G and J

Oh put a pic up now, why be bashful. lol And why hang about posting given that you are aware that you’ve got asbestos to deal with, get a surveyor in. Our survey only cost £350 and we had results from the testing in a week.

Done. @CemCet Once completed, it would be nice if you share your report/thesis/thingy with us.

And you get to check your welfare suite (aka downstairs loo) every day too. Lovely. :-<

We are about to start demolishing a bungalow and building a house, but not next door. Some things we’ve discovered so far that I wish I’d known earlier: Party wall agreements can be a real pain. Not so much in the cost of them, though that’s stupid in its own right, but more in the pain it them causes with site insurance. Sigh. Gas disconnection is circa £2k, and unlike gas connection is not subsided. Senseless. Bigger sigh. Having the lecky disconnected and reconnected for us means going underground, which for us meant going under the road. Should have allowed 12weeks to get this booked in, and it also cost best part of £10k. Huge sigh. An asbestos survey (called something less sinister but that’s what it is) is required before demolition, ours was done by a guy from our local demolition co. Why not get it done pre exchange if you can. We were lucky in that nothing dangerous detected, but one never knows. Grin. Demolition is stupidly cheap for what it is, but it’s wasteful. We are planning to do some of it ourselves to save money but just as importantly to reclaim materials that would be landfill with a demolition contractor. The roof timbers, as the best example, are long lengths of 4” by 2” and the wood quality is better than you can now buy. I can’t use it in the main build, I have to use inferior stuff with paperwork, but I can use it elsewhere. Chuckle. I would never have believed what peeps snap up when it’s free on gumtree or Facebook marketplace. The kitchen with cooker and hood went to a good home, they even dismantled it with me. We’ve a stand alone concrete sectional garage that’s been claimed and is awaiting collection. I’m told the plastic windows and doors will be snapped up too. And we are sort of selling the clay French pan tiles too. All good re-use and less landfill. Big grin. Being within a metre of a boundary imposes lots of fire related regulations on the design and the build sequencing. It won’t cost us silly money but there is a cost and it needs factoring in, and the earlier you start the better we have found. Small sigh. None of this may be relevant to you, but I thought I’d share in case.

What goes on top of that PIR upstand just inside the door?

Don't tell the architect that 😉

Buy the house. Then you get it for free. 😉

Ah I see. Ta for getting back to me. We’re using a 140mm stud frame.

Just had a quick Google on the Veismann Vitocal 151a. Is it effectively a dual heat pump system?

Ah, as we are. What material did you put on as the outer leaf? We are having masonry downstairs and timber clad upstairs and I’m struggling to work out exactly where to place the windows with respect to the frame.

Is your house timber framed?

I’m assuming this discussion is referring to gap covering type tape. When I visited @Nick Laslett he showed me the expanding foam tape he had used. Is that not an option? I think it goes between window frame and whatever the fabric of the house is, thus no tape showing issues.

Nudging us towards homes that help the planet a bit is no bad thing really. In some ways it’s no different from the increase in minimum insulation levels. In your shoes I’d build ‘em in, and be ready to put in for a variation of conditions after the event if needed.

From what I've read on here if bnb spans more than 5m there's a definite danger of ‘bounce’. As a result we're putting an extra foundation (is it called a sleeper wall?) down the middle of the house to reduce beam length. We will have to manhandle these beams as we cant use a crane (overhead wires) so that helps with that too. Are you thinking of using a beam to save the extra foundation?

Ours will, I hope, cool as well so it might be going when we are in the garden. Hmmmm, so if there’s little noise anyway then there can’t be much if a difference. So sitting in the garden when it’s running hopefully won’t be too bad.

Hmmm, we’re planning a similar installation. Is there much difference in the noise level between standing to the side of the unit and in front of the unit (i.e. with the airflow coming towards you)?

Just expressing an opinion.......it makes our (G&J) lives easy if we just do what the rules say......the rule says do forms before you start, so like it or not it's a no brainer to do.........venting over it is not going to help our stress levels, nor is taking a pop at anyone who has a different view of the world to us.....horses for courses, we're all different

Oh I’m sure it’s accidental. I couldn’t possibly be thinking of anything other than precisely the title of this thread. I wonder at the desirability of local variations in such legislation. Hoomans appears to need to feel both special and individual , so perhaps customisation of local stuff is the natural result. Perhaps a ‘ one size fits all’ thing would be equally flawed but in a different way.

J found a post by @ETC “PART 3 -Timber Frame Junction Detail” from which I’ve found: So it looks to me like behind blockwork I effectively use the windows to close the cavity. Is that correct?

Or maybe to raise money from the ‘windfall’ excess profits developers can make. We pay too few taxes in Blighty, and we get the services we have paid for, so good luck to ‘em and well done for exempting us self builders.

I suspect it’s simplicity of rules/process being prioritised over sanity of concept. The building world reacts well to ‘do this or else, then do that or else’, so maybe they’ve just gone for something easy to understand and workable. I was stressed about the stupidity of our building control company’s admin, but not about the CIL peeps or their process. And the nice CIL peeps did guide me through beautifully.

I’ve a number of questions swirling round in my head re our windows. We will have a traditional timber with a block skin downstairs and wood cladding upstairs. Doors and windows are going all aluminium. I've to date assumed that the outside of the window frames will be more or less flush with the outside of the frame, like this: Is that the best place to put the windows both thermally and for any other factor I can’t imagine?

Oh don’t worry, you’ve not missed out, there’s still time to skin and gut a few for a casserole.

Snap. I did love our oak worktop, wish I’d varnished it. We ‘enjoyed’ the black marks. 😞 But this time we are going more modern, after all, one doesn’t want to repeat one’s mistakes. Far more exciting to make lots of new ones.

Great views and defo an improvement kerb appeal wise