recoveringbuilder

We will shortly have to apply for detailed planning on our remaining plot which currently has outline planning but this will lapse next April. We won’t ever build the house ourselves so it won’t be a personal choice and we need to find the cheapest way of making the application, we were thinking maybe we could do it ourselves but quite frankly haven’t a clue how to do it. I could draw a floor plan no trouble but I couldn’t transfer this to elevations etc and it terrifies me thinking about the things the local council will ask for that I have no knowledge of so , much as I don’t want to pay an architect I don’t think I have any other option!

I think it’s more common in Scotland to have a brick or block outer skin, we would certainly never have considered anything but that, the thing is once the kit is up it’s wind and water tight so the work inside can be going on at the same time as the roof tiles are getting put up then the block work, much quicker than having to wait for a brick house being built before you can move on but in our inclement weather the block work outer skin gives a much sturdier feel,

Back to the window film, been looking at this again as we’ve had an awful lot of heat coming in this summer but unfortunately no funds to do anything about it however things are moving on again and I started to think about getting this done soon, does anyone have the all weather film which apparently keeps the cold out in winter and the sun out in summer, was thinking it might be as well to go the whole hog!?

http://bit.ly/2UFKVpp so the Victorian water tower that featured in Kevin’s grandest design a few weeks ago is now on the market for a cool 2 million!

We have a Street of prefabs near us built after the war that are classed as non standard construction, one was sold to a cash buyer but another was bricked up which overcame the problem and sold on the open market. We’ve had a mortgage on our first two timber frame homes and had no problem obtaining it.

Is this 155m2 ground floor? We paid £4K for ours supply and fit, which was around 154m2 , the fit though was only the laying of the pipes and connecting to manifold and air test which cost just over £1k , we still had to do everything else connected to it which I didn’t realise at the time, I expected them to come back to install everything else, personally I think for £1k we could have done it ourselves as we had done on our previous build but I thought I was saving hubby a lot of hassle when in fact they did the easy bit!

How frustrating! You would think they are purposely forcing you to take this step because they are not competent enough to make the decision.

Beautiful house! Just wait till the boredom sets in once you’re finished, you’ll end up doing it all again ?

Howdens, we have had an account with them since 2007 when we did our last self build, there has been several kitchens bought through it as well as doors, flooring and lots of incidental items, what annoys me about them is that it seems to depend how much you buy in any given year as to how much discount they give you, we priced up for a basic kitchen we were going to put in the cottage before we resold it but their price was far too much for what it was and they wouldn’t budge on price, we have a small utility room that needed 3 units, they wanted £400 per unit! We didn’t even give them a chance to price for the kitchen as we’d already decided to go bespoke but going by what they wanted to charge per unit we were as well getting it made, then you hear of others getting the price reduced and wonder why they can do it for some and not others, of course their ‘sale’ is coming up soon so that prompted a call from them last week to drum up business!

There are very few tradesmen I would trust to charge you what they actually pay, before we started this we got a price from a local company to supply and build the whole thing, they detailed out everything they would be supplying and right away we clocked they would be charging top dollar for stuff, first on the list was concrete blocks at £1.10 each, we eventually paid 69p!

I have corian worktops, been in use about 9 months now and no staining, I did realise one day there had been beetroot spilled on it and was in the horrors in case it had stained but no it was fine, only thing I would say is they get small scratches on them very easily and lose their shine, I have one that is very rarely used and it’s still shiny but the others have small surface scratches and are a bit dull although I believe I can have them repolished

We got that for our pellet stove but you have to have it installed by an mcs installer

Welcome, we are in Carluke so not a million miles from you, our build is complete more or less, still got a garage to build and drive/landscaping to do. Will be interesting to see if you can stay within budget!

Are they not included in the ‘second home ‘ tax?

However you’ll already have paid tax on the money you bought the house with?

And I bet they’re still the same price!

But that won’t work in Scotland with the home report unless the surveyors are willing to add the stamp duty amount onto the valuation, lenders won’t lend more than the house has been valued at

Ah but there hasn’t been years of house price increases, when we sold our first house 13 years ago we got a lot more for it than we had ever thought we would, but that was in the good times, the house has since undergone a lot of upgrading and I know for a fact one buyer spent over £50k on it but it’s sold twice since we sold it and has only increased in value by about 5percent in all that time

I would imagine most sellers would try to get more for their properties to cover this but at the end of the day you’ll only get what someone is willing to pay and with the home report dictating what the property is worth, in Scotland anyway, most buyers won’t pay above that amount and in fact a lot of buyers want it under the home report value,

I met our architect yesterday and during the conversation he asked about how far away from sign off we were, there’s not a lot to do with the house to achieve this however when I said the garage wasn’t built yet he said he thought that with the garage being on the same building warrant as the house we wouldn’t get sign off until it was built or if we wanted sign off before it was built we would have to remove it from the warrant, just wondering if anyone has any experience of this?

We haven’t done so much this build as we managed to get prices for labour within a budget we could afford however in our last build both working full time and my son in law working full time, we spent every hour we weren’t at work working on the build. Hubby would come home At 4pm have a quick bite to eat and start and we would be at it till gone midnight, my son in law spent every weekend for a year with us from 9 in the morning till 6 at night.we were out until 2 in the morning moving scaffolding for the builders next morning, we spent The bells at New Year’s Eve laying under floor heating pipes, by the time the house was finished we vowed never to do it again! It was a large house 385m2 and it was the only way we were ever going to complete it as we had a very small budget and we got mucked about a lot with various trades so we had to take on things we knew very little about. Personally would never go this route again but probably that’s more to do with getting older!

How I wish that had been my quote!

Surely if they were fitting staircase etc this would qualify for supply and fit therefore zero rated?

You’d need more than ground workers, the kit firm will only provide joinery services, you would have to get a builder to do the rest or employ all the separate trades yourself

So how can this work with materials? you're not going to be able to get suppliers charging you only 5 pc ?