jack

No, I've never noticed this with ours.

Great story, thanks for sharing. Careful with the magnolia paint. Too much and you could end up accidentally making the house worth a lot more.

It probably depends what's going on top. We have EPS 100 under most of our MBC slab, with EPS 300 under the ring beam and areas of high load. That's a structural slab though, which has to handle the weight of the entire house. I haven't read everything above, but if it's just a floor slab that isn't bearing any walls, EPS 70 may be fine. That said, it depends very much on what you're actually doing - I'd be checking with your engineer or the suppliers (and building control officer) for advice before committing to a solution.

I also wish we'd thought about this at the planning stage. MVHR is great, but during hot periods in summer, the only way to keep the house cool is to leave windows open overnight. While we're not near any significant watercourse, we do seem to get a few mosquitoes in overnight. There are roll-down and magnetic screens available, but they look a bit cack in my opinion. Perhaps if you plan to integrate roll-down screens from the start, you can conceal them so they're aren't so obvious. You also have to consider whether your windows open in or out. If they're inward opening, you really need an external screen setup, and vice versa.

I've heard mixed reviews about Milwaukee. Apparently they used to be top drawer, but were bought out several years ago and quality may have suffered. AvE has covered this in passing more than once on his Youtube channel. His review of one of the largest Makita cordless drills is here. By coincidence, I'd already bought the Makita DHP481Z, which is either the same as the one he reviews or very similar. This thing is a serious bit of kit. Amazing torque. I used it to drill about 30 x 12mm holes through softwood to the full depth of the bit, and the motor speed didn't drop even when being pushed hard with the bit buried to the chuck. I burned out a cheapo corded drill from Homebase doing something similar. One thing though: it's heavy! I wouldn't want to be spending a lot of hours holding it overhead or at odd angles unless you have more masculine wrists than my dainty things. Looking back, I seem to have gotten a good deal (£105 delivered) from FFX when I bought it about 18 months ago. I also have the basic model Makita LXT impact driver, which again is amazing. I used it to drive long galvanised carriage bolts into the holes drilled above and again the whole experience was effortless. These were the first time I'd ever spent money on decent tools and there's just no way I could go back to cheap tools again. I'm sure you'd get a similar experience from DeWalt and others, but I'm very happy about having gone down the Makita route. Oh, and I use generic 4AH batteries, and they're brilliant. To be honest, unless you're drilling all day, you'll be hard pressed to empty one of these of charge in a hurry. Takes only 25 mins to charge from empty as well.

All our bedrooms have floor-mounted outlets and they're fine. This also reduced the amount of ducting we needed, to the point where we got away with one fewer rolls ducting.

I recall reading that every time you give a fresh deck of cards a good shuffle, you very likely arrive at a combination that has never existed in history. The number of possible permutations is 51!, or: 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000

Don't worry, this won't be the last time you'll feel like this! You don't just have to ask for advice - feel free to have a rant as well. As long as you're working and learning, you'll get sympathy. Virtually all of us have been there are some stage (some of us several times!) Keep your pecker up and crack on. Oh, and I echo what Ferdinand said.

Agree with all the above. If the architect's fees include full management throughout, then perhaps you can disengage from them once you having planning permission. I know both the architects we worked with were happy to stop their involvement at any point (and both were happy to consult later on an hourly rate if needed).

Okay then, it's a common misspelling.

A misspelling?

Very neat install. No way I'll show you the current state of my Brink 400 Excellent!

I was about to say that the corresponding pay-cut would cancel out the reduced commuting costs, but then I recalled how much some train-drivers are on...

Exactly right, but then the cost of commuting can itself be eye-watering. Before I gave up working in London last year, my season ticket (just the train - no tube/bus) wasn't far off £4,000 a year for a trip of under an hour. I reckon commuting cost me £10,000 a year in gross income when I added in things like lunches, the odd drinks after work, and buses when it was raining or I was in a hurry for the train.

Absolutely. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it! We do say that something is "inflamed", so "inflammable" makes sense at least in that context. Annoying though, because "in" is used more often as a negative modifier. From memory, "inflammable" means more flammable than, erm, "flammable" - or maybe it's the other way around.

I can see why you of all people are avoiding using it then! Good on you. It's the little things that make life worth living.

It's not by accident that Screwfix's own brand is called Erbauer.

This "hewn" look is exactly what we wanted, but it would have cost far more than we were willing to spend. Also, based on my experience with trades since then, I doubt we'd have been able to find people capable of doing the perfect work required - even people who were referred to us as perfectionists let us down with the quality of their work.

As a point of comparison, our electricity bill was £650 for a 289m2 MBC house, with DHW and UFH handled by a 5kW ASHP. We do have a whacking great load of solar with an immersion diverter, which means hot water is more or less free for several months of the year, and I'm convinced there's still something to be saved by reducing the amount of immersion boost we use during winter and the shoulder months.

Almost word for word my plumber's reaction to our proposal for a 5kW ASHP for DHW and heating duties. It was -1 here overnight. Heating still hasn't come on this year (partly because it can't - the ASHP recently threw a fault and we're waiting to get someone out to take a look). The concrete floor downstairs is starting to get uncomfortably cool to walk around on without socks, but the house is still perfectly comfortable. I'll add a couple: Estate agent (an acquaintance who ended up at ours after the pub with a group of friends one night) [As we arrive:]"Ooh, can I have a look around? I've wondered for ages what your house was like inside." [After poking around:] "I don't really like modern houses, but the inside isn't as bad as I thought it'd be based on the outside. It's actually pretty good." In vino veritas, indeed! Random local couple who we know to say hello to, walking by [Brick skips going up]: "Oh, they look nice" [Us]: Yes, once they're done they'll be painted white". [Them]: "Oh no, I don't like that at all."

Ouch!

I personally suspect that for at least some people, architect bashing falls into the general basket of undervaluing industries where the product doesn't always reflect, to the untrained eye, the amount of knowledge, experience, and indeed graft that's involved in generating it. A friend is a graphic designer and is regularly turned down for design jobs because she's "far too expensive". She's highly experienced, does brilliant work, and is flexible and easy to work with. She makes an average of maybe £20 an hour! I wonder what people think is a reasonable price to pay?

Many of us appreciate your input Ian, and most of us don't think all - or even most - architects are tossers. There are unfortunately a number of people who seem to take pleasure in denigrating architects at every opportunity. I genuinely don't know where the animosity comes from, but there seems to be some sort of pride in putting down architects or proving that there's something about building that they don't have deep expert knowledge about. Perhaps these critics are great at all aspects of designing buildings themselves, or don't care about design or function enough to care, or have had a bad experience. I don't know, but it's no excuse for rudeness. All the architects I've met have appeared to be very hard working people who almost certainly didn't get paid anything like as much as most other people who've spent a similar amount of time in education and training. Of the roughly 10 architects we met before we built our house, one was a tosser. He was actually probably pretty good at his job, but I found him arrogant and would have found it difficult to work with him. Every other person we met seemed excellent, and we were utterly torn as to which one to choose. 1 in 10 being a tosser seems to be about right for people in general. In the end, we made a mistake. We went with one architect, only to find at our next meeting that the architect we interviewed was now going to be the "second" on the project due to where he was based. We met the new person, and she seemed okay. As it turned out, she was fine to work with (ie, not a tosser), but we didn't like what she designed after several attempts and versions. In the end, we agreed to pay them for what they'd done and parted company amicably. The guy we ended up getting to do the work was great. The house isn't perfect, but I believe most of the imperfections or shortcomings relate to things that we pushed ourselves.

Doors beside the extractor?

Jesus, how many of you are using these things? During the peak of our build (max number of people onsite) in summer, the toilet was utterly dire by the end of each week. Maybe they don't use much solution in the serviced ones, so it deteriorates faster.