Bitpipe

https://www.roofingsuperstore.co.uk/product/ubiflex-non-lead-waterproof-flashing-black-200mm-x-12m-33mm-thick.html This is what we used.

Welcome and congrats on the hardest part - finding a plot! Make sure you have costed professional services into your budget - your no doubt helpful architect will not be free, neither will structural engineers, ground investigations, project managers, building control inspectors etc before a spade hits the ground. They're also not zero rated for VAT ! Keep these services to a minimum and don't be afraid to dispense with them entirely once they've delivered their core job (i.e. architect has got planning etc). We lived on site in a 40x12ft caravan with kids who were 8 and 10 then and it was fine - smaller the better tbh (kids, not caravan). You buy one and sell it on after, our 18 months accommodation cost £800. All the more necessary if you plan to spend a lot of time on site doing work. Get your power, water and sewage / treatment sorted early and plug the van into these. Turnkey frame is a great idea for the novice - removes most of the risk in one fell swoop. Many here used a passive twin wall system w. insulated slab (I went a step further and built an insulated basement) - do lots of cost comparisons and cross checking as various suppliers include/exclude different things. Our TF had all internal stud walls (not just structural) and temp stairs as part of the package. FT company also did all detailed design, calcs and I just handed their package to the BCO - no need for an architect to interpret. We took a year and a month from demolition (start Aug) to moving in (end Aug following year). Frame started 13th November and by mid Jan scaff was down and we had a fully roofed, rendered water and airtight house. 1st fix can take a while to complete as trades can be hard to pin down so prepare for schedules to slip - you get bursts of activity and then fallow weeks where nothing happens. Our 2nd fix went fast as we were lucky to have a big enough house to allow trades to follow on after each other floor by floor i.e. plaster was drying in basement while painters were at work on ground floor and joiner was working upstairs. Doesn't always work like that so you will have gaps between wet trades as they normally need the place to themselves. Landscaping etc can happen after you move in but keep an eye on your completion and VAT reclaim eligibility.

Ubiflex is the poor man's version of lead flashing Now I would have been a bit more smug had I though to apply the Ubiflex before the render went on, but I hadn't thought of it then. I did do it before the garage got rendered and it worked great. Now have 40m of ubiflex to apply to the main house but luckily for me, the render is (hopefully) getting replaced so I can nick in and do it all properly this time. Every cloud etc..

I also love chickens and have 6 in a large fenced area in the garden. Don't let them out anymore as the fox loves them more than I do. WRT dressing your insulation, I used a 200mm strip of Ubiflex (fake lead flashing) to cover the insulation - runs from under battens for render and over the insulated up-stand and into gravel. It has a gritty finish and I think it's made of bitumen covered steel mesh - so flexible but tough. Comes in a few different colours and there are also cheaper versions from different brands.

Similar to me - I paid one an initial fee to build a detailed QS cost plan for ICF vs Timber Frame and carry out a PHPP analysis. His proposed fee was then 10% ish of the QS cost but he was confident that he'd bring it in under budget. I did it myself, saved 20% on his budget plan with more aggressive pricing and also saved his fee... Was easy enough, greatly helped by choosing a turnkey TF package - had I done ICF with more contractors in the mix then maybe he would have been more useful - don't know.

Good point - what made PM manageable for us was that contractor one did demolition, cart away, basement excavation, basement construction and all services and contractor two erected a timberframe, internal floors, walls and felted roof (then returned once windows & doors in to do insulation & airtightness). Had we not had a basement, they would have done raft foundation also (but not groundworks). Including scaffold, that's 3 contractors to deal with initially, each onsite sequentially. Window & door installation was one contractor, roofing was another and render a third - another 3 contractors - they worked more in parallel. At that stage we had an airtight waterproof shell with internal floors and stud walls ready for first fix from plumbing and electrics (two more contractors) and then a joiner to make good for boarding and plastering (now up to 10 contractors). Tiling, flooring, decorating and kitchen brings it up to 14 (may have missed one or two others), while that sounds like a lot, it was spread over 12 months. We did landscaping after moving in (another 3 contractors).

Really depends what @SRP means by 'project manage' and how insulated / engaged they want to be in the build process. It's a sliding scale of engagement really and there is no one size fits all model - very dependent on your attitude to budget, quality and time. Are you likely to be really stretching your budget, more or less comfortable with the costs with a buffer or are you awash with cash? Do you really care how things get done or will you have very specific ideas about detailing during all stages of the build? Can you be disturbed at all during the working day to take/make a call? Can you spend some of a lunchtime and evenings / weekends on the phone / internet? Can you work from home a few days a week or get to site ever? Does your build need to happen asap or can you take a bit more time (usually this depends on your accommodation situation while building, if you're living on site in a caravan then you're lest cost sensitive to overuns etc..) You need to check with your architect just how hands on they would be as a PM - frequency of site visit, scope to make autonomous cost / quality based decisions etc. You will need general site management also, opening, closing, taking deliveries, H&S etc. Then you need to decide how sub contractor / materials decisions are made. Do you want to approve? Leave it to general contractor? Have Architect manage tenders etc? A general contractor will run your site and will hire in subs but they won't necessarily make great purchasing decisions for you or hunt for best prices / quality etc - they tend to stay in their comfort zone (usual subs, suppliers, decent credit etc) and if it's a fixed price deal, they will retain savings / absorb costs. They will do things the way they usually do things so if you have some very specific requirements in design or quality (e.g. airtightness, shadow gapping etc..) then you will need someone to be more hands on with the delivery of those items. PMing it yourself is potentially cheaper - depends how much time you can commit and how engaged you want to be with the decision making. We both worked full time but I worked from home mostly during the build and we lived on site so was able to see what was happening few times a day but the majority of PM time was evenings and weekends to source materials & pricing. Needed to field occasional calls during the day for schedule trades & deliveries but if you want all decisions to be run by you then you'll have a similar level of disturbance. We chose all subs and materials so saved 20-30% on the QS plan that was originally presented to us by a professional PM (plus his fee) i.e. to get the same quality (maybe) from a hands off turnkey single contractor would have probably added 20-30% to our budget.

Yup - you'll need a right angle elbow to bring it out of the ground. Stopcock just before that with a section of 110mm waste pipe as an access sleeve is also a good idea as otherwise you need to keep turning off water at mains to service the tap.

I claimed quite a lot of landscaping VAT back, plus got other contractors (gates, resin driveway) to zero rate their work. I believe you are eligible to zero rate lawn and hard surfacing to the immediate area of the building (within reason i.e. the bit that would all have been churned up during construction). I claimed for 100m2 of patio and 250m2 turf. If your planning docs show walls and fencing to street or sides then you can zero rate that too, plus any planting mandated by planning (I had a condition to plant and maintain hedge in the planter wall so I included the irrigation kit also). Also included all the sub surface preparation - aco drains, type 1 etc.

Having met you a few times I can confirm that you are not Nick Clegg.

We enforce a canadian /european style no-shoe rule in the house for everyone (visitors etc) as for the first year we had an unmade driveway so wanted to minimise grit etc. Much more hygenic and everyone gets to enjoy the soft & warm resin floor underfoot.

Our ground floor is suspended timber (over basement) - build up is UFH in alu spreader plates - 18mm OSB - 12mm ply - 9 mm ply - 6-7mm Sika resin comfort floor. Nice and warm underfoot year round, whether the UFH is on or not. Remember tiles etc are good at conducting heat away from your feet so will feel cold unless warmed up via UFH (i.e. in summer). Wood, resin etc is a poorer conductor so will feel warmer underfoot.

Dancing baby..

I'm just a whippersnapper - May 22, 2013

Nope because at that stage we had no idea and the passive / low energy idea came later. Brief was design us a nice house based on design ideas we like (white render, boxy) that fit the site, allowed for future site expansion and would get planning. After we got planning and were waiting for our rental to sell and release funds, I was researching basement build methods and found this site's predecessor. I then discovered the whole low energy idea and went from there. As luck would have it, and the site constraints - we're in a build line that runs north / south - we have minimal south or north glazing, four windows & door to east facing street and big sliders to west overlooking garden.This performed well in the PHPP so no tweaks required aside from motorised external shutters to the velux on roof and the east windows. For quite a while we planned to build in ICF from basement up with a SIPs roof but the final costings made us pivot back towards timber frame.

Very similar to us Jack, ours designed a great building for us but was a bit traditional in how to build it so there we pleasantly parted ways but I considered it money well spent.

Square is always the cheapest as you get max floor area for wall length (well, technically a sphere is most optimal but they're a bit fiddly to build). I.e. if you build a square single story house 10m x 10m, you will enclose 100m2 with 40 linear m of wall (and trench foundation under the wall). If you build a rectangle 20m x 5m then you will still have 100m2 of floor but now have 50 linear m of wall & foundation - so 20% more expensive. Also take circulation space (corridors, stairs etc) into consideration as this will eat into your habitable space. Obviously you need to ensure the layout works for you, plus consider plot dimensions, position of the sun during the day, views etc.

Just watch out for algae growth - blows onto the wall and gets into the finish and then blooms when it's damp - jet washing does not shift it (but will take the topcoat off your render) When I get mine replaced I will try and treat with an anti-fungal product.

The lad who did my landscaping had that issue - was cock a hoop at winning 10 out of 12 jobs he bid for but was stressing over fitting them all in, hiring extra labour etc. I shared my opinion that he needed to put his prices up until the job win rate was manageable and he'd still make the same, if not more money. Which he did... obv. not to me though

I think the days of a car reflecting the wealth of an owner are long gone in these days of PCP where you can drive a new BMW for a couple hundred pounds a month with no intention to ever own it outright. I have friends who would not be seen dead in a less than two year old car but have no savings, life insurance etc.. life life day to day which is fair enough. Back on topic, our architect had very sensible staged fees and when we felt that the next stage did not deliver the value (make your own bacon sandwich moment) then we amicably parted company. That said, we made a few snafus that cost us money (i.e. not putting structural support in for wall mounted balcony glass, needed to use a cantilevered deck system over a GRP roof) and a few that just needed head scratching (poorly placed steels wrt duct runs) which may have been avoided if the architect had handled the detail design. As regards architect fees - there's plenty of competition in the market and people don't need to pay them as evidenced by plenty of the self builders here.

I always meant to seal the gaps where my render met the soffits (which were installed after the render). Never got round to it and not sure there's a massive benefit other than aesthetics as there's insect screen top and bottom and I'd never get up to clean it. Bit of a shadow gap effect. Anyway, as my render is likely need removed and replaced, glad I didn't bother. So my choice would to leave it be and see how you live with it - nice home for the spiders...

Is there insect mesh at that interface?

Welcome - don't worry about the gaps in your building knowledge. We'll expect you to pull your weight in the off topic threads though - more than a few engineers and scientists on this forum I did EE myself but never got my head round the radio side of things so stuck to digital and s/w. I recall our uni radio lecturer tell us day one all 'Sure it's a black art lads, a black art...'

My current favourite is the wild haired NI guy who was on the BBC show where they used VR to show the designs to clients (which I think is a great idea, would have helped me immensely). Liked a lot of his refurb design ideas (some were a bit out there though). Unlike many TV architects, he also doesn't seem to have too much of an ego (cough) https://www.robertjamisonarchitects.com/. Or maybe just a strong sense of irony.

I think if you can get a mortgage on it, then it's ok. Our render clad TF has not presented any challenges in that respect.