recoveringbuilder

In our last house our manifold was in a cupboard under the stairs, I used to have a clothes horse in there to dry washing, where we have it now the cats lie on the floor near it as they have discovered the great source of heat!

Yes that’s the stuff I’ve got a roll that we got for patching up tears must be about 15-20m of it but it’s only 27” wide , yes I’m 5 mile outside Lanark in Carluke

We have some rolls of stuff left can you show me a picture of what you’re looking for or where it’s for? These are what I have , If I remember correctly the one with blue writing was for outside but the orange was inside, I have 3 part rolls of it and can’t be too far away from you

Came home from work yesterday to a card through the door from an air testing company, thought it was a strange thing for anyone to be doing, going round canvassing for air testing work so I don’t know if he was sent by the architect or just appeared but he came from Perth so a distance away, but I noticed when I looked up his website he doesn’t charge vat.

+1 for architect, local architect knows all that’s happening within the local area with regards to planning applications and ours was quite willing to fight our corner.

Yes I’m afraid to say this was the thing I was most uncomfortable with during our build, working in customer service you are trained to be nice to people but during our build I found I was having to say things to people that I would never usually dream of saying! I said to my hubby one night after a particularly bad day speaking to suppliers and builders, I hate what these people are doing to me making me into someone I don’t like very much, however when it’s your money you’re dealing with a lot of straight talking has to be done ?

We had originally planned for a wood burning stove with back boiler to run all our heating and dhw through a thermal store, however during the planning of this it came to light that the government were starting to make rumblings about wood burning stoves and not wanting them used. we eventually went for a pellet stove which gives us everything the wood burner would have and it lights itself , it is also legible for the rhi, caused us a few problems to begin with as we hadn’t been given enough information about how to use it but once we got round this it’s working out great ,

Must be different in different areas of Scotland, ours was registered with council way back when we started and the council informed the post office, no charge! but I do agree with @Ed Davies I get a tv licensing letter at least once a month!

There hasn’t been much happening here since the joiner finished mid January, we started oiling the staircase and associated newels etc, we’ve had carpets laid in 3 of the 4 bedrooms, the 4th one still needs decorating but neither of us has the inclination to do it and I’ve built up a couple of things for the grandchildren’s rooms. We got a brickie out last week to look at getting the steps and ramp done but with the turn in the weather again we’ll have to wait before we can have the machine in again to dig foundations for these and sort out the driveway and garden, so today at a loose end I spent the afternoon counting! With all the talk of price per sq m I wanted to get it all added together, I knew how much cash we’d had but what with using credit cards for some things and using the current account for others and with both our wages going into this account it seemed there were days when I didn’t know how much I’d spent or where it came from! So much for the spreadsheet I started which went ok until things got really busy and I was getting requests left right and centre for all manner of things.It took me a good few hours to go through bank statements, cc statements, cash withdrawals etc but I eventually got it all counted up and receipts into some kind of order, I wanted to get this done so I can hit the ground running when it comes to filling out the vat forms but I also want to now make a spreadsheet of individual costs such as , foundations, block work, drainage and so on just in case we ever decide to do it again! I’m a great believer in fate and things happening for a reason and the two plots we are marketing there is a couple very interested in one of them subject to talks they’re having just now with the local council regarding style of build, this would leave a spare plot?! Would my OH go for it again? I don’t know, I very much doubt it but stranger things have happened, after all we didn’t mean to build this one! Oh and btw we just found out the builders company we were using has folded, apparently one of the two brothers left the company a fortnight before we parted company with them which goes some way to explaining why they suddenly seemed to lose interest and stop coming which at the time seemed strange to us as they had done the majority of the work apart from the finishing joinery which they kept telling us was 4 days work, the joiner we got in after that spent the whole of November, December and part of January finishing off and redoing some of their work which was substandard.

I find these “transferable “ mortgages a bit of a con. When we sold our last but one house we had a very small mortgage which we understood was transferable and we thought we’d just move it over to the house we were buying, it was an eighth of the price of the house and we thought since it was an old house we were buying it would be handy to have the cash to do some improvements, however when we approached the lender to do this it turned out we would have had to make a completely new application and since we were then 9 years older than we had been when we took it out and would have reached retirement age just before it was paid off it would have been put onto a reduced repayment term thus making the payments higher or we would have to have shown a means of making the payments after retirement. We decided to pay it off as it seemed such a palaver on what was supposed to be a transferable mortgage!

Yes I can second that , friends of ours bought a run down cottage on a mortgage intending to knock down and rebuild but were told they’d need to repay mortgage before they could knock it down

We had a mat well in our last house, you can buy coconut matting cut to size, we got it from a local carpet firm and we made the mat well more or less the whole width of the doorway.

Just been watching this and there was someone bought a plot and they revisited them 2+ years later to see what they’d built, was just wondering if it was anyone on here! it was a lovely house.

Hi again, being inquisitive as I am ( otherwise known as nosey) I’ve been looking at Scot frame website, our house is circa 268m2 so a bit larger than the one you’re looking at and we paid around the same price for the kit albeit all our finishings were solid oak. Another way we saved having to pay out vat was getting the TF company to do the erection of the kit which then made no vat payable on the whole kit which saved us forking out at the beginning and with the length of time it takes for the vat reclaim I’m glad we did it this way. We are just finishing off outside now but reckon the final cost will come in at just over £1k per sq m , a lot of the saving IMO was us sourcing everything instead of letting the builder supply, he worked on a labour only basis.

Hi and welcome, as I was reading your post I was just thinking you would be better with a complete new build so I was glad that by the end of it this was what you had decided! I was astonished at what you have already spent on architects although I do believe they are more expensive down south but even so! I visited several TF manufacturers at the self build show also prior to our build (which was our third) and also found that despite leaving my plans with them they never got back to me, however Claymore timber frame in Fife did get back to us and we eventually went with them. Communication was brilliant and I could lift the phone to them at any time and get to speak to one or other of the brothers who run it, we had no problems with them and they were always willing to sort out any queries right away, I wouldn’t go past them if I ever did this again

Ours has all been plastered and it was also erected and made watertight during the lovely summer last year, it’s now been plastered for around 5 months and we are getting the inevitable cracks here and there, nothing major but I certainly wouldn’t have gone for tape and join which we had in our first house,it’s such a pita years down the line when you’ve wallpapered and go to change it and you inadvertently take the backing off the plasterboard, we ended up having to plaster numerous walls after this happened.

I spoke to Fleming homes at the home building show in October 2017 and left them a set of my plans which had been passed and we were going to start the build in the spring of 2018 , they never made any contact with me after that day even although they said it would be around 6 weeks before I heard from them!

Oh he’s used to that, every time he thinks he’s finished we come up with some other idea! We just haven’t run this one past him yet!

No , no brickwork yet, we were thinking about not building this year until the finances recover but depending on how cheaply we could do it with leftover stuff which at present is lying around outside as we have nowhere to store it, we may just be able to manage it, there are probably about 24 lengths in all , some 8x2 and some 6x2

It’s 6mx6m picture attached

Because the middle part of our roof was built on site rather than of roof trusses there were loads of lengths of 8x2 and 6x2 brought on site @ 6m lengths and we now find we’re left with a good few, we still have our garage to build and are now trying to think about getting this done as cheaply as possible, we have plenty of insulation etc left and are wondering if a joiner would be able to make trusses up from the timber we have instead of us having to buy ready made trusses, anybody any experience of this?

Following this with interest @PeterW as we are having a few issues this way in that the ufh when it comes on in the morning is taking all the hot water, the stove kicks in but we are having to wait a while to be able to get a shower, hubby was just saying our last ufh had a mixing valve at the boiler which was good but this hasn’t, his question is how would you control a mixing valve at the ts?

The installers air pressurised them @Roz with a compressor

Ours was 100mm deep, so the mesh and pipes were at 50mm, 50mm run of concrete below and 50mm over the pipes/mesh

Ours was put in on the mesh and pipes were pressurised at the time, so mesh was sat 50 mm up on little holding things then pipes attached to mesh then the pour