jack

Thanks heavens for being sufficiently depressed! Seriously, if anyone's feeling really stressed, don't let it fester. Take a break if you can, talk to friends and family, get some counselling if you're feeling particularly bad, and slag off the chancers causing you grief on here. It all helps!

I can think of two specific periods in our build when I felt like that, and in both cases things got better soon afterwards. I think anyone who's built a house will recognise that feeling of despair, although you seem to be getting it big style. I don't know if it helps, but I just kept telling myself that one way or the other we'd get through it, and that once we did, the problems would become distant memories. There are still a few memories from our build that can annoy me if I think too hard about them, but they've faded with time, and left me with mostly good feelings about the process. Is there anything specific we can do to help? Might be advice, but might just be shoulder to cry/shriek on. We're with you, either way.

I'm sure she'll pick her moment...

Yours or hers?

Lovely looking stuff. I'll bet it's satisfying seeing it come together...

What, finishing a bathroom?

Yes, what a shame we got distracted before she reached our bedroom! The kids' bedrooms are virtually squeal free!

I believe all our joists are at 400mm spacing.

Thanks Peter. The current flexible drain pipe is 10mm OD, I think, but quite thick walled, so probably something like 7mm internal diameter at best. I think that with 10mm pipe and a downward slope the whole way it should be fine. Will check whether there's room for 15mm though. I wasn't aware of that. A portion of the run in clear, or some sort of shallow tray just before the drain that shows evidence of passing water should make that issue visible (helped by the fact it's salty and so will leave some residue). I'm planning this on the wall above the rising main: The water softener will be at the level of the two flexes (to be seen whether I actually use flexes rather than plastic pipework for just that bit. The vertical stuff will be copper).

Indeed. I was surprised recently when I saw the following comment in a post on a Facebook self build forum: "Our PHPP calcs are showing that our heat demand is above the 15kWh/(m²a) needed to avoid a primary heat source (currently at 21 - probably due to form factor). We don't need to achieve Passivhaus but now conscious that we may need some heat".

So as usual, it's people that are the problem! Bloody people!

Every time I look in (twice a year, maybe), that thread is still in the top 10.

I took it as a pop at the people that couldn't give a toss etc, definitely not a pop at you. I take your point, but an EPC rating of A, B, C etc is supposed to be easy to understand. Maybe people just look at that but it doesn't mean anything to them, whereas digging only a small amount more would let them determine how much the house would cost to heat?

GBF?

How long are your spans though? Our bedroom is the room with the noticeable bounce, and has the longest spans in the house at over 5m (no other room has more than 4m). Also, one end of the joists in only that room sit on a steel that's about 7m long. If you walk past the chest of drawers, the mirror on top wobbles, so it isn't just me! There's some bounce in the other rooms, but it's is definitely worse in our room. Noise transmission is bad everywhere though.

We have a surprising amount of squeaking in those areas where we didn't get around to screwing down the chipboard. Unfortunately, the main place this happens is our bedroom. Drives me mental. Once I finish the more important stuff I'll be pulling the carpet up and adding some screws to try and reduce it. I'm also a little surprised and disappointed by how bouncy the floors are. Again, this is something that no-one else in the house notices or cares about, but I find it distracting (I'm really easily distracted )

Context Watson, context.

Christ, what do you want, a Blue Peter badge?

To be clear, is that what you're saying happened in this thread?

"Kneejerk empathy"? Good lord, what a hideous phrase! What's wrong with starting with empathy, then moving on to the best practical advice we can come up with collectively for the current situation, tempered with advice for those who follow so they don't make the same mistake? I'm sure you've learned plenty from the site - it isn't all just hugs and drum circles. And yet Jeremy candidly admits that several things went wrong, despite the fact he's clearly a highly capable human and spent a lot of time researching and planning. Bully for you. Sounds like you have it all worked out and everything will be perfect until the day you move in. Nevertheless, in the unlikely event you do hit an unforeseen roadbump, you can be sure there'll be kneejerk empathy and practical advice here if you want it.

Grab a cup of coffee - even for me this post is stupidly wordy (although there are pics too). We were put on the spot about an installation position for our water softener during the build. That, coupled with a remarkably stupid set of decisions I made about plant room layout, meant it's ended up in a really inconvenient place in our utility room. We'd like to move it before we install built-in furniture in the utility room in the near future. I've located a potential new position, on a shelf (yet to be built) at about waist height in the plant room. It's good for the incoming main, less good for drainage, and possibly a bit annoying for connecting softened water into the existing pipework. Here's how it is at the moment: I haven't shown the existing drain from the softener, but it basically goes through the wall to the SVP. Just near the label "Up to cold water manifold loop" in the diagram above, there's an open waterless trap taking the output from the HWC tundish: Here're a photo of that general area (which is very congested - I'm tidying up all the wiring and insulating the pipework as part of all this): So now for the questions. DRAINAGE The initial thinking was a trap at the unit, running a drain along the right hand wall on the floorplan above, then hiding it in the wall along the top of the diagram above, before joining it to the drain from the MVHR which is on the other side of the wall north of the HWC. However, reading the installation details for our softener, the 10mm OD flexible drain pipe they supply can go up to three metres from the unit, and more if your pressure is above 2 bar (which ours is). I therefore can't see why we can't just join the flexible drainpipe to some microbore copper and run that on the surface of the wall at a slight fall to the open waterless trap that the tundish uses. It would be thin enough to slip comfortably behind the existing pipework. Anyone see a problem with that approach? There's also an overflow outlet, which they say should ideally go to the outside of the house, but which at the moment just discharges into a separate open trap beside that for the drain. Is there any reason not to just duplicate the microbore setup for the overflow and have that drain to the airless trap too? Might be a bit crowded, but presumably I can just attach a flared bit of pipe to the top of the trap to give some more space for everything to discharge into? WATER TO SOFTENER This should hopefully be relatively easy, because the softener is going right near where the water comes into the house: Presumably we could we just turn the first elbow after the PRV so that it heads upwards, then connect into that (see diagram from softener installation manual below). The pipe going into the wall would be redundant, and the filling loop could be reinstated just above the elbow. Edited: that won't work - still need the unsoftened water for kitchen and exterior taps of course! So slightly more complicated - need to either connect in where the current filling loop is or muck about with another T and moving one or both of the existing elbows downstream of the PRV. Criticisms? Better ideas? WATER FROM SOFTENER This may be the tricky bit. It seems to make sense to try and connect in the region between the yellow arrows (blue arrow shows existing soft water supply): I could take the softened water from the softener, up the wall, then along two edges of the ceiling (adjacent the wall) and down to an elbow into a T within this area. There's room - just - to do this. Again, any criticisms or better ideas? POSSIBLE PRV CHANGES At the moment, the PRV is before the water softener, which according to the installation manual isn't right. We have over 6 bar static pressure, so I'd like to take this opportunity to change the existing PRV for a 5 Bar version, and then put an adjustable TRV (set to 3 bar) and pressure valve after the water softener, as shown in the right hand example here: Seems reasonably straightforward to just replicate this going up the wall, yes? OLD PIPEWORK At the least, it seems I need to cut and cap off the branch from the T at the top righthand corner of the first diagram in this post, and do something similar near the blue arrow above. The plan would be to drain the dead leg between these two points as well as possible and then cap it off inside the wall/ceiling at each end. Anything else I need to consider with this? Another minor point: because this room isn't finished, I can still in theory remove wall and ceiling boards to access any of the existing pipework. Not sure whether that makes it any easier or opens up options for more creative solutions (eg, could I go up into the ceiling from the softener, turn across and connect into the redundant pipe going along the top of the north wall, then turn back over the ceiling and down to elbow/T in as described above. Quite a lot neater for not too much more work?) Sorry for the complexity of this question, but the current softener location has bugged us since the day it was installed, and this is our best chance to get it fixed before we finalise the joinery in the utility room and (finally!) finish the plant room. Oh, and my plan is to get a plumber to make the actual connections once I've got a precise plan, but feel free to try and convince me I can do this myself. Many, many thanks as always.

You can use a flexible (ie, film) plastic tubing for this. Cheap, but it can get shredded in windy weather.

The concept is colloquially known as putting the contract in the drawer. Even so, for complex and/or long term commercial relationships, periodic contract review is often healthy. Agreed. We've all met poor tradespeople, and there are doubtless some gormless self-builders, but I can't see any point in unpleasant generalisations. Yes, with hindsight, a clearer agreed scope of works would have helped, and yes, possibly the demo guy is an arsehole who's preyed on someone who wasn't up on the finer nuances of demolition and waste removal. But we are where we are, and it's a FACT that without any written contract, the OP is put in a much more difficult position. The discussion is for his benefit (what does he do given he's here?) as well as for others who are reading this in the future before they engage a demolition contractor ("oh, I need a demolition contract that specifies who's taking the waste from the site"). Shall we just, as Declan says, take a breath and try to stay constructive? Sounds like a decent outcome, well done for dealing with it head on. And wow, £1900 quid back for the copper roof - sounds like he was getting an amazing deal before you pushed back!

The worst contractor we had onsite, and the only one we ended up sacking 10% of the way through their job, was the outfit that did our brick slips. They were recommended by the company that supplied the brick slips and backing system, but in the end the people who did the work were basically labourers rather than the brickies that were promised. I've said on BH before that a bright 8 year old would have done a better job. I broached the subject of quality with them, reasonably forcefully the second time, even going so far as to offer to increase the fixed price to ensure they had the time to do the job properly. Despite assurances that the work would improve, in the end we had to let them go, which we did via text exchange on a Sunday night. They agreed it was the best thing, then in the next text told me how much we owed them (quite a lot, apparently!) for the work to date. Bearing in mind I was going to have to pay someone to undo the pile of shite that they'd left us with, I asked them to give me a breakdown of how they'd come to this amount, only to get a threateningly aggressive text saying that we knew what their day rates were (we didn't - it was a fixed price job), and to pay up immediately. Didn't sleep much that night. Got some advice from a family friend who's an ex builder turned project manager for big projects up in London: pay them and move on. The last thing you want is more stress over a few hundred quid. Even if you get them to reduce their costs slightly, you could still arrive onsite one morning to find a tin of gloss paint slung over your new windows and doors (this had happened to him on a job). Long story short: even owing someone money is no guarantee that you're in the driver's seat. Even if you can avoid paying them, you can still lose money, because you'll need to pay extra to undo the bad work, then possibly pay someone more to come in on an urgent basis to do the job right. Before we started the build, I'd read everything you'd said about yours. I remember feeling that by just following your lead we could avoid making any mistakes. Oh how long ago that feeling seems!

No external filter on ours, and we rarely get anything in the internal filters that an external filter would have stopped. However, our inlet is on the flat roof over our garage, so possibly a little out of the way for casual insects