we would be silly to let it go and that we should ask for another visit from the head of bc and insist that he measured it. I’ve done this and await a visit from him next week, should he agree that it is not compliant we intend to go to litigation with the architect, I’m not looking forward to doing this but as I’ve been told he will have insurance to cover this I feel it’s the only way to go other than us having to fork out for another staircase, several visitors have remarked they wouldn’t buy this house with the staircase the way it is and I feel we haven’t got the house we’ve supposed to have. Any views on this please?

I recently bought two large three seater sofas and when the delivery firm came I let them come in through the bifold doors which they were really happy about because they told me they sometimes have to take the arms off to get in doorways, apparently if they remove the fabric on the bottom they can access whatever holds the arms on. In our last house we had a flat above the garage which our son lived in, he went out one day and bought a large sofa without thinking of the access, when the delivery guys came there was no way it was getting up that staircase, we had to remove the dormer window and haul it up with two people on ladders! When we sold up we had to saw it up into pieces to get it out!

+1

I had a few receipts that I wasn’t sure about, some in builders name and even one that wasn’t a receipt but a worksheet for glass I had ordered from a local company. The ones in the builders names I put an asterisk next to with an explanation below as to why it was in their name and everything went through no problem.

Yes local council had to approve the name we intended to use I think mostly to check there wasn’t another named the same in the area. We have a Beechgrove, Beechlea and Rowan bank near us so we went for willow park, we do have a couple of willow trees in the garden!

Had a lot of dealings with SP energy myself when they quoted us an extortionate amount for our new connection. In the end it was a pole on our land which took the dispute in a different direction, They had no way leave for it being there and when I threatened to serve them notice to remove it they suddenly reduced their quote to under a fifth of what they originally quoted so I wouldn’t rule out serving them notice, I think others on here have done so. As for the trees , where we are there is a tree surgeon sent round every year by SP energy to check any trees encroaching on their wires and they remedy this, we had one that they wanted to lop before we started our build and I asked them to take it down altogether (which they did foc ) so I can’t see this as something they would take into consideration. I can’t really advise any further sorry.

We had several different types of plasterboard used, green, pink etc bathrooms all done in the green and all ceilings double sheeted , outside walls done with the 37.5mm insulated pb apparently there’s a shortage just now of the insulated stuff and insulation in general, my SIL who is a QS was talking about it last night, it seems a fire in a factory in Croatia or some such place which makes some of the components that go into insulation has caused the shortage.

I can hang a washing up on a clothes horse in the kitchen (which usually sits about 18 degrees ) at night and it is dry by mid morning the next day, no condensation to be seen, I do have a condenser drier but I very rarely use it unless I’m in a hurry for something. Much prefer to hang it out though in the better weather!

Don’t know about terrified but I paid a visit to a house in the process of being built today and the smell of new wood set something off in me that my hubby is now terrified off ?

This is already the case, I know two friends who have bought property whilst still owning their main home, one in particular paid an extra £10k in ‘stamp duty’ . Currently you have 18 months to dispose of one of your properties and can then claim it back.

That seems like a helluva lot of fees!

That’s ridiculous! Our two previous self builds were both sold with their architects certificate even although they were out of time they were still required. my friend recently bought a property which had a conservatory added to it some years previously and the seller couldn’t produce any pp or bc paperwork so he had to buy an insurance policy to cover any future trouble with the conservatory ( either not having pp or not built to bc standards) so I wonder if this would be an option ?

Well I ended up with wood! If I thought that this would be my forever home I would have gone all out for the composite but I can’t say it will be so for a fifth of the price wood it was and it’s pretty smart looking

Top picture is definitely land drainage, I should know we’ve used rolls of it!

The builders should build to your spec , I would imagine most builders know about insulated slabs now

You’d do well to have a talk with claymore timber frame in fife, we were very happy with their service and our engineer was very happy with the spec, they also provide erection service which we were very happy with

Your budget quote from Scottish power will give you a price but no planned route for the connection, Scottish water doesn’t do budget quotes , you have to make a proper application for a connection and then they will give you all the details of where the main is and what they expect you to do, unlike @ProDave they wouldn’t do any of the work for us and we had to organise all the ground work and road crossing which was no easy feat, we couldn’t find anyone to do the road crossing at an acceptable price ( only company who were willing to do it wanted iirc £7k) we ended up getting the water pipe in when SP energy dig up the road for their connection. I think perhaps Scottish water won’t reveal the whereabouts of the main until you’ve paid the connection charge because previously people were just connecting themselves up!

I quite agree with you there, if all the other properties on this road had pavements to the front we would have been quite happy to do this as the road is pretty dangerous to walk on, there’s a 40mph speed limit on it but it is used as a shortcut to another village and they speed along all the time, you take your life in your hands if out walking dogs!

When we got our electricity in they had to get a road opening permit, I know this for certain as open reach had applied for it too and they were going to get the slot that sp energy wanted resulting in us having to cancel open reach so that sp energy could get the slot otherwise we would have had to wait another month for electric, a street works permit would be required by the person doing your pavement but can I ask if you are sure it is needed? Our pp said we had to install a pavement to the front of the property but being in a rural area where there are no pavements it seemed strange that they wanted 100m of pavement, turned out it was just a generic thing on the pp and didn’t apply to us.

Merry Christmas everyone and I hope all your dreams of self build come true. This is our second Christmas in the new house although I think it’s more liveable now! The last few months have been spent getting it that way, it now resembles a home, all rooms are more or less finished although we will be revisiting the dining room next year and trying to get something done with the staircase whether it be moving it to the position it should have originally been in had it not been short of around 40mm headroom and wouldn’t pass regulations or starting again with a new one! However this will wait until the garage is finished, it’s up and the roof trusses are on we just have to get some time to finish it off, we got a fantastic bargain of a up and over garage door, 4.3m wide from a chap who was in a new build and was changing his garage into living accommodation-£30! He had been advertising it without any luck and I just happened to spot it on gumtree just after he’d reduced it because he just wanted it away! Made to measure for us . Next year will also see the drive getting done, it’s only hardcore just now, and after that a proper holiday will be called for! I almost forgot about the front door where we decided disabled access should be , our one and only visit from building control brought up the fact that the door , being one of these two half doors , wouldn’t be suitable for disabled access as it only has a handle on one door, the other being opened with two little bolts top and bottom which could not be accessed by a wheelchair user, our own fault, we were meant to have the access at the back door but we would have needed quite a long ramp so decided on the change without giving the actual door much thought. I don’t like the existing door anyway so we will source another in due course, we can’t get off a temporary habitation certificate anyway until the garage is completed so all things to work towards! I’ve been up since 5.30 this morning as I had to have one of the dogs operated on yesterday and with 10 people for dinner it’s going to be a long day! I hope you all have a good day whatever you’re doing.

I kept the floor and worktops light as the units are dark grey ray