Thorfun

awesome. will get that sorted out Monday. thank you. ?

nice one. I have previously used some non-shrinking grout underneath some structural steels. I presume this is a similar product?

no idea but following with interest as we need 4 of these at about 800mm wide and would like black fixings as well!

greetings. in our basement we have a structural opening for a sliding door. it's a 250mm reinforced concrete insulated slab. long story short, I need to raise the floor level of the structural opening 13mm from the current level so that the sliding door is at the correct height for the level threshold from the FFL. Can I lay 13mm of concrete (I guess I'd have to get small aggregate pieces) or will that simply not be strong enough to take the weight of triple glazed 2.5m sliding doors? how else could I raise floor level of the opening 13mm? I asked the window company if they could simply use packers and they said no.

Congratulations! Good luck with the next stage of your journey.

but you can eat them in your secret batcave. makes it all worth it.

I just had an amazing idea (as I said previously it's easy to spend other people's money!). could you have a 'secret' garage built in to the hillside with a hidden door (think Batman and his Batcave!). you could still have the normal garage for the 'normal' cars and have the secret agent/Iron Man/Batman type garage for the 'special' cars.

seriously, dig into the hill a bit more and put the plant next to/near the cinema. you could have rooms there that don't need natural light so it's perfect for a cinema, gym, plant room etc. means you won't have to use up your garage with plant.

welcome. my advice is to keep us updated with progress! we love a good self-build on here. ?

I agree on that point. personally I think the entrance will be awesome and love the way that the house is hidden and only that small building is visible. I hope you get this project going and update the forum as I will follow this with much interest.

it is very easy to spend other peoples money! and I'm not normally one for commenting on designs as they're such personal things. but...... ? if you're digging into the hill to create the cinema could you not take a little more out and build a gym? or another room that could be used for another purpose? obviously budgets are an issue but it seems a shame to not make the most of the space in the hill now when it won't cost too much more than try and cobble something else together at a later date? we were originally planning a basement only under half our main structure. in the end we decided that it wasn't much more to just make the basement the whole of the main structure. it definitely wasn't the same cost again as plant was already on site, formwork was already being made etc. now we have rooms that can be purposed as required. anyway, just a thought.

nice looking project! I'm no expert but we like a large utility room where you don't have to shuffle past someone/something to get to the other end. could you not increase the size of the utility room and reduce the garage size? a 4 car garage seems a bit excessive in a 3 bed house! The cinema/media room seems a little pokey and also looks a little square. have you done the research on ideal dimensions for home cinemas? might be worth doing that first and then building the room to fit those requirements rather than trying to fit a cinema in to a square room of arbitrary size. just a couple of thoughts but I look forward to you, hopefully, updating these forums with your progress. looks like a very interesting project for sure.

once we've built our house I'll let you know what we love about the lighting! but, we did employ a lighting designer to design an overall concept for the house and we love what she did. now it's down to us to put it in place.

we used Proctor Roofshield (https://www.proctorgroup.com/products/roofshield) as our roofing membrane. This is allowing us to fully fill our 197mm rafters (actually putting in 190mm due to availability of thicknesses) of Isover Frametherm 32 glass mineral wool batts with 90mm PIR below the rafters. you could try this route. speak to your preferred insulation manufacturer and ask them to do a condensation risk analysis on your chosen make up and they'll do the calculations for you.

so now you've made me doubt myself! when the surveyor left site he ordered me ducting to run from the proposed new pole to the house and a 'box' chamber to put outside the house for access for them. then said when I was ready for the new line to be fitted to contact them (although it might have been to contact BT) and they will come and fit the pole and connect the line to the ducting I will lay. maybe this is what you mean by FTTPoD?

yep! ? but I never knew this checker existed. I found out when an OR engineer was working on the pole and I went out and had a chat and he said it was FTTP. so when I spoke to them about the new connection for our new house it was fibre all the way. I originally wanted the connection to go under the road as I didn't want wires overhead. the surveyor said that's fine but it'll cost quite a bit with the road closure, digging of the road, running the cable etc or they could put the pole up and it'll be free. wasn't a hard choice.

probably not something you want to hear but our FTTP connection isn't costing us a penny! the pole across the road has fibre all the way from the exchange and OR are fitting a pole at the edge of our property and I'll run the cable underground in to the plant room. it's probably worth speaking to OR as you never know and you might be surprised.

I've asked the question but looking at the installation manual for the Solaredge Optimisers that I have on each panel it looks like grounding is not required http://www.solfex.co.uk/uploads/downloads/Power_Optimizers_Installation_Guide_with_IndOP_Option.pdf page 13 it says: "For rest of the world – all power optimizers are double insulated and grounding is not required." so I'm all good without earthing cables, right? or am I reading that wrong?

indeed, I see that now and will definitely be speaking to them.

the counter battens was chosen so I could fully fill the rafters with mineral wool insulation and nothing to do with the solar panels. heat on the membrane never even crossed my mind ?‍♂️

errr.....I didn't see them fit earth wires to each panel. oh ****! where would those earth wires end up as, from what I can see, we only have 2 x pairs of cables (one from each string) where the inverter is going to go but no earthing wire that I could see.

and this is the issue. we slated and flashed to the specifications and requirements that were given to us. we were going to use lead but then the company sent the fast flash and it looks really good. that crinkly stuff is horrible but it won't ever be seen at the top so I don't care that it's there. it's very easy to say but that's another day for the Solar installers to be on-site to remove the panels and trays and then to coordinate the roofer to come back once that's done to remove the slates and then put more flashing down but the scaffolding has to come down in a week as the doors and windows are arriving and so I don't think that solution is feasible (although I'm not discounting it and will speak to the consulting company about it). this is just another one of those self-build hiccups that I'd love to have the time and money to get sorted out properly but I'm just not sure that's going to be possible. ?

hmm...might be able to slip a 5mm plastic packer underneath them I guess. could be worth a try and something I could do without too much difficulty (although I'll probably wait until the roofer is back on-site!). it's a good idea and I'll discuss it with him.

yeah. makes sense and I would agree. but they need to be clamped down and so I don't see how this can be resolved easily.

found this photo that shows the panels do not fully cover the flashing. I'm really not sure how we can cut the tiles any shorter as we'd have to take all the trays up and the flashing and pretty much start over again. ?