jack

I assume that the other requirements relate to the "sealed bids" approach to selling. There's no point taking the highest bid if it turns out down the line that the bidder was just tyre-kicking. I assume they want sealed bids because there's a lot of interest in the land. I suppose in that case the argument is that the pool of potential buyers is smaller, but those that have bid will all be serious and can proceed.

I was never in London around the time of the Troubles (and I suspect day to day it wasn't as bad as your experience), but I understand there was a similar stoicism involved there. I had exactly that conversation with someone today. Far more people die on the UK's roads every week than were killed in this attack. We just have this guttural reaction to events like this that the drip of "ordinary" deaths don't seem to involve. I supposed it's called "terrorism" for a reason.

I remember reading a report like this a couple of months ago. These attacks are more or less inevitable. I suspect we'd all be surprised at how many attacks get stopped before we hear about them. I (like everyone) struggle to understand the mentality. There were reports about chat on Isis social networks talking about the bombs that killed children in Mosul being returned to Britain. So if it's wrong to kill innocent children in Mosul, surely it's wrong to kill innocent children in Britain? I'm not even sure that these people are evil in the true sense of the word. I assume they're not psychopaths, but actually genuinely believe that what they are doing is right. I'd be very interested to know the mental state of someone right before they did this. What are they thinking as they walk into a crowd of smiling, happy families, knowing they're about to end their own life and bring years of darkness and pain to the lives of so many others. Do they feel stressed? Excited? Guilty?

Welcome David. Hope today's sunny for you as well

Snap!

Continued: - Not putting heating the bathrooms. Not quite a disaster, but even with passivhaus levels of insulation, the bathrooms are a little chillier than desirable in winter. - Didn't think hard enough about level access. Solvable, but would have been a LOT easier if we'd sorted it earlier. - Same with the garage - really didn't give enough thought to how we were going to manage the access ramp into the garage. More to follow, for sure...

There aren't enough gigs of storage on the server for me to list them all, but some include: - assumed that external blinds would provide 100% darkness, so didn't allow for internal window coverings. They provide nothing of the sort, so everyone is presently getting woken very early by light leakage. Had I known this I've had built in recesses for proper light-proof window coverings. - didn't put in writing some things that I should have, which came back to bite me on the bum when it became my word against the other guy (I actually think he genuinely remembered it differently to me, but one thing I do have is a reliable memory for conversations, so he was definitely in the wrong). - specified in greater detail what level of finish I expected from trades. According to at least some trades we've had onsite, my idea of basic, workmanlike quality" is "perfection that no human being (or at least English tradesperson) can achieve". I think it just shows how poor many people are at their trades. - I carefully measured up all the window apertures once the frame was up, then proceeded to not get around to comparing them to the plans. Some were slightly short, and that triggered the biggest nightmare of the build (as we all know from watching Grand Designs, it's always the windows that cause the problems!) - kept putting off difficult decisions, which often meant making the decision at crunch time, while under stress (possibly even stress related to something unrelated). Also meant we sometimes paid over the odds for materials, because we didn't plan them far enough in advance. I could go on (and on, etc). I suspect that other people will have different issues. The ones I had above are largely related to my own personal weaknesses as a human, which include a dislike of confrontation, an intense dislike of telling people what to do (you really need to learn how to do this - I'm certainly better than I was as a result of the experience), and problems with making big decisions. I recommend examining your own weaknesses and seeing where you think they might get you into trouble!

That's an very aggressive price, even with you doing a lot yourself.

Designing a house before you have the plot is somewhat putting the cart before the horse. What if north is to the top left and you have all the glazing facing that direction? What if the plot is wide but you won't be able to build deep? I think it's great to work on what you want/need, but until you have the plot, it's probably premature to go too far down into the detailed design. Having said that, in terms of scale and relative positions of rooms, your layout is startlingly similar to what we built in 2015 in Surrey (ours is a mirror version of this). If you get to the point where building this is a reality, I'd be happy to share our own experiences in living with this layout.

If the internal humidity is similar to what you expect it to be long term, then I imagine this would help.

Can't remember - several weeks, at least (I think). I'd like to know the reason too. I've just assumed that the wood was sourced somewhere with high humidity levels relative to the average in our house. Not a great deal that can be done about it, other than repair and re-paint. We were always expecting re-paint within a couple of years, but I've certainly been caught out by just how much work will be required to get these all back to looking decent. I'll be posting for advice in the relevant subforum when (if!) I get 5 mins to think about this.

Result!

Welcome, sounds like you have some interesting experience! Ask away in the relevant sections and I'm sure someone will be able to have a go at answering.

And that's the only story you have to tell about the experience? (<-- gimp mask)

I could see the engineered version making a difference. Here're a couple of door frames in our house, taken today:

Now that's an interesting idea...

Agreed. I'm not a great fan of drawers. Their sole advantage, for me, is that they look neat. Our kids are at the age (ie, between 1 and 30) where they just don't put things away without constant haranguing, so the ability to shut the mess out of sight is nice. Of course, we could have achieved that with shelves given the wardrobes all have doors...

One data point about softwood: We used high-quality softwood linings. It was some of the nicest softwood I've seen, with few knots and a very fine planed finish. After 18 months, they've all seriously shrunk, leaving cracks at pretty-well every joint, several popped screw-heads, and a couple of places where knots have pushed the paint into a bubble. I'm now going to have fill, sand and paint every single frame in the house. I did expect some movement, but I've been a little surprised at how extensive it is. The MDF skirting boards we used have all weathered very well. If I were doing this again, I'd consider using MDF for the door frames/lining. Not sure whether there are other disadvantages of MDF in this scenario that I'm not aware of.

I think they look okay. It took several weeks for the Ikea smell to dissipate though. My kids have already destroyed two of the drawers by closing the doors on them when they're open. I guess the same could/would happen with any other wardrobe of this design, but if we were having proper built-ins, I wouldn't have the drawers behind a door. We still haven't done our walk-in wardrobe, but one way or the other, it will NOT have Ikea fittings!

There are few things in this world I dislike more than that game.

For cost reasons, we ended up installing Ikea wardrobes in the kids' bedrooms in the new house (despite promising ourselves we'd never have Ikea wardrobes). Installation proceeded well - everything done in one room, and all bar the doors in another. Oddly, we ended up with three clearly different types of drawer runners, and two types of hinge, despite all wardrobes apparently being identical. A few days later we went to finish the second room, only to find that the door hinges wouldn't click into the hinge mount on the carcasses. All of them were the same. I took some photos - the little pins were simply too big for their complementary slots. With our recent experience of all the different types of hardware, I assumed someone had put the wrong halves of different hinge models into the bags. Eventually we dragged ourselves down to Ikea an hour away, with photos and a couple of examples (we didn't remove all the installed hardware, as it isn't really meant for easy removal). After waiting nearly 40 mins to see someone at customer service, I explained what the problem was to the very nice but slightly dim young chap serving. He took us through the installation process, even though we'd told him that we'd successfully installed the ones in the other room. I kept showing him that the slot and pins just weren't the right size for each other, getting more and more frustrated by his seeming inability to understand basic mechanics. Eventually, he went and got his manager. The manager asked me in a patronising way what the problem was, so I explained again. I was starting to get pretty frustrated by this stage and started my explanation by saying that we'd been here nearly an hour and just wanted replacement hinges. I then went to put the pieces together to demonstrate, and they snapped together perfectly! Turns out I'd accidentally put them together the "wrong" way, which was, of course, the right way! I immediately realised that my lovely wife, who'd wanted a go on the tools the first night we were assembling the carcasses, had installed all of the carcass mounts upside down in the second room, and I was too thick to realise this when trying to fit the doors!

I very seriously looked into straw bale construction, back in the early days when we'd just bought our bungalow and had no idea what we were going to build when we knocked it down. It's a genuinely amazing construction method, but I believe it's better in drier climates. In a wet climate like ours in the UK (especially further north and west), you have to carefully manage keeping moisture away from the base of the external walls. That means a some sort of raised base and a decent rainscreen (or very wide roof overhangs), which tends to eat away at the relatively low cost of the bales themselves. In the end, I decided we were doing enough unconventional stuff without throwing a relatively untested construction method into the mix as well.

Lovely view!

Family or trusted friends? How much are you storing?

They usually do, but you just hope they haven't done any permanent damage (to the situation, your bank balance, or your sanity) by that stage.