recoveringbuilder

I’ve done both, when we bought the cottage it had a pine kitchen which in the first few weeks I quite liked however after that I couldn’t stand it, by this time we had already applied for pp and we didn’t want to spend a lot on a new kitchen but wanted to update before we sold again, we started watching gumtree and viewed a few second hand which weren’t any better than what we had but eventually found one that was a year old, couple had bought the house and didn’t like the kitchen, we bought it for £1400 including quartz breakfast bar and it fitted in great with only one unit to spare. I do now have my £30k + bespoke handmade kitchen which is widely admired but I could have spent a lot more if I’d been able to they are definitely one offs.

Our address with bt is , plot next to, and although we now have a name I wouldn’t want to confuse them by trying to change it.

Years ago when the tip near us was an old quarry and you just drove in and dumped stuff there were always the local chancers looking for scrap. We were moving house and needed to get rid of a few things including an old cooker, we also had a lot of bags of dog shit so we put them in the oven part of the cooker, when we got to the tip the usual suspects were there and they were so keen to get the cooker they actually lifted it off the trailer for us, we quickly made our exit but I would have loved to see their faces when they opened the oven???

THE STAIRCASE, had to be moved into the room as the architect had made a mistake with the head room, waited months for a solution which was going to cost a lot more money which we didn’t have by then and the architect refused to pay, eventually found a cheaper solution which I now hate. This is something we’ll have to go back to after sign off which is now resulting in me not being able to furnish the room!

What a story! Do you really want to live near these people though? hopefully your builds will go smoothly, there’s many a person would have given up before now

We didn’t pay a deposit when ordering, our first payment was made a week before the main structure arrived , the amount being the amount quoted for the shell, erection was paid after it was done then we paid the roughings and lastly the finishings but only days before they arrived

When we were going to build our first house on land belonging to my mother in law and her brother they were going to gift it to us however our solicitor was not happy with this arrangement as he could foresee problems further down the line with my husbands two brothers, so it was agreed that we would buy the land at a nominal fee, as it stood it wasn’t worth a lot without the pp so we paid the nominal fee. Many years later one of the other brothers was gifted a piece of land from them and at the end the remaining brother managed to get the two oldies to leave him everything else, farmhouse, land and another house because of dementia and a bent lawyer we ended up getting nothing else other than the land we’d paid for, where money and property is concerned people change!

This was the kind of tap I had in my last house although it didn’t come from Aldi, came from howdens, was around £160 13 years ago but was still working fine when I left it 3 years ago

We had a quote from wickes for our last build, we also had a quote for a bespoke kitchen at the same time, the wickes kitchen was only coming in at £3k under the bespoke kitchen, ultimately we went with howdens although we have went bespoke this time.

This was the company I first contacted as I liked one of their designs, they were very helpful and the price of the kit seemed ok, architect ended up talking us out of paying for their plans and said he’d design something similar, sometimes wish I’d gone with their design as it would have been tried and tested and I wouldn’t have had the problem with the staircase

Welcome, you’ll never get a true price for your groundwork’s until you have a plot, there is so many variations on ground conditions, we thought our plot was pretty level until the dig out started but luckily we had plenty of land to ‘lose’ the excess soil otherwise it could have cost a lot to have it taken away, then there’s the spec of foundations, probably impossible to get a figure without having the land. I think ours cost around £12k but many on here will have spent a lot more,

Lounge is still sitting at 28 degrees now and I’m threatening to sleep on the bathroom floor tonight!

We started off with a skip, we couldn’t put plasterboard in it, if you wanted to do that you had to have a skip specifically for PB, at £250 a time we decided not to get one. The one we did get was quickly filled up by the builders bringing stuff from other sites, I was asked by the boss if we would be getting another one and said I suppose we’ll have to, next day a large fridge freezer appeared on site ! We didn’t get another at that point and unfortunately when we parted company with the builders we were left with the ff and various old wheelbarrows, we broke up and bagged the pb and made many journeys to the local tip a couple of miles away without any problems, we did however end up having to get another skip for the ff and wbs and everything else that had accumulated.

We went to the expense of a built in coffee machine in our last house, it ground the beans but I’m afraid to say I could count on one hand the amount of times we used it although we are big coffee drinkers, I now stick to my tassimo machine when I want a good coffee but nine times out of ten we just use instant!

It’s a good idea, all our builds have been done on a single plot with no one else around in the same predicament, this thought came to me recently when we met a couple who had been building at the same time as us but on a small development of 4 houses so they always had someone to bounce ideas off and commiserate when things weren’t going to plan and I envied them a bit, it’s a lonely place a self build and I found there was no one really who understood the process, people at work knew you were doing it but have no understanding at all, I’m regularly asked at work if I’m settling in to my new house because they think it’s like buying a new house- all ready to move your furniture into, which is usually not the case. I found this site invaluable for sounding off about something, unfortunately there are not a lot of us in a small radius up here in Scotland!

I can’t comment on how things are done now however when we were going to build our first house and having trouble finding a mortgage we went to a broker who eventually came up with a lender willing to finance our build, he also wanted a percentage of what we wanted to borrow and having never had a mortgage before we felt a bit uncomfortable with it. We consulted our solicitor with the proposal and he wouldn’t let us touch it, said we shouldn’t have to pay to get the mortgage so of course we left it alone.

Hi, we have just finished our third timber frame build two factory built and one built on site, no problems with the TF at all in any of them, all done with the input of our own architect and structural engineer, first one was a bungalow and as you rightly say because of the trusses used it would not have been suitable for conversion but that was not something we would have wanted to do anyway, build two and three have both been one and a half storey so trusses were designed for this. It seems you have had a bad experience which has put you off but personally I wouldn’t do it any other way mostly for speed of build when you’re living in a caravan!

Welcome aboard, interesting to see you say you wouldn’t go timber frame again , why?

Ours was biomass installed by an MCs registered installer, he gave us all the certifications to enable us to make the application for rhi payments, he had to register online within a certain time of the installation to say he’d done all the work, the EPC is down to you but otherwise we haven’t paid anything else

Trex seem to be one of the most expensive composite decking companies and I’ve read a lot of bad reviews on their product

Shouldn’t velfac take some of the responsibility for this since the firm you were going to use were one of their approved installers for?

I’d agree with the above, I have a manager at work who has been looking for a builder for the last 9 months and is not having a lot of luck as all the good ones are so busy they won’t even quote, we did get our plumber through one of these sites but he was only advertising on it because he had just started up on his own after being employed by a company for 15 years and needed to get his name out there but I’d be very wary of getting someone from one of these sites for a complete house build

All I can say is thank goodness I’m not in London ?

Our houses have all been done with an architects certificate and although they were well out of date by the time of selling (one was 14 years old by the time we sold it) solicitors for the buyers still wanted to see the certificate and the sale wouldn’t have gone through without it, I know you’re saying you don’t intend to sell but I would be careful about this as it could come back and bite you years down the line if you ever did decide to sell

Probably different batches, IMO they should have been all bought at the same time and should have been mixing them as they used them, I’ve seen it done they have a few pallets open at the same time and are using them from all the pallets getting a good mix, my daughter and her husband had this problem with the persimmon house they bought off plan and when it was finished it looked exactly like this on the gable wall, SIL who’s a QS kicked up a stink and got a few grand off