Sue B

Have I mentioned that Peter’s background is horticulture - he was an apprentice gardener when councils had a proper apprenticeship scheme and sent kids to college on day release doing city and guilds. The garden and paddocks will be beautiful and the kitchen garden will be very productive. The difficulty is that he (like a lot of men) won’t eat veg so it’s me that has to consume all the produce that he grows. I’m still getting through the soup he made me last autumn - all neatly frozen in pot sizes portions ready for me to take to work.

We laid all the UFH pipes ourselves in the last house. We bought a designed system (too scared of getting the wrong things to buy the components separately ) from nu-heat so paid a premium for their design and supply but it was all really straightforward. Yes, the pipe was unwieldy and because it was a designed system, the pipe was cut to length which did make it more manageable. However, even now, 10 years older, I have no qualms about doing this ourselves again, buying all the bits we need separately, other than finding a cheap way to hold the pipe reel to make life easier. I intend to talk to Insulhub (Isotex supplier) about doing the passive slab largely by ourselves, buying in some labour from them to check what we have done before the pour.

Will be bathing under the stars ??

Look in the first floor bathrooms and the walk in wardrobe. I missed it on the second draft because it's a very fine dotted line

3rd Draft arrived this afternoon - I think we are there!!

I think you are right @JSHarris - we installed our MVHR last time but paid the supplier to come out and balance it before we used it. They were there an hour or two. They definitely didn’t have meters to check the air flow!

Just looked that the new plans again on the screen and they are there!! Hopefully will get the final plans before submission on Monday so you never know, you may just see the back of those windows soon

Just uploaded from snips of the PDFs

That sounds like a good solution. We’re going to the NEC show in a couple of weeks so will look out for them

After struggling with kitchen lighting and spending a fortune replacing bulbs very very regularly, I vowed to go back to a simple fluorescent tube in my next kitchen. It’s what we have in this temporary house and it lights the kitchen perfectly. It’s not pretty, but it is definitely functional. I prefer table lamps in living room areas but I like them controlled by light switches. A bit more effort at design stage but the plugs are cheap and readily available.

My questions would be more fundamental and all to do with risk and family and looking at the potential nightmare scenarios of the kind that you hear about and wonder how on earth someone got themselves into that situation. These are not questions that I'm expecting you to answer of course - they are quite personal and no offense is intended but the risks you are considering are IMO enormous. Is your wife an only child? If she has siblings, is your FILin a position to offer them the same consideration should they need it? Are they aware of the situation and if so, are they happy with it? I know it is his money to do with as he wishes but families fall out over much much less. Is MIL in agreement with these proposals Asuming you are going to be paying 2 mortgages: Can you afford to pay both off at the same time What happens if you or your wife lose your job and you are unable to pay the mortgage on your FIL house. If your FIL is intending to pay his own mortgage, what happens if he loses his job or has an accident and is unable to work? He could lose his home because he is unable to pay the mortgage - and your build costs have suddenly gone through the roof. And then the most tricky question of all......... Self build is probably THE most stressful thing most of us will ever do. It puts enormous strain on the most stable of relationships and getting another family member involved in the financial implications of a self build (even a very loving father with his daughters best interests at heart) make me nervous.

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LOL - I think I may need the real windows to break up the sugar cube whiteness. Not given up hope I can use them yet but thought @oranjeboom was interested too.

Really quick response from the architects and most of the issues are resolved. Some of the windows are now too small but I'l live with it for the weekend and see how I feel. I have a few concerns about thermal bridging where the dark sticky out bits are - I can't think how we would build that, but as we know, my experience of building extends to lego (which I am very good at ?so it may be easier than I can see). These are the real things now so comments really appreciated more than ever - thinking of you in particular @Ferdinand. They are PDFs that I can't edit so I know the address is on there but I can't redact it - never mind, they will be public documents soon enough with luck. Uploaded the wrong plans first time round - edited with the second draft. Edited again with to replace pdfs with snips

Welcome -we are also planning to build with ICF and have spent the last few months deciding on which our favourite ICF flavour is. Lots of useful information on here to help your decision making process.

The first draft of the plans arrived today - I open them all excited and love the initial look of the building. Then I look a bit closer.......... I am SO disappointed that I'm not even going to load them up here. I mentioned to them many times that I hate being too hot. That I haven't put windows on the south side of the first floor deliberately - for two reasons. 1) I don't think that planners will accept windows on that side because of overlooking the horses next door and the planners appear to think that they will object and 2) we don't need anymore light and we will overheat. We spoke about our exrrememly tight budget - the glazing alone would take our budget. I gave them the roof light sizes from @pocster - why have rooflights when you can have full length windows into your bathroom - right by the bath? I put an overhang along the whole south side of the house - I appreciate it may be difficult to build and require "boys stuff" to hold it up. However, it will help shade the ground floor. It's gone, so the ground floor will overheat as well - no explanation as to why it's gone. If they were going to tell me it's really difficult to build, I would accept that and think hard about it but to just remove it is gutting The kitchen has so many windows that you can't put any cupboards on the walls - god knows where the oven will go The dining area of the kitchen has sliding doors PLUS a single door within 5 ft of each other. I think even when I'm eighty I might manage the twelve steps to get from one option out onto the patio to the other. There - I feel a bit better now. I will have a discussion with them tomorrow and we will get back on track to plans that we can afford and that will achieve what I want.

We are just about to submit our plans with a flat roof. My archtechtural co were advising against it - we are green belt, 400 m from an SSSI and one of the few plots that is allowed to live on our plot. They were advising that it was unlikely to be passed because of those restrictions. Our reasons for a flat roof are similar apart from the fact that I don’t like flat roofs but like the look of solar panels less! Talking to a neighbour, they pointed out that another house had got PP down our road and used our current PP as one of the plus points. Our current PP is for a pitched roof so the ridge height is higher than their flat roof would be. The design and access statement talked a lot about visual impact and they had a lot of photos of the road scene. They got their PP by default in effect - the decision was outside of the timeframe so was classed as non-determination. They appealed and won. Hopefully that will allow our one through as well.

Someone on here (can’t remember who), recommended these guys. http://www.norrsken.co.uk/ I haven’t contacted them yet as we are not yet at that stage in our planning but they are in Poole so very local to you.

How about buying a garden sail to shade the window this summer and see how this works without spending money or time designing something “proper”. You can even put it up and down a few times to help your decision making process. Modelling is all well and good but real life is sometimes different.

That is exactly the information I was looking for - thanks Ed. Looking at those numbers it makes sense to have either all south or south and west if I split them to get some time in the evening. However, reading one of the other posts (I think it’s was in this thread) the gain from multi-direction was marginal.

We had internal Venetian blinds in the last house - there was a choice of colours but not sure about black. With Venetian blinds, if you get the angle right, you can see out but outside cannot see in. Being internal to the glass there is no dust.

Are the G38 and G98 regulations? Not seen them in any reading so far. but judging from your answers, the third string comnected to an off grid system sounds feasible - whether it is sensible or not is an entirely different matter.

I am thinking of flat roof (you have probably seen on other posts) with solar panels facing east, south and west. I know there is software out these somewhere to help determine the configuration that suits your requirements best but not looked at it yet. I know so little about solar panels so excuse my ignorance. This is what I have gleaned so far - I think! Monocrystalline panels are dearer than polycrystalline but are more effiecient You are allowed 4 kw without permission You need an inverter that can take 2 strings. Panels are connected by strings (not litereal strings - even I know that ) Panels generally need to have the same orientation to go onto a string or the MPPT struggles a bit to do it's techie stuff Therefore you could have an east and west split with an inverter with dual inputs To get a three way split you would need a second inverter So Thinking about furture proofing and what we can afford inially and what we can add onto once battery storage becomes affordable: We could do the east / west split now and have one inverter but get the cabling ready for a second inverter should we decide to do that later. Get the roof ready for the south installation so that we won't be damaging the roof adding supports etc later on Add a second inverter that is "off grid" and chuck the south facing panels into the battery with no export to the grid Is that a sensible option or is it a crazy idea and if so why? Answers on a postcard please? Sue xx (because like Miss Piggy - I love you all)

I used “I’ve made a bit of a boo boo” on Friday when confessing I had sent an email to all parents in our primary school and in the sixth form. I suspect I will find out on Monday that Boo boo and the Ooops in the body of the email will not have shown enough gravity in confessing my error.

and this is the surrounding area with the yellow pin on our front paddock.