lizzie

My first choice of frame provider was Beattie Passive...for reasons that we all know I was steered away from them. I still like their product and if I were doing it again I would look at them again.

@ultramods it would be a shame to compromise your lovely basins for the sake of a few extra £’s on some wall tiles.

@JamesHopeful are you saying in essence that you want to build a bigger/slightly different house than you have (or will have) planning for and you do not want to go back for new application or even NMA to accommodate the changes? You make references to your situation being different when comments above have been made. Perhaps if you were to elaborate it might be helpful. One thing is certain PD rights do not come into existence until and unless you have a completed signed off building. Whether or not PD rights are removed when PP is granted is a different matter and it varies from area to area. LA can and do take enforcement action against people who blatantly flout the regulations and whether or not it would have been allowed under PD rights is not the issue. Every small developer in the land would be at it if PP was ignored and breaches were just waved through on the nod afterwards. The law is the law and the rules are there for a reason if everyone decided to flout them then what worth are they. Retrospectives for blatant try ons are regularly turned down and appeals are costly. Do the thing properly and you wont have a problem try and think you can ‘get away with it’ and likely as not you will be hauled over the coals by LA, they dont take kindly to people trying it on. If it went any distance and even if found in your favour the costs would probably be large plus the uncertainty during that time that you have with a building that contravenes your PP.

I haven’t go any cracking here either.....I have bloody great crevasses its like the grand canyon in places. Mine was boarded and plastered whilst still not watertight. It was leaking literally like a sieve for air test and just had temp bits of tape put over to get a result and I was told I needed to sort it properly afterwards by air testers as even their temp tape was having problems sticking due to the wet. The leaks continued right through the whole house being plastered and the plastered walls and floor were wet around the leaking windows. However my cracking (and I have an awful lot) is not around the areas that were wet for so long. Prior to boarding and plastering the frame was sopping wet as we did not get the roof on and watertight for some while and it was very wet weather, then it turned warm and we had black mould growing on the frame we had to treat it with anti fungal and dry it out with dehumidifiers. I guess all thats the reason why my cracks are so bad. Pic just for interest.

another vote for full tiling of walls and floor

I have one of those magna clean things on my boiler. (Mains gas boiler running ufh and dhw). Man came to service boiler today and did Magna too. He said one of the cleanest he has ever seen even though ufh produces less than rads its still very clean........I am pleased!!

I dont know how you should do it but do get your floor right. The cock ups with my floor levels gave us problems right through the build and beyond, on mine (different construction) it wasn't possible to rectify 100% without taking the house down (so I was told). Why cant they lift the stuff that is down...glued and screwed too much hassle? Get a second opinion.

I have been approached by several. Said no to all except the kitchen and that on the basis of anonymity.

Great house @Eileen... well done!

Great feedback @NSS so glad to hear it is working so well and hopefully Mrs Nss is still feeling the benefits. It has taken me nearly a year of perseverance to get my mvhr properly set up.....I must admit there were low points during the last year (usually from hospital) when I just about gave up and thought it would not work for me and the whole point of the build was wasted as I have had a lot of bad bouts since moving in. However the last month or so since it has been properly working has been a revelation and at last I can feel some benefit from it even in a short time. My docs are pleased but not half as much as I am.

Well done @Eileen put some pics up please

tbh I sympathise with neighbour and empathise with your wish to get on with the job. We were lucky our only near neighbour was the one that sold us the land so he had the benefit of the £’s to ease the pain of construction at the bottom of his garden. We had the usual working time and day restrictions in our planning, on the odd occasion we wanted to work outside the hours we always asked if it was ok and we told him what work we planned. Never had a problem. If I had been a next door neighbour without the benefit of the ££’s I would have been pretty p****d off having had to put up with usual work hours to then find outsde hours noisy work going on.

@JSHarris yes we would. We have a sort of ready made access via a window that is a door so wouldnt need to pierce the existing structure for access into it, I’m thinking lots of glass in the roof to keep light into existing room. This is the area between house and garage (where dark grey car is parked)....floor levels will be a consideration. Its quite a big space...we would have about 5m width with at least 6m length without going further back than corner if existing house. 4m length would be a good size to keep some external windows in existing room.

Has anyone done an extension on their mbc house? We always had an idea we might close in the area between house and garage as extra living space under pd rights. Going to have to find an architect who understands the method of construction used for house and how to bolt on to it.

@ProDave yes professionally designed and flow rates in design...installer never ever explained them to me or showed me anything to do with system at all and I had not looked at design docs in trying to find the source of the problem. I had worked out it must be something to do with flow rates as everything else seemed ok but tbh after nearly a year of mvhr not working properly, ufh not working properly, dhw not working properly I was at the end of my tether. I am not a heating engineer! All the professional installer had to do was set it up properly or tell me how to sort it instead of saying he would come and look at it and never showing up.

The lovely man who sorted the mvhr has been back today to look at the ufh and service the boiler. Turns out that although I could see actuators up and bobbing red things on the other bits (forget what they are called) some of those zones were turned to a very low flow so hardly any water getting through hence cold floors and no matter what I turned room stat to I couldn't get the place warm. We did have some warm bits of floor and that is explained by areas where there are two loops and one turned up and one at min. The temp of water coming in was quite low too. All now reset and I can live with it for a week or so and if not right he will look again when he comes back to do another small job after Easter. Why couldn't the installer have either left it properly set up or told me where to look and what to do. No-one has ever explained to me how it all works until this man. Now I have some basic understanding after being at my wits end for the last 12 months trying to work it all out.

I have 5l of this. Not used it yet. Porcelanosa spec says grout sealer not necessary however floor man who came to clean up tiles with acid (tiler had not cleaned them off properly and I had an unshift-able grout haze plus lumps of grout and adhesive) said he thought grout sealer would be a good thing to do so I bought it......its still in the cupboard 6 months later, will get round to it one day.

Never driven one but always up for a challenge!!

@joe90 I may just come and visit for ideas ??

Guys I think we have hijacked OP topic here. My observation that the construction type of build a lot of us have (not cheap as we have now established) may or may not be cost effective/heat efficient relative to to OP question of different type of slab/ufh install. My comments were as to style of build not a particular company.....there are others! Cost of build is a personal matter and we all build to our own pockets/parameters that influences the choices we make on which type of construction method to go for, in quoting my cost per sqm I am not complaining at price (I agreed it!) but commenting that it is not a cheap way to build. I think the cost benefits are longer term with this type of build and that was what I thought when we decided on it.....hope it works out that way:-) The self build calculator for June 2018 shows TF timber clad to be the most costly way to build......their averages are just that but it comes out more than insulated cavity brick and block which is at the lower end. I think everyone on this forum knows that my frame and slab were a c**k up and I still live with the consequences of a lop sided frame (no rectification possible) however I have put it to bed, the whole thing made me very ill and I have no wish to go back there. We have done what we can to mitigate the issues and thats it now. Time to move on. With the help I have had from all you lovely people I am slowly resolving the issues I still have with various things and now I have finally found someone to sort MVHR and UFH I hope we will be able to get the house functioning as it should. I am learning to love my house after a few years of sheer hell - and I know I am not alone there - I am looking forward to getting my garden sorted this year. Always a coffee available for anyone passing who would like to drop in.

this seems like a nice challenge for @Onoff?

yes spot on thats exactly what I was trying to say.

@JSHarris if only.... you have no idea on what it cost lol and I’m not saying on a public forum. If you take the cost of your frame and divide it by your sq m it will be a lot less per sq m than mine. I know the frame supplier costs increased quite a lot in the years between you and me. Not inflation just market. That way gives a better indication of cost of type of build rather than £sqm finished house as people have different ideas on what is basic, good and high spec for finishes which really affects the numbers. The point I was trying to make is that timber frame construction (shell not finished ) is no longer a ‘cheap’ option as it was somehow perceived to be in the past. The self build calculator (costs at June 2018) show in their examples timber frame with timber cladding to be more expensive than block and brick.

@JSHarris I think you will find prices have gone significantly from when you bought yours. I don't know what size your house is but my frame and slab (without the groundwork prep) alone came in at circa £550sqm plus they could not do the roof so I had to have someone else do the roof trusses which added considerably to the cost of actually getting a shell building (not a watertight one of course). Then the 3g windows, mvhr, ufh etc all big ticket items for someone who has employ people to do everything, I am not a DIY person as has been shown all too often on this forum LOL. My core costs are well in excess of yours percentage wise. I am single storey too which is also more expensive to build. It has cost me quite a lot sorting out problems with the whole thing too, it was not a good situation in any way but I am not counting that when I say it is not cheap to build this way. It may have been a few years ago but not any more. I think it is comparable to brick and block and in some ways may cost more as contractors charge more as there are fewer that do this sort of build whereas brickies are more plentiful if you see what I mean.

Had one like that too it was great. Agree with the suggestion sitting in before you buy if you can. They vary a lot.