dogman

They are here and working. Don't hang around do they.

At long last we are starting. 3 months late but at least the weather has improved. Spent all week excavating the slab base. 4 days of digger hire, 260 tonnes of muck removed, 80 tonnes of type 1 brought in. Mbc are laying the type1 as the slab has a ring beam around the outside so it needs to be built up first before the main base is laid

At long last we have got going again. Due to some delays with slab design we lost our ground work team. However as is the case in building industry(apparently) i was passed from one contractor to another until one wanted the work. They turned up this morning with a five tonne machine so a bit smaller than expected but the operator is really good and has made good progress pulling out the old footings and levelling the base. Only slight issue is that the expected chalk across the site as found when we dug trial pits has become subsoil in the middle of the dig ( the dark brown stuff at the edge of the chalk) It is still very firm but Building Control have asked us to refer it back the the S.E The hole is currently 1m deep at the end nearest the camera but that will be lowered by 500mm when we finish

Make sure its from a good supplier. last lot i bought had so much glass in it it was useless. The load before that was like new tarmac and has hardened like a road

Due to only having electricity at our site it will never really get to that as we have a diverter. it is more that the electric company want to ensure you cannot. The advantage as my Solar man tells me is that the equipment fitted to do this will send it somewhere else such as batteries. He is trying to sell me a system that can daisy chain batteries depending on your excess produced. Apparently they are about the size of a Desk top hard drive and you add to them as needed. Probably wont yet as i have an old Immersun that will divert it to heat water. however if you do produce to much and cannot use it its lost somehow by the inverter

I have been looking at this issue as my array will have about 6Kw. my Solar man has given my options. Apply to export more. In the uk with SSE it cost £300 to apply If they say no you then can add a limiter to ensure you never export more than 4kW costs about £170 to do this.

Thanks JSH . Mapei is our normal go to adhesive and grout.

Just to help. The slab is not yet down and will be the normal MBC slab. I will be following the sensible advice on this forum to treat the the whole ground floor as one zone running at 20-23 deg. The Flooring will run across the whole ground floor which is three large rooms and one small room including the kitchen. I don't really want to use a decoupling membrane as it will add a good chunk to the cost. The tiler did mention that it would be better to try and put a joint at the door thresholds to act as an expansion joint if possible. I have yet to plan how to lay the tile as Opus can be a bit of a challenge especially as the largest tile will be 900 x 600 and smallest 300x300. @Nickfromwales What adhesive did you recommend? I think the wife has decided to go for limestone and we can reserve the stone for a 50% deposit on credit card and the will hold it until we need it for a couple of months. However just had the whole plan thrown into chaos as our ground worker has come back from holiday and told me this morning he can no longer do the job. Our reserve is saying that he cannot start for at least 5 weeks and MBC want to start asap

@Nickfromwales MBC slab so concrete with Re-bar

@JSHarris did you use a decoupling membrane?

Can anyone help the wife pick her flooring She wants limestone and we have a local shop selling it at £30 meter at present. Its an opus pattern tumbled finish and need to get now as it is on offer. She is up and down as to buy it. It will run through the whole groundfloor. Worried about it cracking as we will have UFH (low temp) Do we decouple? Will it stain even after sealing? what is it like to live with?

Mbc are happy with just vertical battens to the specification of the board manufacturer. Has anyone used SAS Prowall/Prorend they and Knauf have been very helpful, waiting for Parex to send out colour samples

The valve we have in the current house has a big chrome plate on it. SWMBO makes me clean it after every shower hence why i like the ones i posted.

@ProDaveI have looked at yours in the past and have not discounted it. Have asked MBC about the battening as they specify counter battening.

One of the board and render manufacturers has stated that you must not counter batten the frame as it causes the render to crack. Only use vertical batten and leave gaps for air to move horizontally

Just been looking at theses badboys Got home to see if i could find them on line and no longer in catalogue Shame as i like the idea of not getting cold water when waiting for hot to turn up as they were on wall at opposite end of tray

Be careful assuming wimpy will not be interested. We bought a plot of land from a major developer during the first housing crash. When we sold the house we built we picked up on a short covenant stating that we had to inform The Us in our case of any development on site. It cost us £1400in admin and charges to discharge

Just had a visit from the water company about failing to notify them of disconnection following demolition Lady was taking photographs and gathering evidence for some sort of action against us. She had identification. I did point out that she had no authority enter the site and that if she wished to check rather than assuming she would find out that we are on a private bore hole and private drainage. The information she had came from the local building control which shows that we had stated on the demolition notice "private water and drainage" The local authority also know we have a borehole as they inspect and test it and also have it properly registered

I have managed to speak with several board manufacturers as well as a couple of the render manufacturers. key is to ensure that a. the battens do not create dead spots. b. That there is a method to move any moisture from the inner skin to the outer skin. c. weep holes are not needed on any boarded system. This is one way of doing it using flashing

Just be careful with the flat ceiling design. I did this but when i got the plans through there were gluelam beams in the way. Don,t want to drill 100mm holes through them

I think Loopcad is free I have decided not to put UFH upstairs but will run some 22mm to each room for some sort of heatcoil rad or low temp rad if i need it in future

I am building a MBC house @Mikey_1980 put his in the inside the roof before mbc pumped the insulation. Ok you may loose a bit of the U value but with a vaulted space i will do the same

I decided to brave the plasterers forum and ask They are worse than us for banter but do stay on topic anyhow Prorend have details on how to flash the windows in the prowall details

In the end i taped one side and clamped a bit of wood across tape. Did the same on all 4 sides. Offer window up first so you know how it fits. Offered it up took off clamps and slid it in hole. It worked sort of As i said earlier i didn't really know what i was doing

by the time i had taped one side the other had started to expand