jack

@Nickfromwales, you're not the only one to have confused the two threads I think!

I can't help you with your main question, but the planning department doesn't pay any heed to covenants. In this case, they'll be for the future purchasers to worry about!

Fermacell similarly recommends not using drywall screws. Guess what the same guys who did our bathrooms used on the Fermacell?

Yes, I'm feeling particularly smug about having asked them to take down the water-resistant (not waterproof!) green plasterboard in order to put up this "better" backing board! I was talked out of tanking as being "overkill". The point was made that if water got through the tiles, it would find a way past the tanking under the shower tray and then have nowhere to go. This is the same guy who just wanted to use PVA everywhere. I got him some SBR for under the floors and his initial response was it was just overpriced PVA. When I read him the ingredients list he agreed there was a bit more to it. There just seems to be this "take the simplest/quickest way forward" attitude with a lot of UK tradespeople. It isn't cost cutting, because we were buying materials and paying a day rate for a lot of this stuff. The real shame about all of this is that the tiler is a really great guy, who worked hard and mostly did a good, if not always stellar, job. When picked up on things he was responsive to fixing them. It's just I wasn't always able to be there to keep an eye on how things were being done. Living and learning...

Unfortunately, today took a different turn than expected and I wasn't able to get to the tiles. I'll try to get to them early this week. My wife and I are arguing about this at the moment in relation to the remaining bits and pieces we have left for completion. She wants to pay someone to do it, but since it's all stuff that's visible I want to do it myself to make sure it's done properly (or at least I'll know I tried!) We've just been let down time and time again, even when we've had great references from people, made it clear (we thought!) the level of quality we were after, and in more than one case offered more money for people to slow down and do the bloody job properly! I became convinced in the end that it's less laziness or a lack of pride, but the inability to actually appreciate what a decent job looks like. If you don't know that, what hope have you of achieving it? I can think of only a two or three people on our job who had this attitude. Most others were nice guys, who did a workmanlike job and no better.

No, definitely some sort of cement board. Yes, it's a definitely a join between the boards. Some background might help. We didn't have a main contractor. MBC built our frame and we arranged follow-on trades to come in and do the rest of the work. As to how this guy got involved, as I think some of you know, we have brick slips on most of the house, and timber cladding on the rest. The first outfit we had fixing the brick slips did an extraordinarily poor job. My children could easily have done better than they managed. After giving them a couple of opportunities to lift their game, we eventually parted company. By this stage, we were extremely stressed (the brick slips guy had gotten borderline threatening at one point) and decided that even if it cost a bit more, we needed to get someone in that we could trust. We'd had a builder acquaintance of ours price some work previously. Really nice guy. Other friends of ours who had used him had given glowing reports about the quality of his work, but we had been a little sceptical about using someone we knew, and he wasn't particularly cheap. By this stage, however, we were desperate to just get someone in who we could rely on, so we got him in to price for fixing the rest of the brick slips. He engaged the tiler who did the tiling above to fix all of the brick slips, and he did a reasonable job for the most part. I chalked the occasional imperfections up to the frankly pretty useless brick slip system that we had gone with, although knowing what I've since learned that might be a little generous. The same builder also arranged for the cladding work we needed doing at around the same time. The first guys he had doing it were absolutely brilliant, but at some point they became unavailable (it was all a bit mysterious - I think they had some money issues). The next guys weren't as good, but after a few friendly chats with them and the builder, things improved. I suspect, but don't know, that the builder underpriced the cladding job, and that this perhaps coloured our relationship with him going forward. Once the brick slips were finished and we were moving on to plasterboarding and tiling, we decided to get this guy to price again. With hindsight, this was a mistake. The builder himself was involved in the boarding, along with the tiler and another guy had been doing a lot of pointing of the brick slips. They had clearly done this before, as they really cracked on and did a pretty decent job. We had problems with their attitude to things like soundproofing (pretty sure I've mentioned before that they just slung the sound insulation up into the ceilings without making any effort to bridge the spaces between the joists), and I was annoyed by the sizes of some of the gaps that were left around, e.g., MVHR outlets and metal back boxes, but overall the finish was pretty good. He also supplied the guys who did the carpentry (door, door linings and skirtings). We weren't that happy with some of the work and it was an absolute nightmare trying to get him to admit that work wasn't acceptable. Part of the reason we decided to have him do all of this was that if it went wrong, there'd be no question who was at fault. Since the jobs were added piecemeal and we never really considered him a main contractor, there is no formal contract in place other than the general letter he sent with quotes. Towards the end of his interaction with us, it became clear that his idea of what was a "snag" was very different to ours. With our suspicions that he'd lost money on the cladding, we'd decided that for some of the bigger jobs we would go on a day rate. Some of the other stuff (carpentry, from memory) was done on a fixed price. When we pointed out a few snags on the day rate work, he told us that he "didn't have the margin on day rate work to redo work". But then when we pointed out a few snags on the fixed-price work, he told us that he "didn't have the margin on fixed-price work to redo work"! We were certainly left wondering what the hell we were paying him these margins to do, given that we'd probably paid for something like 100+ man days of his sub-contractor's time. We eventually got him to fix the worst of the snags, but we were left with a nasty taste in our mouths. It was difficult because we see the guy around socially a bit. I'd have been perfectly happy to push it but my wife wasn't happy about potentially poisoning things locally, so in the end we just bit our tongues and planned to rectify the bits we weren't happy with ourselves. Anyway, probably more background than you need or want, but there it is. Perhaps if they're there but proud, they actually aren't holding the board flat and were able to be pulled through until they engaged the heads? Yes, it's pretty thick. For the marble, we definitely used flexible cementitious (Topps Tiles branded stuff, I believe). The supplier was pretty adamant about the importance of using that. I'm not sure about the other tiles, but reasonably sure he used the same stuff. I know that whatever he used was bagged. One more data point that for me actually adds to the mystery - this is what the interface with the shower tray at the bottom of the crack looks like: That picture makes it looks slightly worse than it is in real life. The close-up is a bit more accurate: This looks to me like the stud that the crack is along has pulled away from the tray. The only other option is that the entire tray has moved with the bowing of the wall, which seems unlikely. Again, I wasn't here when the tray was put down, but I believe it was put onto a plywood base and glued down pretty extensively with Sticks-Like-Sh*t adhesive. I've got some things to do today but will take down some more tiles later and see what's behind them. Thanks for all the help so far.

Thanks Nick. If you mean the vertical white strip, it looks like a line of sealant of some sort. White mastic that's been squeezed into the joint, I guess. Re: drywall screw heads and adhesive, I wasn't here for them doing this stuff, so I don't know what they used. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they used drywall screws, and yes, that one's not been driven all the way home. I wasn't blown away with the quality of the tiling generally, but this subcontractor was via the guy who I've mentioned in the past as having had problems with. Everything we raised as an issue was apparently us having "unrealistic expectations of quality". He walked off in a strop when I pointed out that one of his guys had unscrewed and discarded a piece of protective steel over the 240V cabling to one of the external blinds, right in the corner of the window where a future owner might drill to install blinds or curtains. He's actually a really nice bloke, but clearly incapable of dealing with conflict (I was always positive and took a "how can we solve this" approach when raising issues with him). Worse, he's peripherally in our social group locally, so we run into him at parties now and then. That made it really awkward to push too hard. In the end we just threw our hands up and wrote it off to experience. Still, if it turns out that they've installed this incorrectly, he'll fix it at his cost or we'll see him in court. I'll pull some more tiles off tomorrow and take some more pics.

Thanks for all the feedback guys, very useful. Possibly, yes. Just seems odd they wouldn't do it here when the same people plasterboarded the rest of the house as well and always used screws across the face of the boards. Ha, yes, I spent half an hour earlier today looking for the neodymium magnets I know have somewhere, but no luck. Might need to get hold of one. It was fitted in late summer 2015, when the house had been wind-tight for several months. It's been at the same temperature +/-2 deg C ever since. Walls went up by MBC in early 2015. Boarding and tiling took place September or so. They seem pretty straight vertically. If they've warped, then they've warped in each and every bathroom wall (as well as our downstairs shower) and not in a single other place! I suspect you're right, it's just hard to believe that they'd do this given that all the other plasterboarding they did was properly screwed to the walls. I've taken off a tile on a crack and this is what I can see (ignore bloodstains - spent 20 seconds trying to find dirty water that I thought was leaking in before I realised I'd cut my fingertip!): The board is darker than it looks in the photo, but it's clearly some sort of cement board. By way of background (and this is all from memory), I came home from work one day to find they'd used water-resistant plasterboard where the showers were. I said I wanted something stronger and more permanent, so we agreed I'd pay for them to take this down and replace it with proper waterproof backer board. This looks very dark to me - darker than the tile backer board we used under the floors a bit later (again involving an argument about what had been agreed in advance - please, please make note of everything that's agreed both upfront and along the way, and put it in writing, either in a site diary or by emailing the person involved as soon as you've had the conversation!) I wonder whether what's been used isn't a tile backer board but is instead some sort of cement board that isn't rated for this sort of application? Another comment: I can't get a photo, but I was able to take off an access panel and get at the inside of our built-in bath (white tiles in second pic above). I can just see where the edge of the board is joined to the frame. It looks like a couple of screws have partly pulled through the board (which is the same grey stuff as above). The structure here isn't quite the same as the rest of the walls, as the tiler did it. The verticals on the built-in bath are a lot further spaced than the studs everywhere else, which actually could emulate quite well the structure if fixings haven't been used on the studs between the edges of the board. Still a bit of a mystery what's caused the swelling, even if the fixings turn out to be the problem. While two of the three showers have been used, one hasn't been and it has the same problem. It therefore isn't (or isn't just) moisture from use that's problem. Next step is to get hold of a magnet or studfinder and see what I can learn about fixings.

I wasn't there, but pretty sure the joints were done on studs. As far as I can tell, it's the centre of the sheet bowing out.

I think I may have mentioned this in passing at some point a while ago, but I'm now revisiting this issue. A few months after we moved in, I noticed that we had vertical cracks through the marble tiles in our ensuite. Shortly afterwards, I noticed that in fact there were vertical cracks in all of the bathrooms. The cracks follow the lines of the board joints underneath. We have Hardibacker or some other sort of tile backer board in these areas. I initially wondered whether it was the house settling along the line of the bathrooms, but the pattern just doesn't fit, plus there's no similar cracking anywhere else in the house. I was about to start chipping out the tiles today to replace them when I noticed how much the walls have bowed in these areas. A couple of examples: Crack in marble: Crack in tile: Bowed wall: I did initially wonder whether it was to do with water, but it's happened even in the second ensuite shower, which hasn't yet been grouted and has never been used. My next guess is that the adhesive (flexible cement-based for the marble, as recommended by the supplier) has wicked into the hardibacker and caused it to swell and bow. It just seems like a lot of bowing for that sort of material. I'm about to start chipping away at the cracked tiles to replace them, but I'm a little concerned that I don't know the cause. I'm also slightly worried about leaving the bowed sections as they are, but short of tearing everything down and starting again, I can't see what else I can do! Help please?

The installer did ours.

All around just thoroughly dependable guys. Everything was always "no bother". Some of them still drop in now and again to say hello (they've done a couple of other houses nearby since doing ours). Remind me never to go drinking with you. The older I get, the sooner my "nope, that's enough" switch kicks in (and it isn't calibrated for shots). Multi-day hangovers have ruined drinking for me.

Brendan's brother is Darren. He's the (slightly more) talkative one.

All ground floor walls and internal studwork, most of the first floor beams.

Actually, that sounds familiar. I think I responded to point out that what they'd quoted on wasn't what we were after, and could they update, and then I never heard back. I suspect they're just a commodity-like supplier, and aren't interested in unusual circumstances.

Ha! Given the number of typos in your opening line and the time you posted, I did wonder whether there'd been a wee dram involved! Definitely worth doing now and then! Glad to hear the stitch is out. How's it looking (no pics, please!) Most smart people consider most patents in their industry obvious. I don't know the history of penicillin patents, but if a patent was available, Fleming (or those who developed the production processes) should have pursued one. Universities didn't really "do" patents back then though. The penicillin story is fascinating. I think people assume Fleming did a load of work, but he actually did very little beyond the initial discovery and journal article. Maxim may also have rights in things like the circuit layout or the copyright in the code that runs on the device. If those weren't copied, then they haven't infringed anyone's rights (assuming no patents).

I didn't find them competitive pricewise, plus when they sent me a quote they completely ignored everything I told them I did and didn't want (eg, they tried to sell me a 15kW ASHP when I said I had a low energy house, and a 4kW array even though I told them I wanted up to 10kW if possible). They also didn't follow up on the quote. I guess when you have a big company with high overheads, even a small dip in income can kill you.

This +several million. I actually measured the apertures in ours but with one thing and another didn't get around to comparing them to the drawings. As it happens, there are a few that were slightly less tall than they should have been (15-20mm instead of 30mm, with one or two being 8-10mm). You wouldn't think it significant, but it was in some cases. The result was delays, extra costs and a couple of places where the installation just isn't what it should be.

@AliMcLeod, the one to talk to about basement construction is @Bitpipe. I know he spend a very long time looking at options and has recently moved into his completed house.

I suppose technically they say "Buying new is greener", not "Buying TW is greener than buying a new house from another builder. And that may be true, if you're comparing that to buying an older house that hasn't been retrofitted with these features.

Lower CO2 emissions - than what? Double glazing - minimum allowable on new builds. Even most crappy Victorian builds have had double glazing retrofitted. Efficient boiler - again, compulsory on new builds. Water saving boiler - I don't even know what this is! Do they give you an ultra-low flow combi so that the shower stops when you turn on the kitchen tap? Quality insulation - again, to building regs, but not necessarily installed with sufficient care that it even functions that well. Then again, probably 95% of the population doesn't know or care about any of this. As a nation, we get the commodity house builders we deserve.

Well done. I liked the look of that stuff but it's eyewateringly expensive at retail.

Correct. After MBC had laid the second layer in the area where we were running the pipes, I cut two channels about 300mm apart in the second (middle) 100mm layer, large enough to take 50mm polypropylene pipe (solvent weld stuff for drains, I believe it was). The pipes were wedged in place with EPS offcuts and then foamed in. I used an airgun to heat and bend up the end that came up into the plant room. Drawcords were put in place. When we eventually got around to installing the ASHP, I used self-adhesive foam tape along the required lengths of 28mm Hep2O barrier pipe (2 * 50mm covered the outside with no overlap). A bit of detergent to lubricate and the insulated pipes pulled through the polypropylene ducts easily enough. The temporary external pipework done up with Hep2O is still working fine. I do have flexis and will install them at some point. Even they will be heavily insulated, unlike my parents-in-law's 15kW ASHP which seems to be insulated with something like 8-10mm armaflex!

We have around 9-10m from our Panasonic 5kW ASHP to the tank. However, nearly all of that run is in the middle layer of 3*100mm of EPS, so highly insulated. I obviously can't compare to any other way of doing it, but the tank reaches nearly bang on 55 deg C (the highest temp of the ASHP in DHW mode) nearly every day. We used Hep2O 28mm barrier pipe, from memory, to keep resistance low and minimise losses. The way I figure it, if you're doing UFH, the temp is low enough that the losses won't be that high. For DHW, the temps are higher, but (depending on your setup) you only have it running once or twice a day for a relatively short period of time. I did some calcs ages ago that I now can't find, but I concluded that with decent insulation the losses weren't that great.