Sue B

Don’t tell me you were at Swindon today @Russell griffiths - we went there to look at ASHP but too the opportunity to look at Velox again. We have pretty much decided that Velox, although I really like the system is just too heavy for two old farts like us, one with an arthritic shoulder. We spoke to the people on the Durisol stand again and nearly fell over. I know Paula and her husband James who are both employed by Durisol. The guy on the Velox stand is the one who pointed us in the direction of the Isotex stand - I was interested in the product but didn’t know they had a stand there until he told me. For me it is a manageable weight but also has a better concrete “wall” so that the air-tightness is more easily achieved. It doesn’t have BBA yet but the sales guy said they had received the letter of intent and just needed the fire rating tests completed. He estimated 6 weeks but as we won’t be building until 2020 we should know for sure if they get it by our decision day. Lead times appear better - they were claiming 5 days which sounds better than Durisol. My biggest concern was cost - I suspect that it will be more expensive - when we have the planning permission on a house I actually like, we will get them both to give us a quote.

We are just about to appoint the architect to draw up our plans. I will give them the sizes and see if they will work. We have 3 bathrooms and then the landing that would all work with sky lights. Maybe, just maybe, you may have a buyer.

Am I understanding this correctly? You have land and the house that you want to build on it has come through on the tenders as between. €390 and €465k. If it was built and ready to sell right now, the local market price would be around €350k. I can’t see really what the question is - why would you even consider doing the build (regardless of how you were going to fund it) when you are spending more than you are getting back. The fact you own the land already actually makes it worse. Your current home would surely be worth less than it currently is as it will have a much smaller garden. I am not one to believe that self building is a cheap way to get your own home, or is a profit making scheme. For me, self building is about getting the home you want. However, a home that you want that you will never get back what you spend sounds like madness. Hopefully I have totally missed the point and there is a cost effective reason for building. So reading your post again, in your shoes I would make the house I own, the best home for me to live how I want to live now and see what happens in the future. Renew the planning permission whenever you need to but put all those plans on hold until there is some sense to building.

All 5, no doubt about it.

Hi Tom Nice to meet you Thursday. I’ll let you know when they are doing the pour down here on the Durisol build in Poole and if they are happy for visitors on the day.

So happy to be able to live on site this time round in our current house. Last time we had a 28ft x 10ft, static in the garden which Peter and I lived in with the 5 cats. We rented the cheapest house we could find in the town which the 2 kids stayed in (17 and 19 at the time) plus the 19 year old’s girlfriend. The split living was decided upon because we couldn’t find a house where we could take the cats safely - I was terrified they would have got run over anywhere in a town, and we couldn’t all fit in the caravan. We moved into the caravan 1st Feb and moved out 30th Oct. Both dates it was -4 overnight. The house we moved into had no working heating but upstairs just needed decorating, downstairs was a complete building site with no electric, lighting and the floor was the concrete raft. it will be a luxury to finish this house completely before moving intrusion time round. We then have to work out how to trundle the currrent house down to the end of our plot (it breaks in two) and hide it behind the stable until building control have signed off the build.

Fly screens! After 10 years in a house backing into a canal I heartily recommend fly screens. We retro fitted a year after our build was complete last time - this time we are planning then in from the start.

Velox do internal (non-supporting) panels but we are unlikely to use them as each panel is 68kg and simply picking them up would be a struggle for us!!

That is good to know @vivienz - it means I know we can still have the passive slab, even if piles are required.

A piled foundation is not one that I would choose to do @Patrick the cost was enormous but I no longer have the spreadsheet where our costs were stored to see remind me just how expensive it was. The company we used (I can’t remember their name) I would never recommend due to the issue of the slab being out by such a large amount. However, the SE said that we had no choice and we would have struggled to insure the finished house if we had not gone this route. This was in 2008. Things have moved on in those 10 years - I had never heard of passive slab at that point and would have investigated then if I had known about it. Our SE was very much old school, when I wanted to build in ICF he told me that we would never get a mortgage on it. I believed him because naively I thought he was the expert. You live and learn.

Oh my. I have just read this thread start to finish. What a beautiful beautiful house. The stairs are stunning.

Juliette balconies would not have got past planning in our last local authority, big windows were fine. Do you want the pain of returning to planners for the amendment? A door removes the choice of placing furniture under the window. If is it your only “window” type area in a room, you will not want to leave the door open all night whereas a window you can leave open for more ventilation in the summer. Just my initial thoughts

I could see the cost saving but was worried about the more precise laying requirement. Still, at least I know what is possible when I talk to the engineers. Thank you .

Before I talk to an engineer I have one more question. I know that some, if not all of you had your UFH pipes laid in the concrete pour and not above the slab in the screed. On our last build we had a piled raft, then we put insulation down, put the UFH pipes down and laid the screed on top. This appeared to be normal procedure at the time (2008). The house that we visited locally, who are using Durisol, have a passive slab but they have not put their UFH pipes in that concrete. They are going put the UFH pipes in the screed. I can’t work out from the emails that we have exchanged if they will be putting insulation down under the UFH but thinking about where they said the floor height would be I would guess that they must be. I prefer the idea of UFH pipes going in once the shell is up. I also prefer the idea of screed after the shell as An ICF build will of course have spills to clear up during pours. Our raft was laid when we were at work last time and it was discovered shortly after that it was 50mm out diagonally. We have learnt our lesson and will be on site during this slab but it did allow us to fudge a solution (the groundworkers picked up the bill for the majority of the corrections). By increasing insulation to level the floor. So, getting round to the question,........ for an ICF build is UFH in screed more sensible than trying to get everything done in the first slab pour?

It won’t take long for them to become young adults all wanting to go out in the evenings and spend hours “prettying” themselves. That is when the lack of bathrooms will become particularly noticeable. We had 2 kids, one of our “must haves” on our list was an en-suite for each bedroom. The arguments saved each morning were worth it but I understand your space won’t allow that.

I agree - a bit top heavy. 4 bedrooms on the first floor all sharing one toilet - it is not what I would expect in today’s world and I would guess it would hamper future saleability. Not having many room sizes shown makes it harder to see what works well - how big is the usable space in the study? Is it big enough for a bedroom? Otherwise a shower room on that floor feels a little odd and I think it is possibly very small? The living room in a house with that number of bedrooms, seems quite small, I’m guessing around 18ft long (I can only visualise in ft and inches) but I think it may only be about 10 ft wide - could you get enough sofa space in that area to seat everyone occupying the bedrooms upstairs?

Which way did you go for your foundations?

I have done searches on here and also outside of BH looking at Passive Slab foundations but want to know more. Our ground has a high water table - in the winter the water table is regularly 2 inches below the surface. In summer it drops to 3.5 ft. The ground is made up, down to a level of around 2.5 - 3 ft. Under that is a sand / gravel mix. These are our findings from digging out the koi pond. When the previous owner originally got planning permission his discussions with engineers were steering him to piled foundations. However, by the time he decided to sell, he had received advice that ordinary trench foundations could be used on the site - we have not seen any documentation to back up either position and we are obviously going to seek structural advice before proceeding. We started with the assumption that we would probably need piled foundations but then I started to hear about the passive slab. With the conditions that we have found so far, does that rule out a passive slab completely or is it still worth investigating if it is possible? From what I have read, the passive slab solution helps alleviate the issues that our ground will give - do we just start searching for structural engineers with experience in passive slab? Not sure where to start.

Just to add to this (and why I am so suspicious of structural engineers), our neighbours the other side (you can see the house in the background of the picture) also had their property looked at as they had several cracks all around the property. The cracks were deemed to be superficial and the structural engineers wrote to them to that effect. They patched everything up and sold up and moved on. Two years down the road, the new neighbours started suffering from more cracks and the internal floor level changing. The original insurers then paid out for a complete rebuild as luckily the first owners had kept the letter confirming no structural issues with the house. Their cracks looked no different to the ones shown by the OP. What I am saying is, a photo cannot tell you definitively what is going on with the house. The only way to determine if there is a problem, is monitoring over time, measuring pins at various points around the house to determine if there is still movement. We could see a history of our house moving over a period of 3 years.

This is a picture of our last house that we bought with subsidence and an insurance claim that went with it. The insurers paid out the cost of underpinning, we knocked it down and put the money towards rebuilding. We struggled to get a mortgage on the house even with the insurance claim. This was in 2005 prior to rules on mortgages being tightened up. A photo cannot tell you what is causing the crack unfortunately. It could be poor foundations, poor ground, tree roots (or the result of tree roots decomposing after a tree has been chopped down). In our case it was poor ground with a variety of different foundations that led to the building moving. In addition, they had built up into the loft, and I think that probably made the situation worse. The final straw was environment agency flood risk work that lowered the water table quite dramatically. The clay soil reacted badly to this and most houses in the neighbourhood then suffered subsidence. Take care with structural engineer advice though. Our neighbours were told their problems were caused by a tree next to their property. Hubby is a horticulturalist by trade and knew that the tree had roots that could not possibly have caused their issues. When confronted with that news, they then got a complete rebuild out of their insurance company. A difference of about £150k to us! We were gutted (but pleased for them).

*faints*

YES! I can’t believe that is really in someone’s bathroom, that the vanity unit was ever designed, made and especially sold. The mind boggles.

I had a spare few hours last night so sat down with my pink Gin to read this thread. First of all - @Nickfromwales WTF is that bathroom that you (beautifully ) put in way back on the first few pages. I nearly spat out some perfectly good gin!! Steady on now @Onoff this dizzying speed could lead to an injury! Slower and steadier please!!

I learnt my lesson when MFI went under. 3 bedrooms all ordered but I had paid on a credit card so I got a refund very quickly. Now, if a company won’t accept a CC for this type of purchase, I won’t use them. Sorry - this must feel like a nightmare.

Yep - it looks good, I watched videos, and then I tried using it! I went back to excel and my lovely simple coloured cells