Benpointer

They are very thick but very narrow slabs and the face nearest the camera is the top. They are laid like slices of bread in a loaf and the dimples are clearly to keep the butter grout in. Obviously.

A relatively quiet week this week - the lull before the storm (hopefully not literally!) The scaffolders arrived to put up a single-lift all around the exterior on Thursday and Friday (and Saturday morning as it turned out). I say single-lift but there were due to be a couple of hop-ups for the gables on the south-facing roof. However, at one end the gable is over a canopy roof which means the first lift is 2m away from where the gable will be. We've left that one off for now - I'm hoping the timber frame company (Turners) can work off the scaffold tower at that end, or I will get the scaffolders back and put in what the frame erectors would like (we may need a sky-hook to hang it off though). The site is looking spick and span at the moment; the groundworkers were really tidy, the weather has no doubt helped (dust is easier to sweep up than mud), and Mrs P. has done some sterling work this weekend tidying up the few bits of spare timber, pallets, bulk bags etc, left by the scaffolders. As they were packing up one of the scaffolders saw an empty bag (which they had brought) and asked "Is this rubbish?", to which I replied "Oh yes, thanks", thinking he was going to take it away, but no, he just threw an empty Red Bull can in it 🤷‍♂️. Scaffolders truly are a breed apart. The house has proved to be too wide for the CCTV camera, so we moved the camera back. Now we have the workshop roof in the way - grrr! Looking at the project finances, frighteningly we have already spent over 1/3rd of the budget 😱. Major spend so far has been on design and planning, the timber frame and windows are both paid for, a good slug of the groundworks costs has also been paid with an invoice for the balance expected soon. This week I ordered and paid for the MVHR kit (based around a Zehnder Q350) and the ASHP and cylinder (Panasonic L series 7kW + 300l cylinder). I ordered the latter through Air2Heat who provide an MCS umbrella service (Paul Thorney - really helpful) so we should get back £7.5k via the BUS grant scheme, which would leave the heat pump and cylinder costing a net £1,200 plus installation costs. Anyway, we're currently running about £500 over budget (excluding contingency) with some opportunities for future savings and a fair few areas of potential overspend. Time for Benpointer's three Laws of Budget Management: If you go over budget, that's bad management. If you come in under budget, that's poor estimating. If you come in bang on budget, you've almost certainly committed both 1. and 2. Next week is going to be very exciting - I hope in a good way. Tomorrow (Monday) our timber frame arrives from Turner Timber Frames, with a team to erect it. The weather forecast is good, so fingers-crossed the frame fits the footings and it all goes up smoothly 🤞.

Ok thanks - I won't waste my time then. Cheers

just resurrecting this one as we have to install FTTP to the house as a Building Reg requirement (RA1) "Dwelling to be gigabit ready for physical infrastructure." Openreach have quoted £567 + VAT but intriguingly they say "Please note that in some exceptional circumstances, the services Openreach provide relating to new build properties, renovations and alterations may be subject to either zero rate (or a lower rate of) VAT. Attached is an information sheet which provides details of where you can find further guidance from HMRC." (Though in true Openreach fashion there is no information sheet attached.) Since we are compelled to have the connection it feels like it should be zero rated. Any thoughts?

Hah yes, thanks Roger! Yesterday we ended up supplying cold zero beers to the roofers next door too. It was scorchio on their roof yesterday - we couldn't stand by sipping beers while they watched on roasting.

I think they are similar to some Todd have - and yes, very nice. Nice handles too. I think they have to be prefinished though. I'm a wheelchair user and with the best will in the world, our doors end up getting scuffed. If we finish with Osmo we can lightly sand and re-seal very easily to hide odd scratches etc.

Just picking up on this topic, we have looked at Todd doors - they seem nice enough but a bit uninspiring - c.£200 a pop with handles. Most of their doors are bashed out in a factory in Malaysia and, as far as I can tell, the same doors are imported and sold by lots of other vendors. We've also got a quote from Deuren and they work out at over £1000 per door for fairly simple oak veneered doors, and brushed steel handles. Does anyone know of any door suppliers in between Deurens and the mass market? We're looking for contemporary wood, ideally that we can finish ourselves with Osmo. Thanks

Great to read your blog, very interesting and witty. I'm mightily impressed by the hands-on approach, I am sure you are saving a lot by doing all that work. I'm afraid we are making a more 'desk based' contribution to our build, which is probably wisest in our case.

We’ve had another very good week of progress by the groundworks team and they are pretty much done now bar some further levelling of the paddock area and one or two other minor details. We are really pleased with their work and the Building Inspector is pleased too, thankfully, so our foundations are all signed-off 👍. Bizarrely, it’s only now that we can submit the “Commencement Statement” for our construction to Building Control, which I duly did this week. Also bizarrely, we are still on schedule - I can guarantee that won’t last! Once the block and beam floor was in and grouted with cement slurry, the concrete block upstands for the internal stud partition walls were laid. With hindsight, it might have been better not to pay the timber frame company (Turner Timber Frame) to supply and erect the internal walls but rather build them later on top of the screed. But we’re way past that decision point now - Turners will be installing those partition walls as part of the overall frame build, so concrete block upstands have to be ready in place. One minor issue that had to be resolved this week - the block and beam floor ventilation ‘periscopes’ are designed for 100mm cavity walls and weren’t going to fit inside our 50mm cavities between the walls and the render-board. The solution proposed by the groundworkers and approved by our Building Inspector is to run them up the inside of the foundation wall before exiting just below DPC level. That gives us a potential cold bridge at each vent (26 in total!) but I think we can mitigate that by doubling the PIR insulation upstands to 100mm where the vents are. It’s not perfect but I think it will have only a very small impact on the overall insulation levels. Next week the scaffold is scheduled to go up on Wednesday/Thursday, then the timber frame is due to arrive the week after - when the fun will really start! Meanwhile next week I need cut the five 150mm oak posts to size and chamfer the edges, ready for them to go in to support the roof canopies over the front porch and rear terrace. (Six oak posts in the picture - I’ll choose the best five!)

Thanks all, my Macbook is an M1 chip so I think I will just take @nod's advice and get some free quotes. I've lodged requests with Warmup and Soleheat so I'll see what they come back with. Any others I should try? Thanks

Hi there, the question is in the title really, does anyone know of a UFH design tool for MacOS other than IOS? LoopCAD seems to be Windows only. Being a devout Apple person myself I don't have any Windows PCs. Thanks!

A compromise between what and what? Wallpaper is a centuries-old technology, with no real mystique. Any competent DIY-er can do it. If you don't like it in a few years, take it off and paint.

Against the consensus on this thread, we will be going for big bold wallpaper on a few walls, having not touched the stuff since 1988. I should add, we are natural trendsetters - where we lead others tend to follow, we just can't seem to help it. 😉 Actually of course, this is a well-established trend (the wallpaper not our style-leadership) but still not quite mainstream. We were taken by this type of look on a house that was on the market last year.

Damn, never thought of that! Will check with the electrician if we can use the same duct, alternatively we do have two spares 😬

Hi Stoph, We used 50mm ducting for all the services - the electrician requested 100mm for PV panel feed or 2 x 50mm, so we went for the latter. They are all above the concrete footings with a lintel in the blockwork. You can see one on the right the attached photo (the other opening in the centre is for a waste pipe from what will be the kitchen). .

Great progress by the groundworks team in sweltering conditions this week - laying concrete blocks in the sun when it’s 30deg C and 80% humidity can’t be any fun at all. Despite the heat, by the end of the week our foundation walls are in and ready for the block and beam floor this coming week. We can really see the house take shape now, although quite a few of the foundation walls are just there to support floor beams and won’t appear as internal walls above the floor. As expected, it all looks a bit too small at this stage. It always seems to be the case that the foundations make the rooms look small. They’re definitely the right size on paper, so I’m sure it’s an optical illusion at this stage (hopefully!) The foul and rainwater drains are also now in place. Our Building Inspector ideally wanted the SVP to come out through the roof above the bathroom but since that roof is covered with Solfit PV panels (https://solfit.co.uk/domestic-solar-panels/) that can’t be penetrated, we eventually agree to put the SVP up the outside of the north facing wall. This is the wall that isn’t really going to be seen from the entrance, front parking areas or garden and we’d really prefer not to penetrate the roof with a soil vent if possible. So, everyone’s happy. The ‘spaghetti’ in the bottom left corner is where all of our external service ducts come into the plant room. 17 ducts in total, including two spare at present, (I may have over-catered): Power to ASHP Power to garden Water pipe to garden Water pipe to workshop Power to workshop Lighting circuit - switched external lights Data to workshop Live power supply in (SSE - single phase) Fibre in (Openreach) Water mains in (Wessex Water) Power to sewage treatment plant PV panel in PV panel in Power to EV charger Data for CCTV Spare 50mm duct (to workshop) Spare 50mm duct (to workshop)

We did try a wild flower meadow in our last house. It looked lovely in the spring but moving into the summer it looked increasingly messy each year. And then we had to mow it, let the seeds drop, and then gather up all the cuttings. After a few years we had a huge, ever increasing pile of cuttings. The range of flowers was always a bit disappointing too - quite a lot of the seeds we planted never seemed to take or thrive. Maybe it's because we were (and will be in the new house) on heavy clay? Anyway, we decided to try a different approach this time - a robotic mower rather than ride-on. We might leave some swathes of wild grass and have someone come in and cut and remove the cuttings from those areas once a year. Apparently there are robotic mowers that can be programmed to cut different areas for different periods of the year - further research needed. Once Mrs P. tells me what we have decided, I'll let you know.

Resurrecting this one. We have the same challenge. Architect felt the B&B floor could vent into the external 50mm vented cavity between the timber frame and the render boards but the BI says they must vent to 'fresh air'. I was thinking something like Rytons Periscope vents https://rts.vents.co.uk/blog/product-details/rytons-periscope-underfloor-ventilator-pufv/ but they seem to assume an outer masonry skin, we will only have renderboard + a through colour render, say 30mm in total, so no room to fit an air brick. Others must have encountered this issue before, any ideas?

The groundworks team have been putting in the Sewage Treatment Plant and drains this week. We’ve chosen the Klargester Biotec+ 2 STP and that arrived on schedule from Tanks Direct on Tuesday. Also this week the concrete pads were dug and poured for five oak posts that will support overhanging roof canopies - the Building Inspector asked us to put in 1m x 1m x 1m pads which seems excessive for 150mm x 150mm oak posts taking point loads of 5-10kN but it was that or pay the SE for (possibly the same) opinion. The team also started reshaping the paddock area - losing a huge amount of spoil and burying a lot of rubble that had been dumped by previous occupants. We'll probably wait until the autumn to seed it - not much chance of seed taking right now. At the end of a busy week there is not a lot above ground to see for all that effort but we needed to get this all done before the below-DPC block walls go in. Access to the rear of the plot will not be possible for the big machinery once the blockwork starts. The wooden garage mentioned at the end of last week's blog came down over the weekend (in the pouring rain) and has disappeared off site. The extra space created has proved vital - the photo below shows the concrete pad that's left after the garage was removed. (The wooden building that remains is a 5m x 9m workshop which is staying, though it will need re-cladding at some stage.) No new issues this week - hurrah! Fingers-crossed for that happy state of affairs to continue. The timber frame is due to arrive from Turner Timber on 7th July, so just three weeks left to finish the foundations and get the scaffold up. No pressure!

Norrsken asked us whether we wanted to reduce the window sizes or make sure the external cladding comes up lower than the window opening. We opted for the latter and they provided us with this helpful diagram for the amount of cill clearance needed.

They pinned it into the clay. You can just about see a couple of pins in the extreme bottom right of the second pic. Not sure what they were tbh thin plastic rods maybe.

The excellent SE we contacted on Thursday to design the depth of our foundations came back on Friday with the answer - deeper than we wanted at 1.95m in the corner closest to the neighbouring oak (15m away) but his quick response has saved the schedule. We need to add clayboards in the corner nearest the tree but overall it could have been a lot worse. His rapid turnaround was brilliant and it meant we were able to crack on this week. The groundworkers had already discounted Monday as I suspect they thought they’s be waiting for the SE but through the rest of the week dug all the trenches and on Friday we had 7 lorries of readymix poured. The only issue was they hit a shaley layer at the bottom of the deepest trenches, so with the BI’s agreement they poured a couple of loads of concrete in on Wednesday before digging out the rest of the trenches. So now we have all the foundation trenches filled with concrete. Next week the groundworks team plan to concentrate on the drains, installing the sewage treatment plant (we’ve gone for a Kingspan Biotec 2) and ‘losing’ the massive pile of spoil we have, across the paddock. Block and beam floor to go in the following week. Target for completion of the groundworks is 27 June, so three more weeks allowed. I’ve checked in with the timber frame company (Turners) and they are still on schedule to deliver and erect the frame between 7 - 18 July. I have also finally managed to get some quotes for scaffolding and that’s scheduled to go up 1 & 2 July. The company we have always previously used have singularly failed to respond to my repeated requests, so I gave up on them and got a couple of other quotes in, and selected one. Windows, roofing, screed, plumbing and electrics contractors all lined up - I need to sort out some plasterers. The first indicative price I had for boarding out and plastering was… Ouch! Hoping that might be an outlier; it’s certainly more than Homebuilder’s Bible was suggesting £ per m2. In other news, we’ve found somebody who wants the timber garage, which we need to remove to create enough space for deliveries. He, his dad, and a friend are taking it down today.

Thanks for the quick replies. It's a very quiet rural area but there are houses each side so I'm not sure about acoustic boards - but probably will go for them. The reason for the odd mix in the roof is the rafters are 254mm easi-joists which we're having blown with cellulose, VCL below, then we will have 100mm PIR below that to give the 0.1 u-value we want. Also going to run the MVHR duct through channels in that 100mm PIR. Service cavity below that and then the PB. Might have to go for 15mm on the ceiling then as the joists are 600 and the service cavity battens will need to be below them.

Am I ok to use standard 12.5mm plasterboard for the walls and vaulted ceilings throughout our single-storey timber-framed new build? I was planning to do just, that with a skim, however one of the plasterers we have contacted for quotes has suggested we should use blue acoustic PB throughout. However the Building Inspector has insisted we fit acoustic insulation to all internal stud walls and the vauled roof make up includes 250mm blown cellulose + 100 PIR, so I feel we will be fine on the sound front. (Plus it's just the two of us most of the time.) Also, I thought I saw somewhere in the building regs that we need to use fire rated PB on the external walls - but I can't find anything about that now I look again. Our external wall build-up is PB + 25mm service cavity + 50 PIR +140mm frame (with 120mm PIR) + 50 external cavity, then a mixture of timber cladding or render on render-boards. Thanks!

Are those diagrams the Aquarea L series or just illustrative of similar ASHPs?