Spinny

Interesting to see peoples ideas on the sequence of rooms. I'd say a lot depends on just what things are currently like in different rooms. When we moved in over 30 years ago we started with the living room because it was just too depressing to sit in there. The rest of the house needed doing BUT we lived with it and bathed the kids in the existing bathroom's yellow plastic bath with a cracked side panel. It was 8 years before we did the bathroom. But we didn't have any capital as you do - however although you have capital to spend the work will be paced by your labour availability. Fabric of the building is definitely good to do, but there is a balance and phasing to think about there too. You can probably spend a lot of money - all new windows and external doors, new roof, insulation, rewire and plumb whole house, new floors and u/floor heating everywhere, new ceilings and replaster everywhere etc. But then it could be an awful long time before you even have one finished room to relax in. Some of these things can be done piecemeal - e.g. rewiring can be done room by room, circuit by circuit, or floor by floor etc. We have one consumer unit for most of the house, and another for the new extension and adjacent areas. Or you can do first fix but leave 2nd fix. If you know what the overall plan is, it can be built out in stages. And the ladies like to have somewhere nice to sit in and to do their interior design thing with. Yes you can say it is inefficient because a professional refurb would never be done that way - they would strip the whole house, trades come in and do the whole house, everywhere is a filthy dusty building site for many months on end, eventually the finishing trades come in and suddenly you get the whole swan at once. But try living in that while it is happening ! The spending choices are going to be really tough - do you spend up on a nice sofa for the sitting room - or go ikea and spend up on high density plasterboard - bog standard rads - or designer ones etc etc. Exciting though.

PS Am having kitchen worktops routed on the underside front edge for LED strips which will light up the finger pull on the handleless drawers/cupboards. Takes some working out. Just managed to sort a way to run 3 wires down alongside the strip where access to the very end of the alu profile isn't possible. Needs to be carefully planned and suitable alu profiles sourced and tested out.

🤣 Well if you go through life and the only buyers regret you have is over £2k you will count yourself blessed I guess. I am going for LED strips mounted in alu profiles which are then routed/recessed/plastered into shelves, rooflight upstands, worktop underside. For kitchen undercabinet lighting I am using LED pucklights recessed into the underside of the cupboard panel - I have Sensio Hype R Pro https://www.sensiolighting.com/products/hype-r-pro which are 24V CCT and dimmable and I am controlling using Gledopto PWM CCT Zigbee controllers. The LED strips I am using are mostly addressable strips just for the fun of it controlled using WLED controllers which Gledopto make now. Some will be Addressable dual IC strips with CCT white and RGB on the same strip. There are actually a number of different control options and configurations possible, as I have realised in working out how to wire a 3 switch plate which is going on the end of the kitchen island. For example: 1/ Wire switches to power the 24V drivers on & off - not the best option IMO - if you want remote control like dimming or presets then powering the driver on and off also powers the controller on and off which then loses any wifi/zigbee/remote etc access to the controller. 2/ Most Gledopto controllers now have the ability to connect directly to physical switches by running a low voltage cable to the switch (never mix high and low voltages on any switch plate) .but this allows wiring to small touch/press switches etc 3/ Controllers often support wireless control via wifi, zigbee, zwave etc So controllable from a mobile phone App, or a Smart Home hub system. It is also possible to create associations between smart home devices so they connect without necessarily needing a hub. I am currently testing out connecting my 3 kitchen island switches using a low voltage Shelly Wave i4 DC module. This connects to up to 4 switches, requires a low voltage 5-24V power feed, and then uses Z-wave to connect to a z-wave capable smart home hub/usb stick. For the kitchen I have wiring threaded behind/under units - drivers and controllers in the island sink unit and on top of wall units for access. Elsewhere I ran some rectangular minitrunking behind plasterboard so I can thread cables up the wall to exit into the end of shelves for shelf led strips.

Any role for Proclima Tescon Vana tape re this ? I know goddamn nothing, but our architect agreed to its use where ceiling joists went into blockwork - we are not doing airtight/passiv or anything though.

She don't look 12 in the photos, more like 15 ? I imagine it took some time to build. Perhaps she is an Architect by now.

I assume you are living there then ? A lot depends on exactly what state the house is in, but I suggest you think hard about what you need to live there comfortably over a long period of time whilst work is ongoing - e.g. Kitchen facilities, Bathroom facilities, Sitting Room, Bedroom(s), heating. Ability to keep kids away from work areas where they could have an accident before you can say jack robinson. And a lot will depend on your and your partners personality, resilience and determination. Some personalities just cannot cope with living in shit for 5 years to get that longer term reward. Hopefully you both pass the marshmallow test. Life won't stop and wait for you, it just keeps coming and there will be lots of potential conflict points. Young kids hard work as you know, but make for the most glorious happiness and you will want to spend time with them, read them bedtime stories, not keep them up until midnight with banging about. Think - where will all the materials and tools get stored ? - Which rooms or 'infrastructure' to tackle in what order ? Controlling the dust, the endless dust, the dust on the dust, the dust on the dust on the dust ? Plan for the worst and hope for the best. Things like windows - although it can be cheaper to do them all at once, can also be broken up. Front/back, upstairs, downstairs etc - just don't choose a design that may not be around in 3 years because the supplier went bust. My own experience - old & slow - 6-9 months extension has now become 4 years and not done. Marital strife off the scale. Having someone other than your partner to talk building issues through with can help - a family member, a close friend. And a big and difficult thing - thinking long term and short term. What is your planned life for different elements - the heating system, the kitchen, the bathroom, electrical layout, floors etc. Some things are easier to change later, others not. And, what Tetris says.

It is quite a piece of work to create a meaningful budget and to stick to it. Our original builder had a QS draw up a line item budget for our extension/refurb contract but with estimates for the plumbing and electrics. I insisted he got quotes for those items which came in a lot higher than his estimates. You need to either have a pretty good idea of what you want to do and the relevant prices, or be defining a budget and then constraining your choices to fit within it. These days there are lots of items where choice and affordability can change the price by multiples and huge amounts of that choice. You should have a window and door schedule and cost that up, a steels and lintels schedule etc etc. You are bound to want some labour too I'd have thought - some things require multiple people, some particular skills, or placing risk with contractors. As it's your forever home you will need to phase it appropriately. Are you going to be living there, or when would you need to start living there ? Living on a building site is not much fun, but makes it easy to be around as much as possible. Are you trying or willing to do it over 1 year or 5 years or even 10 years ? Do you have a partner ?

Yes.

Think you need contingency regardless, otherwise as soon as some problem comes up you are stuck. I doubt the market will value a half complete project at much more than an unstarted project. How would you phase the work ? If you run out of money what is best - a whole unplastered house, or some rooms complete and others not started ? Are you going to sell it or live there forever ? No Electrics or plumbing ?

I am just wondering how feasible it is to run wires inside the profile next to the strip itself. I plan to use 10mm strip and profiles only 12.6mm wide internally and wires would need to be kept from blocking light from the COB somehow.

Yes understood, but two different GIO's from the controller could be used with two data wires, one connected to each half of the LED strip at the centre of the combined run. Each half would then effectively be a separate strip running in opposite directions. Combining them in WLED means logically reversing the direction of one strip in WLED and then having WLED concatenate the two strips. Chat GPT thinks this would work for some light patterns but not for others.

Yes that thought has occurred to me now. Discussed it with ChatGPT who thinks it will work but some running patterns etc would still not work properly and this is a known limitation of WLED at present. So it seems it would be best to still feed the data wire to the Data Input end of the strip. ChatGPT suggests using a fine wire for the data feed which would still need to pass down the profile in front of the LED strip to get soldered onto the connector on the front of the strip. Pic shows my cable, so either run a wire (or all wires) down the profile in front of the strip to solder onto the front. But not obscure the COB light itself.

I plan to put an addressable 24V COB LED Strip under the edge of a kitchen worktop inside a recessed alu profile. It would be easier to run the wires to connect to the strip away from the very end. Does anyone have any experience or comments on whether this can be done ? I suspect power can be connected to any contact point on the strip although I have never seen an example where it is done this way. But with a third data wire driving the addressable IC's would this still be possible ? Or does an addressable strip rely on the data feed being at the very end to drive the IC's in sequence along the strip ? Normally the IC's would say begin at 0 and run to say a length of say 70. but could you connect the data wire at the centre and somehow run from -35 to +35 ? Will be using a WLED based controller. Has anyone wired an LED where they had the wires somehow fold through 180 deg to run back behind the strip before exiting the profile/channel ? ( @cedricuk any info on this ?)

Of course you should tell the planners, otherwise you are breaking the conditions of your planning approval. Once you have formally informed the planners by whatever is the correct method at least you are behaving properly. One window is getting bigger by being extended down to floor level - if I were your neighbour I would call that a material amendment. OK I suspect you don't have any neighbours ? Just follow due process, that is what it is there for. At the end of the day, changing plans during a build, is changing plans during a build, and you can't really argue against accepting any consequences which flow from that - be it doing some paperwork, or proceeding at some likely minimal risk. Who sized those windows ? If it was the architect I would speak to them, to create the revised drawings and ensure they don't have any counter arguments.

Do you have any photos of the joists after the remediation work you did was done i.e. before you put the new flooring down etc ? From your photos it is tricky to see exactly how the damp was getting into the joist. The newer sister joist shows damp in the bottom 75% extending from the end through to where the bifolds are. I presume the newer joist originally reached all the way to rest on the wall but the end had completely rotted away ? Clearly the older joist was very rotten in that corner. So (a) it may (most likely) be that damp was reaching the joists at their ends through their bearing onto the wall. That is the bottom of the wall in the corner there and the ledge the joists sit on was getting damp. Then in the absence of any DPM between the joists and the masonry the damp was sucked into the joist ends and then down the joist length. or (b) it may (perhaps) be that the older joist is in contact with the masonry under the bifolds ? Or in contact with something on the possibly damp earth underneath (rags, or rubble, or timber shavings) ? Thus the older joist was getting damp and passing the damp into the newer joist by contact. I presume when you did your remediation work and replaced the rotten joists that a new DPM was put along the bearer wall the joists sit on, and really ideally up the very end of the new joists too? I presume all the damp rotten wood was removed and ideally the new joists treated with preservative/wood worm treatment ? I presume the only point of contact for the new joists would be at the ends on top of new DPM and there was no direct contact anywhere else such as under the bifold ? In your photo with the torch it looks as though there may be an aperture under the floor there through the dividing wall with your neighbour ? If so there may be passage of air via such a hole. It is even possible that damp is getting into that corner area from your neighbour's side - take a look over at what is on his side - a leaky downpipe, gutter, a gully drain ? When you lift your astroturf is there any/more evidence of damp near that corner ?