vivienz

I've got Karndean going down in my place, upstairs and down. It's laid on top of ply upstairs and a latex screed over the power floated concrete slab downstairs. Personally, I'm really pleased with it and think it looks good. Fitted price for doing the whole house came out at around £53 per sq m.

Lordy, that almost looks like a finished bathroom!!!!

Thanks! The whole house isn't quite ready for painting but I would say that the boarding and plastering is 85% there. The guys worked like crazy through January and the quality of the skim is fabulous, which has made painting so much easier. My plasterers are awesome. More fundamental to the timings is that the decorating is the first time I've really been hands on and at times the build has been stuffed with teams working on it. Very different to a largely solo build!

@JSHarris has been kind enough to lend me his airless paint sprayer recently, as I've started decorating at the build following on from the plasterers, wherever feasible. I will put some more info on the blog in due course, but wanted to put a note in here in case anyone was thinking about this. I've got a lot of surface area to paint and it's particularly tricky in the upstairs bedrooms where the vaulted ceilings reach 4.7m at their high points. Even with a scaffold tower, painting up there is challenging and I really didn't fancy doing it with rollers. First off, it's messy, more so than the promotional manufacturer videos would have you believe, but no more so than many of the youtube videos I watched on the subject. I wouldn't want to do it in a small room or one with lots of stuff in it, particularly for ceilings, as being able to move about with the sprayer seems to be fundamental to the technique and being able to keep the nose of the spray gun at 90 degrees to the surface being sprayed. That said, for getting the white mist coats onto the plaster skim, it's nothing short of miraculous. Masking takes a couple of hours, depending on what you need to do (large windows in my case) but once the sprayer is up and running, you can get a large room, walls and ceilings, done in half a day as it dries incredibly quickly. I've stuck with contract white for the ceilings - it gives a nice opaque, super matt finish that I really like and makes the sprayer the obvious solution. For colour coats on the walls, I'm using rollers. This is for a couple of reasons - first the sprayer is a thirsty beast and it would cost a fortune if I sprayed the vinyl emulsion, and secondly I'm not sure I could mask effectively enough to retain the white ceilings without overspray from the colour. It also means that I get some texture on the walls, making it easier to touch up any paintwork in the future. If anyone has a new build with lots of bare plaster walls and empty rooms to paint, I'd certainly recommend a sprayer for the mist coats. Do prepare to get messy, though.

I will do a price comparison - I'm going to use this in a couple of places.

I'm getting Hemera external roller blinds from Hallmark Blinds. I have to say that the customer service from Hallmark has been rubbish, but they were significantly cheaper than the other supplier I looked at, Caribbean Blinds.

I've gone for external motorised roller blinds that are made from a tough mesh. They are fixed down tte sides with wires and roll back up into a cassette that sits above the window, powder coated to the same colour as the window frames. They claim to block about 85% - 90% of solar gain and you can see through them from the inside. These have to be looked at as first fix items due to the cable that needs to run externally and also the cladding needs to have room left for the cassette above the windows. These have come in at about £4.7k for two large 3 pane windows, including installation.

It won't be the cheapest option as I'm on a standard variable tariff with SSE - I didn't want to be tied into a contract until I've finished the build. I shall report back, but bear in mind that an awful lot of power tools will have been charged during the period, too!

You can have a house that is built to passive standards rather than a Passivhaus. Personally, I wouldn't want the latter as I want my home to function around me, not my having to compromise my lifestyle to suit the house. We're into the final stages of our timber frame/passive slab build and I've had the underfloor heating ticking over at a modest 18 C for the last three months or so, powered by electricity feeding into a couple of little willis heaters. Once we're live with the other systems, they will be fuelled by solar PV. This choice was dictated by having no gas near the site. Now, that 18C running through the slab has created a lovely, temperate atmosphere in the building, even though the MVHR isn't running yet. It's a little cooler upstairs but still very tolerable. I don't yet know how much it has cost me on electricity so far and I'll report back in due course, but given the high level of insulation I doubt it's costing me anywhere near what it costs to heat our current home. As I sit here typing at my desk, a nasty cold draft is sneaking in from all directions and I feel far more comfortable, temperature-wise, at the new build. In my limited experience of SEs, I would say go with what you want and then ask them how to build that rather than what they would build.

Bargain - no time to lose!

In my case, I don't think I would have stood a chance of getting the team I wanted together locally in North Dorset and I went off piste for my slab, timber frame and M&E. All the rest of my trades are local, though, and they've been great. I have worked on the basis that if you get your expert team in for the specialist work, you're drastically reducing the chances of anything going wrong in the first place.

I guess that depends on the terms of the contract and whether you would be in breach of it by doing that. I paid in full for mine by the time they were all in, even though a few snags needed attending to, but I've had no problems with the firm (Norrsken) and they've been great with coming back to make any adjustments. They will still need to return to address a few cosmetic issues, but this won't be done until we're complete - about 4 months after the installation was complete.

No problem - about £14.5k and I only needed a reduced dig of 800mm to get the desired finished floor level. The piles were over an area of about 200 sq m, including an attached garage and were done in a week. It was the right choice for me as a deeper reduced dig would have been crippling in muckaway costs - no one wants free clay and there's no way we could have lost that much on the site.

Haha! The toffee wrappers would be mine! All sorted now, thanks. I have to say, though, it's difficult to tell which is a decent sink as you get very little (no) tech info on the thickness of the metal, in general.

You can estimate the cost at any time but you will never truly know the cost until it's been built. Or at least, that's my experience. We knew what our budget was at the outset and told the architect this at the beginning. It's hard to get firm ideas of how much things will cost until you have a set of plans because it's really difficult to get quotes without them from suppliers - they need dimensions to provide anything meaningful. I understand how frustrating/worrying it can be to not know full costs at the outset but you really need your design first and then go through an incremental process of tweaking things throughout the process, both design and build, to fit your budget. Having some flexibility on costs built in to that process helps enormously.

Go get 'em, SWMBO!!!

I'm currenty looking at stainless steel inset sinks, which seem to vary enormously in price. For a bog standard, 1.5 bowl sink with drainer, they can cost anything from about £60 to £600. Is the variation in quality as wide as that in the price? Incidentally, I noticed an offer in Wickes this evening for a Franke inset sink (single bowl) with mixer tap for £119.

Would you also need to factor in the cost of accommodation whilst the rebuild is being done?

The connection to the new house will be zero VAT as it's a brand new connection to a new dwelling. Not the disconnect, though.

It should be easy to get hold of. I couldn't be bothered with tracking down and arranging transport to buy my own so hired it from the same people who provide and service my site portaloo. The fencing is about £5 per week.

Welcome! It's worth researching your shsding options as early as you can, not least do that you can account for the cost. Keeping heat out of a building isn't cheap. I'm using Contrasol Ltd for the brise soleil in front of our ground to roof height window in front of the stairwell, which faces almost due south. They have been pleasant to deal with.

Done - thanks!

About 4k including the filter stuff and VAT. Thank goodness for the DIY Kitchens January sale which offset a little of that.

Oh, go on, let's have a reconstruction of the event filmed for youtube!

I have. I succumbed to temptation and have ordered a Novy Panorama. I'm going to arrange delivery in the next week as my kitchen is arriving soon. Cooks and Company were okay to deal with, no problems.