jamiehamy

Our windows are 68m2 and even the most expensive was not that much. Internorm were around £22k for PCV framed aluclad, but Rationel, Janex, Velfac and Nordan were all in the £16-20k bracket before any final bargaining took place. Are you procuring or your builder? If your builder, then steer clear and let them deal with it all and pay for nothing until satisfied. You may have read about our woes elsewhere - we are almost there but it's been tough going.

Or half the people building the same amount?! :-)

It is - and it's why I was so angry at the SNP for scrapping Right to Buy. Take out abuse of the scheme and it was a fundamentally sound concept - even if exceptionally generous. Hell - Nicola Sturgeon's mother bought her own council house. Yet in Scotland that opportunity has gone for thousands - so what is the alternative? Renting forever more and a retirement paying rent? The complaint was that it reduced stock of social housing - possibly true, but just because LAs mismanaged that, doesn't mean the scheme was bad. BUt what they never accepted was the the net difference in houses available was nil. It's all part of the same question around helping people to afford houses and in Scotland that opportunity is gone for too many.

You have hit the nail on the head, as has NSS - true innovation in this regard is not difficult and already possible. But in the UK, it will never happen on the scale it needs to to be able to bring house prices down significantly - and there are some good reasons. As soon as you start going mainstream with quality prefabs, tens of thousands will be out of jobs - literally. A modern prefab could probably be erected by a team of three people. The production in a factory can massively automated - so nice cheap homes, very quick to build and tens of thousands of tradespeople with no jobs to afford them...

I'm still on £1+vat p/m for 4*2.

I agree with you on both counts here. On the first point - the 'Land Reform Act' in Scotland is a waste of time because there is no planning reform - without planning reform, it's a waste of time. So in Scotland despite the rhetoric, nothing will change here. Re:housing prices - isn't it odd how month on month, house prices rise and yet never a word uttered against it by even the lefty parties? Why? Because they all have such vested interests they will never, ever look to tackle house price inflation - which is one of the key root causes of the issues we have in this country. I too have always said i'd take a hit on my house price when the market rebalanced - heck, I already did in 2009 - I'll never get back what I paid for my small flat, no-where near it, so I've already felt that pain once but prepared to do it again for a rebalance that is so desperately needed. In Scotland I think the planning situation is even more bonkers given just how much empty land we have - no point allowing the break up of big estates if they only think you're allowed to build on them are wind turbines - serious point. Build a wind turbine on the top of a hill? - Sure, why not make it 10. Build a small house nestled in the foot of the hill - bugger off. Oh, but if you managed, that piece of land worth 4k is now worth 80k - guess who wins?! Not anyone on a low income, that's for sure. So back to the original question - I don't think you can separate out land costs - that's the problem here more than the cost of building. In my humble opinion only! Address the land cost and planning policy and you could look at a housing that could last decades - not only more people building their own, but more people building small, second homes - love em or hate em, they are nothing unusual on the continent.

Hawd on - doesn't trust the previous results?! Not knowing any more about it the good old cynic in me says he's just printed his own money! Do you have to pay for any additional work/time of his/hers? What if there is a redesign? If there is a change after your BW docs are submitted, this will need to be updated eventually. What rational have they given for this change of heart?

I think the data will be collected as a text file, but the problem is we have been using a gas heater at weekends (until we ran out of gas over Christmas!), so the longer term trend is distorted somewhat - we've not been using the gas for a couple of weeks now. I think my friend used the same combination - I know all the onsite cams run on one or more Pi's and there are two wire sensors. @ProDave I've used the link and this is a revelation! Spend the night plugging in all the values for the components and now have some good figures to go on. Quite pleased and I think this really knocks out bothering with an LPG gas central heating system completely and the number of electric heater that were planned. Considering now going for an inline heater with the MHRV system - will speak to BPC in the morning to look at options here. Thank you for sharing that - it's probably been discussed ad nauseum before but I've only really gotten down to looking seriously now we are ready for putting in some form of heating. I got there eventually! Thanks everyone for the inputs

Same here for induction - as much as I loved gas, I'll not go back after induction. And so easy to clean!

Thanks for this - will try tonight

Yes, I think so. Generally the steep external increases are when it's bright sunshine - although that might sound obvious, it can be cloudy all day when a weather front hits adding 5degrees with no sun. My friend has rigged up two sensors that somehow record and send to a webber version and are accessible from anywhere. Quite handy for a whole host of purposes! I used the MYSON heat loss calculator which allows me to plug in all the u values - but gives me a Nan result! I'll try again when I get home. Walls are XPS 200mm, roof 150 PIR, floor 150 XPS. This is the latest weekly graph BTW. On Monday we had a 3kw heater on in our working area. The sensor is quite away away from the heater.

Sorry, that was totally vague! I just meant in terms of how the house responded over a 24hour period, does that look 'normal' given where we are at. I'm trying to get up to speed on heat loss - until now I've not paid much attention. We don't have any heat loss calls - assuming that's because from a BC perspective this is a conversion? I know we don't need an airtightness test. I've looked at heat loss calculators online but none are fit for purpose for us. For u values, floor is 0.14, walls 0.14, roof 0.15 and windows generally 1.0 - but we have huge expanse of glazing. Is this the point you direct me to a spreadsheet?!

Whatever you do, try ensure 'loose' membrane is minimised. We don't know the exact problem because the cladding has not been taken off, but a friend is constantly annoyed by the sound of a piece of membrane that gets caught somehow in high winds and creates a'zipping' noise (for want of a better description ). We're assuming there is a raggy edge that is the culprit. With open cladding, the membrane will need to be absolutely taut to avoid flapping or anything similar, esp if not flat against the sheathing where it can be stapled.

Not very scientific, but does this look okay? Bearing in mind there is no heating in the building yet and some small areas to be plugged/insulated and we have no plasterwork. It's glorious sunshine today but as you can see, there is limited effect on the internal temperature. The south elevation glazing all has solar tint on it. I'm trying to finalise what we're doing for heating hence my interest in this - but I'll open another thread in a bit specifically for that, Cheers, . Jamie

We were given a broken Im350i to see if we could fix it. £150 later on a service and some replacement parts and been totally reliable since. Best investment I made... along with the Bosch 6tool set and the Senior Collated screwdriver! All worth every penny, get sooner rather than later is my suggestion.

Put it on the neighbours gatepost :-) I'm half serious - I've got one at our flat outside our door. With hindsight, I should have put it at the bottom of the close with no marking - then anyone who managed to get it off, and into it, would have to try quite a few doors first, deterrent enough. I'll end up fitting one somewhere at the new place - probably resin bolt it into the concrete wall at the drive.

I'm not out to upset anyone, but the whole design rights thing did cause us a headache.

Okay, just caught up - I go away for build some walls for a few hours and look what happens! I *think* uor experience is relevant here. We were originally going to buy an old barn but that fell through. When we found the water tank, we used the same architect, however we decided for various reasons to look at who else might be interested. We changed architect, but before the new architect would do anything, he wanted permission from the old one to carry on from the very high level design that had been completed. This was despite the final design bearing little resemblance, and the final design being from a scale model my partner built and the architect simply drew up properly. Nonetheless, despite agreeing it might be a bit OTT, the new chap wanted written permission from the previous one. That was fun, but we go it in the end - but needless to say, it did very much sound like the rights to the design remained with the architect, not us - and that is not unusual.

I've forgotten what we're actually discussing!

If you want your project, whether it be a self build or any project else to be a failure, then this is most certainly the right way to go about it. You are not wrong, but in my experience in prpjects over the years, the input of everyone is valuable, essential, and should never be ignored or discounted without proper consideration. IN fact, the input of the person with the least expertise in a subject often has the best perspective and should be listened to the most.

Remember - we are the joiners and boarders in this case! And just about everything else :-)

We've decided we'll sheet the ceilings in each rooms afterwards - it does created more work for us to put in extra timber as you say, but allows us the flexibility. It would have been a dream and doddle to sheet up the ceiling before the walls went in, but would have mean bringing in the spark earlier than we wanted. It is a compromise, but I think we're worse off, just don't want to create any extra work for the spark and plumber later on. We don't have a loft so can't go down this route I'm afraid!

hiya, We are building the internal stud walls and have also had 4 pallets of Gyproc delivered (what fun tmrw will be lifting them all up to the house!). My thinking is that we can start sheeting one side of the internal stud walls before the electricians and plumbers start their thing - one of the sparks said as much. My thinking is that for toilets, we should sheet the 'inside' walls of the toilet which will allow access to run the pipes and cables from 'outside' the toilet and be brought through to the right location? For other walls like adjoining rooms (bedrooms/study etc), as long as we only do one side, it shouldn't matter which (we are using 95x45mm studs). A sensible approach? We want to get as much done as possible before bringing contractors on board to the wiring and plumbing - but do't want to go too far. Thanks, J

I can't offer a definitive answer, but we have the same issue coming up (I was going to post about this later) - our walls are 2.7m and 3m going up to 3.3m, so have to have a join. My plan is to put a 45x45 dwang across the join to catch the screws (in your case 25x45?), but not quite sure how to smooth the join as I don't think that edge will be tapered? If I scrim then it will not be flush with the rest of the board... We had though about buying 2.7m gyproc and 3m, but couldn't buy partial pallets so everything is 2.4.

Speak to any door company and they look at you funny then you ask for 826, however ask for a real reason for going with 33inch as opposed to a metric size and none is forthcoming, apart from a bigger range in imperial. I won't do anything 'old school' after the issue with the OSB boards being 2440x1220 rather than 2400x1200 - I'll stick to metric all the way, even if it costs a bit more. This whole palava of mixing types of measurement is perverse for 2016 - 20years ago maybe, but surely we must be moving on from that?! Good old Blighty doing things her way!