Grosey

4000mm if I remember correctly.

Hi, as above it is a Hormann door, just from a dealer local to me. Sectional insulated, I think it was about £1600 ex vat, fitted. This included the electric opener & 2 remote fobs.

I have that screwfix one, wish I’d read the reviews. It’s as sh1te as everyone says!!!

Just resurrecting this thread. I am now looking for such a company to handle my reclaim.

???

Link below, I think I haggled about £100 off that price. https://www.easyfire.co.uk/lillian-3.html

We put a bio ethanol fireplace in ours. Looks great, convenient, no smell, kicks out a fair bit more heat than expected and does heat the room up to borderline uncomfortable if the UFH has already been on. Probably does work out expensive as I just bought the ethanol from Amazon. However it’s only used as a feature when we have company. Dont believe any any of the fuel consumption claims, 1L lasts about 1hr30 in ours at full whack.

My mortgage advisor has just informed me that F2F are no longer lending for SELF build projects ie where the borrower is using the money to build a house which they will live in themselves. They are now only lending to customers who are developing/building with a view to sell (and make a profit).

That seems a fair enough cost, I guess mine was more of an actual custom request.

If Stairbox can actually offer what you want through their online designer, I think you’ll struggle to find a better price. I enquired about a couple of simple “custom” changes. (We wanted a square instead of round curtail step) And it was £1000 for that change alone. However their off the shelf items are fantastic value compared to the competition.

Got stacks of F2F paperwork here if anyone wants to know something specific I can try and help out. When I discussed using F2F with my solicitor his first response was “give me a couple of days to speak to some other clients, I may be able to find you a better rate than F2F” he was essentially asking some of his other wealthier clients if they’d like to loan me the money - all drawn up through him. Apparently a reasonably common practice in farming / estate law. I once looked at buying buying a barn conversion off my uncle, and was looking at a form of private mortgage / rent to buy scheme between he and I. I discussed this with the same solicitor and he said it would be very easily done, I just agree terms with my uncle, then a charge is placed on the land registry title that Mr Smith is entitled to £xxx or owns a share in this property until the debt is repaid or something along those lines (lawyer speak). Similar in a a way I suppose to a standard mortgage, you can’t sell the house without paying back whoever you have borrowed from. Thats is a very basic of my understanding of it anyway, over to the many here that are more intelligent than I!

Perfect thanks guys, have emailed the guy that did the original calculations for ease, hopefully he’s still in the same role. If not I’ll be in touch for recommendations.

Perfect thank you, I’m assuming that the As built sap assessment will need to take place on site and not just from plans and information I provide?

The house is built and finished. Just trying to obtain completion certificate.

Hi, Could someone explain to me to me in layman’s terms what I need to do in relation to these documents in order to get completion certificate? SAPs calculation were done to obviously get Building regs, however I bought my plot with planning permission etc and just got underway so I skipped a lot of the education on these things. I’ve built the house as per the plans in terms of Insulation and windows. Do I now need the place to be certified as it’s built to ensure I have met the calculations or is this just assumed? How does an EPC fall in line with all this, and which ones are critical documents?

I have the heatmiser neostat system and I believe it can do a lot of what people are discussing here - Optimum start - an allowed “pre heat” time so the stat can call for heat up to a set amount of hours before the time setting. Differential - amount temperature has to drop before stat will kick back in - 0.5 - 3.0c Output delay - how long since heat was last called for before it can call again: 1 - 7 minutes. Up / down limit - how many degrees change from the current set temperature can be achieved using the wall stats 1-7c Pin lock - locks the room stat entirely. All all of this can be done in the room stats but I access everything via the app which is much easier.

Now that we’ve moved in I’ve found myself fiddling with the thermostat settings constantly over the first few days. Never had underfloor heating before before and it is definitely a different beast to living with radiators. Could someone give me a starter for 10 on their settings (times and temperatures) as I seem to be chasing my tail a bit at the moment making too many changes. Also some idea of how other people time their hot water, I’ve only had a combi boiler before so never really had to think about it. We have a hot water circulation system which does seem to cool the water if the circulation pump is on and the hot water is not. Any advice appreciated.

Yes, I owned the plot outright funded via other means. I also had enough cash to get the shell started so there was an “asset” for them to loan against. It was supposed to be in £50k chunks but I sent them a photo of the blockwork progress and there were happy to realease £100k. It was my mortgage advisor who recommended it, it is business generally, but I believe they see self build as a form of business as people are creating value with their money. They are as as interested in you as a person as your project, you need a character statement from a solicitor or someone to vouch for you etc. It’s really quite different to dealing with a self build mortgage, I visited their head office in person several times whilst setting it all up, talking it through face to face was really helpful as there were a few elements which took some understanding. Folk2folk are Cornwall based and tend to operate in the South West I believe. Not sure how far there reach but there must be other similar companies around the country.

It’s not cheap, mine was 6% apr interest and maybe 2% fee I think, plus a few other associated admin costs, but I drew mine in Jan this year and looking to give them 3 months notice shortly. The loan is actually called easy in, easy out. Not for everyone but it suited my situation perfectly.

@Russell griffiths exactly that. I had all sanitaryware and radiators available in the garage 6 months before we needed them. Many times things were dragged out and measured or checked how they fitted etc, all first fix was completed to fit second fix items I already had. Also exactly right about de-risking. My timer for example, arrived and the tiles were piled up in the required room, adhesive and grout was in the garage, box of trims was available. He had nothing to do or think about other than start tiling. He also had no labouring to do, what’s the point in paying a skilled bloke to lug 50 boxes of tiles up 3 flights of stairs?! Either do it yourself or find a child to do it and pay them a shiny 50p (this is a joke, sort of) If id have got the tiler to quote on price in his head he would have thought hmmm 5 days for the job @ 160 a day, however I want to be covered if something goes wrong so best quote at 7 days. I paid him day rate and it took him 5 days as we all knew it would, so I effectively saved £320. Have confidence in your management and avoid paying “insurance” to tradesmen in case something goes wrong. The few snags we did hit and where extra work was required were resolved quickly by having good people available, who were happy to just crack on and solve the issue as they knew their time was covered. If people were on price then each time there was a hiccup there would have to be a discussion on the price to resolve, costing time and money. Another thing if interested may be that I funded this project via a peer to peer loan from https://www.folk2folk.com/ This was organised much more quickly and easily than a regular self build mortgage, no real staged payments and I was released £100k in one chunk, which allowed me to stockpile items as per the beginning of this thread.

These ones? I think I paid £99 each in a sale. https://www.victorianplumbing.co.uk/maverick-thermostatic-shower-panel-black-bsp001

I should perhaps add that I am a qualified project manager, albeit working in Telecoms. The project did run like clockwork and came in on budget. There was never a late delivery and nobody was ever waiting for Materials, with many things sat available 2-3 weeks in advance. It orobably helped that I have quite a large site with a large workshop area in the basement which meant I could hold large amounts of “stock”. Not to trying to sound smug on this part but I reallly don’t know how much of a factor this was in keeping costs down, as I don’t know any different. I feel I must have been fairly good at this side of things as there are 4 houses being built nearby and their progress is all over the place, with materials arriving in random orders and service trenches being excavated multiple times. Fallow periods with nobody on site etc. That site is being ran by all accounts an experienced developer but his PM of it is definitely lacking.

@Ferdinand A little history on how we ended up here which may explain the outcome. I’m 31, this is only the 2nd property I’ve ever owned. The first being a shared ownership flat I bought 3 weeks before the recession hit and 8 years later I sold for less than I bought it for. I had a 5 year sharesave plan with work that was due to pay out in July 2016, I had made a good profit on it and the amount was enough to allow us to leap the property ladder a bit, looking around we couldn’t find anything we wanted to purchase should the money have been in our pocket. Anything we did like was way out of our price range £300k - £350k. We saw this plot of land with planning permission for sale, liked the house and saw enough potential to change things to make it a home we could love. So the brief was always to get my wife and I a house we simply couldn’t afford, in size and spec. The planning permission was originally submitted in 2000 and was reapplied for several times, so many things were not included that may have been part of it had the design stage actually started from 2010 onwards. 1 - Passive house or any particularly environmental facets were never really considered, MVHR wasn’t part of the design and I wasn’t even that aware of what it was until I was well in to the build. I had brickies on site 3 months after completing the purchase of the land, so there was no dwell time to consider things like that. Remember the brief above, we NEEDED a house! I did quickly look at solar panels, but the capital expenditure just wasn’t an option we had. Briefly read up on 3G, again was disregarded due to cost, although I can’t remember what that was now. 2 - yes traditional block built house, trussed roof. We did consider block ground floor due to retaining wall and then timber frame on top but due to access issues and overhead HV power cables a crane was unlikely. Plus the 3 little pigs came to mind and I wanted a house made of bricks! I got 3 quotes for the watertight shell and all came in around £75k - and the end my chosen builder did say to me he believes he underquoted by approx £10-13k, so it could be argued that this cost should be factored in. 3 - as above the build is on our absolute limit of affordability of capex, however we do have a reasonable monthly income between us - may sound daft but I can afford a monthly gas bill more easily than I could £10k for a heat pump (this may be an age related perspective ?). If we added in many of the features that people here like to include the house would simply not have been an option to us. Either make it smaller or go back to the drawing board and pick up associated architect and planning fees - none of this was an option. 4 - Doors were Travis Perkins, £90 for a FD30 and £70 for a standard door, this was well under budget and proved to be a big cost saving on what I had expected. Flooring was £42/m2, so a reasonable cost, I think the wide board again makes it look like more than it is, link posted in a previous comment. The grey floor tiles in small en suites are indeed Wickes, the grey wall tiles are from TileMountain.co.uk @ 9/m2 and look much better than that price. The large format 900x450 black tiles were also from tile mountain and were only £25/m2 they don’t photograph well but look great in real life, a kind of rusted iron look to them with a slight sheen/glimmer that really shows off when wet. The tiler thought they cost me £60m2 upwards and couldn’t believe what I paid for them. 5 - Labour. Electrician was £3500 labour only, he used my site as a “hospital job” doing a couple of hours on odd afternoons when other jobs ran shortness or cancelled, or on Fridays when he wanted to finish up close to his home. I pestered him to ensure he always stayed ahead of where I was and his slower progress never ever impacted anything I needed to be doing. He was an acquaintance already and we ended up with a good working relationship. For example it took him about 4 months to complete first fix 100% but as I say this never mattered as any room I needed to board or progress onwards was always completed. - Plumber - friend did boiler room and snagging of my work for £1000 all in, this figure came about as I told him I only had £1000 for plumbing labour, so that was that. I did all first and second fix myself. - Plasterer / Renderer - £6000 labour only for external render, internal scratch coat and skim. Cousin of mine so no other quotes were obtained because I know his work his top quality (he works on a lot of the ridiculous houses being build in Rock, Cornwall - Gordon Ramsay’s place included). I probably did get some mates rates here but I don’t actually know to what extent, 4 plasterers on site at one point who I didn’t know so they all had to be paid out of the total. Tiler - £160 a day, my advice is don’t be afraid to use day rate, if you trust the tradesman you could both end up with a better arrangement. When you ask someone to quote on price you are offloading the risk and paying a premium for this, my advice here would be to de-risk the job as much as possible yourself then get some one in on day rate who will be happy to do a good days work for a days pay. Joiner - £100 a day, this was a bit of luck on my part. Skilled joiner had some health issues and couldn’t drive at the time I met him, was getting himself back in to work after an extended sick period so was willing to work quite cheap. At first I was picking him up each day but he got his licence back during the build. I’ll agree this probably saved me a fair bit, I’ve had him here working for the final 4 weeks. Ah the jack and Jill bathroom - I think my first post here which I remember your good self replying to offering advice. Well we took it and now have 2 separate bedrooms with 1.8 x 1.5 en suites, 1 with 1500 Bath 1 with 1500 shower. It’s the ones with the light grey tiles. Much better than the jack & Jill so thank you. The drive retaining wall is just standard blockwork, only completed the day of the photo so still very green. Further down it will transition to Gabions to keep costs down. We we do have space for another property, actually several more but the guy I bought it off, who is now our neighbour placed a covenant on it that a I could only build 2. Ground is slightly made up at that end of the site so I don’t think footings would be easy. As I said before I think some sort of lodge garden room structure on a slab may be what happens there, and may look at the possibility of Airbnb’ing it. However I liked this plot as it’s private and I don’t think I have any sort of knack for customer service. I may still build the lodge but use it as a Cigar and Whisky lounge!

He is a beaut! Currently trotting from spot to spot trying to see where the best place to lay and snooze is. Basking in the sun from the balcony doors is currently winning...

Thank you, I was trying to think of a way to explain how we’ve gone about budgeting for our finishes. And I think you’ve nailed it with “Sweet Spot”, there is obviously diminishing returns as you go above a certain price point for things, even more so when brand names get thrown in. @Ferdinand I think you can probably understand what I am getting at and can probably summarise it in to a useful post for others better than I can ?