jack

There are gyms and there are gyms. If you plan to be doing olympic lifting and dropping weights to the floor, you'll need something a lot more robust than screed. Even just doing deadlifts in our concrete garage on very thick rubber gym mats, dropping from even an inch or so reverberates through the house. In the end I bought some lifting pads so I can drop weights, and they mostly work (I'm old enough that I no longer want/need to do heavy - for me! - lifts from full depth). If you're not expecting to drop weights, then you mainly need to account for point loads. Whether a screed will work depends on what type and thickness of screed you go for.

Thanks for the kind words @Gus Potter, they mean a lot to us. Thanks also for your own contributions, which are exactly the sort of helpful, unbiased information for which people come to BuildHub. Yes, there was a lot of work early on, and certainly there's ongoing effort to keep things running, but it's largely settled down so that it doesn't take up huge amounts of anyone's time. We've put reasonably robust systems in place to keep out spammers, and the odd one that squeaks through gets the immediate ban hammer. Admin is taken care of by a small group who have occasional online meetings. Because no-one is paid, we have modest financial needs: software licensing, site hosting, the costs of running the BuildHub company - that sort of thing. Probably the main thing we could do with is help on is the technical side. We have some great people helping us out with our IT needs, but having another experienced person or two to fall back on would be helpful, particularly if they have experience with the forum software we use. I'm not too concerned about the long-term viability of the forum. The admin and mod team has been pretty consistent for a long time. If/when we get to the point where people started drifting away, we'll try and recruit from existing members.

Are you going for an air source heat pump and underfloor heating? Many here have had success with underfloor heating using an air source heat pump in cooling mode?

This is almost certainly based on (and possibly just a rebadged) Brink Excellent 400. If you can confirm that, then anything you can find out about the Brink likely applies. The Brink unit is Passivhaus certified, is pretty quiet, and has good heat recovery numbers. I have 6 year old Brink Excellent 400 and other than an odd leak that took a bit of diagnosing, it's been faultless.

My grandfather had several bits of his fingers cut off through various accidents using a spindle moulder over a 60 year career working in lumber yards in Dublin. Deadly things apparently - I've now met two chippies who say they've seen them in use and would never touch one. The last one to go was one of his thumbs. Apparently, that one "really hurt". Silver lining though: every accident would have a payout, and he'd lend money to his kids for a house deposit, or use the cash to visit them overseas.

Yes, the window installation was easily the most stressful part of the build, largely due to the incompetence of the installers. Despite being resellers of the very product they were installing, they'd never installed windows with this particular blind system before, and didn't look at the drawings before they started. Edited to add: All of that said, the blinds themselves are one of the best parts of the house. If anything, I wish I'd included them on a couple more windows. They are remarkably effective at keeping out the worst of the sun. I also quite like how they look when they're down and tilted 70-80% to horizontal - the ones at the front of the house are very rarely retracted all the way.

Very similar to us. I didn't like the idea of going straight from meter to external taps, so everything goes via the main internal stopcock in our plant room. The one thing I missed was to have separate valves in the plant room for the outside taps. Given the relatively high likelihood of leaks, damage from frost or being knocked, seals failing etc (compared to, eg, internal taps), this seemed like a good option. There are entire months through winter where the outside taps aren't used, and I think it would have been nice to be able to isolate them from inside.

I think serious issues with the latest generation smart meters are pretty rare. Ours (on Octopus Go) seems to work perfectly. On your other question, we do have an electric car, but from memory Octopus didn't ask us to even confirm that when we signed up for the Go tariff, let alone require any evidence.

We knocked down a small bungalow (<100m2) and rebuilt about 5 years ago, right on the Hampshire/Surrey border. Materials and labour costs have moved on a lot during that time, but if you're doing a lot of the work yourself, have kept the design simple, and make smart choices about where to spend your cash (e.g., no £50k kitchens!), your budget doesn't seem unreasonable.

@nod?

All of them. It's a fixed price contract. However, contracts can always be renegotiated. It's in your interest for the builder to remain in business to complete your build, and for them to at least be making a bit of money. It's up to you how far you push things.

Yes, the standard search is a bit ordinary. However, it's easy enough to use google's functionality. Just put together whatever search term you're interested in and add the word "Buildhub". There's a more formal way (add the following to your search: site:buildhub.org.uk) but it isn't necessary. It will never be commercial while I or any of the other people currently involved with the site are running it. The original founders unanimously agreed that we would be completely non-commercial. No-one is paid anything for their work. There are no sponsors and no advertising - not even Google ads on the landing page. The quid pro quo for this freedom from advertising is our occasional request for voluntary donations from members. That's running at the moment (look for the floating message at the top of the screen), so if anyone reading this has found the site valuable and has a few bob they can spare, feel free to send it our way. Maybe send 5% of whatever money we've saved you!

I wouldn't bother, especially if the company is no longer trading. Even if it were, it's arguably unenforceable. But as you say, it's only £200 for peace of mind. Only you can assess whether that's good value. In our case, we have a covenant dating to the 1950s saying we need the original vendor's permission to do literally anything building-related to the property. We've since knocked down a small brown brick bungalow and replaced it with a modern two-storey house with three times the floorspace. Our mortgage provider wanted us to get insurance, but we just ignored the request from the solicitor and the mortgage went through without it. I've since occasionally wondered whether the mortgage company wasn't the one pushing for it, and it was instead the solicitor carefully wording his comments to make it appear that way.

Agreed. We have two separate living areas and I occasionally think it would be nice to have another! Depends who's living there, of course. We have two very different teenagers who rarely spend time together. The main thing that jumps out at me is the size of the master bedroom. We have a big bedroom at around 4600 square. Having lived with it for a few years now, I know that if I ever build another house, knocking 600-800 off both dimensions would make very little difference in terms of space and comfort. Yours looks to be roughly another metre or so bigger in one dimension and maybe roughly the same in the other. This feels like massively wasted space to me. You could set up the window end of the bedroom as a proper "parents' retreat" type of thing, with sofas, TV etc, which would use up the extra space and perhaps offers you another private sitting area.

I can't explain the download speed issue, but the "A" in ADSL stands for "asymmetric", and refers to the fact that download and upload speeds are different. You're likely to be getting far less than 3MBPS upload. What does a broadband speed test give you for an upload speed?

You have recourse through the legal process. First, you have to give your neighbour the chance to rectify or pay damages you find agreeable. Assuming they won't pay your £1900 quote, they either need to pay someone to rectify, or they need to take it up with whoever did the work. You don't get to choose the contractor at this point, and if you insist on using your guy, then you'll almost certainly have to pay out of your own pocket. If your neighbour refuses to play ball, then you'll need to go down the legal route if you don't want to pay for it yourself. It's an unfortunate situation, and I'm gobsmacked that your neighbour would instruct repairs to your roof without your input, but you do have recourse. Incidentally, I don't know how you think someone could do a "like-for-like" repair job on this roof. As others have said, it's on its way out - I can't think where you'd even source slates of that quality. Also, there's already been replacement of a significant portion of the roof in the past - see sections 1 and 2 (which might all be one section - hard to be sure).

Who's billed you £1900?

Where a design service like this is being supplied, it's appropriate to add VAT. If you could get everything on the same invoice, it should be zero rated. Can you have them issue a proforma invoice for the design and only invoice you properly later once they're ready to bill everything else? Whether they'll go along with something like that depends on what the likely delay will be between doing the design and invoicing you for completing the other items. Alternatively, could they invoice you for everything on one invoice, with a separate payment schedule taking into account the different stages?

Main things to consider are: - diameter (we went for 28mm pushfit plastic) - insulation (90% of our ~9m runs are through the middle of the insulation under our slab. Alternatively, you can insulate with nitrile rubber, or buy special pre-insulated ASHP pipes, although the latter is expensive) - oxygen tightness (copper is fine, as is plastic pipework with an oxygen barrier)

All doable via web interface. I'm on the Go tariff and don't use the app.

TV + console or 2 + sky + DVR (if you use one) + media PC (if you use one) + sound bar (if you use one). It adds up.

The house is a bit over twice the size of ours, but we comfortably get by with a 5kW ASHP. What're the insulation and airtightness targets?

It does. But if it's only the hydrogen leaking, it won't take the scent (a much bigger molecule) with it. TBF, it may be that any leak sufficient to allow hydrogen out fast enough to cause a dangerous situation will also necessarily allow sufficient odorant out to allow detection.

All this talk of hydrogen - especially pure hydrogen - being fed to boilers is utter nonsense. There's no way you can pipe into people's homes a scentless explosive gas that leaks better than just about any other gas in existence. From Wikipedia: At best, there's research into diluting natural gas with a small percentage of hydrogen - 20%, say. And how do you manage a transition from gas to hydrogen? You can't exactly do it gradually, but to do it all at once would require everyone to convert their boilers to be hydrogen-capable all at once. And finally, the idea of on-site production of hydrogen in the near term is ridiculous. Why would you generate hydrogen inefficiently, only to immediately burn it? Clearly there's no point using it to generate electricity in a fuel cell - you might as well just use the electricity directly.

Unfortunately, it's too expensive and dangerous us for us to be getting involved in lending this type of tool, plus a nightmare trying to figure out how to cover wear rates on blades. We only accidentally got into lending the couple of other things in the loan library, and it isn't a service we plan to expand.