Tony L

Best on blocks, I'd say. We had ours installed by the dealer we bought the 'van from, & they told me to get the ground as level as possible & have plenty of blocks to hand. Perhaps they fine tuned the levels with off cuts of wood & old slates - I don't remember now.

if I remember correctly

I don't know which part of the country you're in, @boxrick. I've saved the details of a company in, Purley/Croydon, called Bespoke Guttering. They manufacture on site, from a roll, so you end up with a seamless gutter. They do fascias & soffits too. Presumably, they offer downpipes as well. I'm way off the guttering stage of my build, so this isn't a recommendation, but you may want to consider them if you're not too far away. Here's a picture from their website:

Well done for taking them on. I hope you win in the end. How did they force you to pay? Did this go to court?

Interesting. Thanks, I didn't know that. It wasn't one of my conditions, but they did put this in next door's conditions (for PP to demolish & rebuild - same as me).

Also consider that PP is often granted with a condition that the property will no longer have PD rights. This probably doesn't help you, @Leigh0403, but the best thing to do is to get your outbuildings up before PP is granted (assuming they qualify as PD & they're not going to get in the way of the main build).

Thanks for explaining your VAT reclaim, @nod. It's good to know they don't enforce the silly wardrobe rule, although a different inspector may have taken a different view.

The natural wood colour looks the best of those two pictures. It suits the house. Normally, I prefer black, but it needs to be on the right kind of house. With black, you can be confident it’s going to retain the same look for many years. With the natural wood, anything can happen – perhaps not, if you really know what you’re doing, but it seems most people don’t know (or perhaps the builders just don’t care). I don’t like it when natural wood cladding turns grey. I see a lot of wood cladding weathers badly & can look damp towards the bottom. I particularly dislike the “damp at the bottom” look I see on a lot of natural wood cladding – it looks just like a cheap garden shed to me, & that’s not a great look for a house.

You have no downstairs loo, other than the en-suite. Are you going to send your guests upstairs, or into the bedroom? Your enormous L-shaped hall is a waste of space. You could re-configure & have an extra room down stairs – a downstairs loo, & perhaps an office & cloak room as well. There’s too much glass in the bed room. A room that’s closer to square, rather than long & thin will always be better IMO. If you move the bedroom door towards the porch, you can make the en-suite twice as big, or make this room a downstairs loo, for everyone. You’d still have room in that big bed room for an en-siute. Which way is North? I wouldn’t worry about the internal configuration too much just now. The planners don’t care about how bad your internal configuration is, so just put in for planning to see if you’re going to be allowed to build a house that’s the size, shape & height you want. You may find they force you to build a smaller house or a house with a lower ridge height than you want. Once you have PP & you know what the constrains are, you can then spend time on the details, knowing you’re not wasting your time. You may need to put in for a non-material amendment, but getting these approved is easy compared to gaining PP.

It will grow on slates too, although it will likely be easier to remove than from a clay tile roof. Zinc works in the same way as copper, & would be my choice.

Probably not, no, but I'm past the point of no return now, so I will keep going, with a positive attitude, & I hope I will have changed my mind on this by the time the end is in sight.

Welcome to the forum, @JoanneP. My advice is: spend as many hours as you can spare reading through the history on this forum. There’s a lot to learn & I think this is the best pace to educate yourself. You will come across many success stories – so there’s the reassurance you’re looking for. Also, you’ll come across many stories of builds that have gone wrong – mostly because self-builders have been let down by the people they’ve employed. For example, my builder, caried out sub-standard work then, with the help of a solicitor, tried to force me to pay over £7,000 for work he hadn’t even done. The arguments went on for weeks. You could very easily find yourself in a similar situation. & the builder's not the only person who’s ripped me off or let me down badly – I could give you a long list. So if you’re confident you can stand up to these types of people, go ahead. If not, think again, because there are a lot of very bad people who are very good at telling wonderful stories about what they’re going to do for you then, sometime after you’ve engaged them, you realise they’re not going to make good on the agreement that’s been made & the arguments start – intense, lengthy arguments. Are you good at dealing with those kinds of situations? You may need to be.

Thank you for starting this thread off @Canski. I was thinking BCO & warranty inspector would do all the necessary inspections as the build progressed, & the SAP guy would have a quick look at the end & do some sums based on information I provided. I expected the process would be no more arduous than the last time I got an SAP cert for my rental flat. I can see this is something else I need to have a good look at before work recommences on my project

I can’t say for sure, yet. I had to ditch the Arch Tec whose drawings I already have, because they were so full of mistakes & he wasn’t good at correcting them, even though I was giving him plenty of help – so there’s no point in me telling you more about these drawings, because they didn’t reach the stage where I was ready to get the SE involved in the superstructure calcs (my foundations are already built). I engaged a new Arch Tec & paid him (on 19 May) & I haven’t seen a single drawing from him yet, even though I was supposed to have a full set of draft drawings at the beginning of July. Yes, I’m annoyed with him, but I’m still expecting his work to be good quality when I eventually see it. When I get the new drawings, I’m envisaging my thick wall, with the blocks laid flat, will run up to the height of the first floor, then there’ll be upright blocks on top of this, flush with the wall beneath on the side with the stairs, & running all the way up to the vaulted ceiling/roof. If the SE looks at the drawings & says we need to make a change, & go all the way up with the blocks laid flat, I don’t think this will create too much extra work for the Arch Tec. I’d rather keep to upright blocks at first floor level, as blocks laid flat would eat up an extra 115mm of bedroom width, & cost more.

I thought so too then I did a bit of Googling & found this review, which has made me wary.

Yes, I'm interested. Thanks for posting these. These diagrams assume a zinc roof (formed on site), so I'm not sure they answer all the questions you may have if you end up going with Pagurek click system, as you suggested you may do, in a recent post. Please keep us all updated, as you work towards your solution.

I don't want my garage to be completely airtight, but I was thinking, if it was a lot more airtight than most garages then I could run a PIV in there to pressurise the room & dry out the cars when they need it - some of my cars are old & may be left for weeks at a time without being used. Also, I might heat the garage if I'm working on one of the cars during the winter. I have the PIV that was rescued from my bungalow before it was demolished. I'm thinking the best solution may be to have a regular garage door, for security, then some king of curtain arrangement inside to increase the air tightness.

No, but I'm planning this (that's if I have any money left when the build nears completion). I discussed my plan with my SE, & my drawings show standard 7N blocks laid flat - so my wall that the stairs will hang off is 215 thick (+ finish) rather than 100.

These were my first thoughts. If you've identified an affordable, reasonably airtight garage door, I'd be interested to hear about it, please.

Just confirming AeroBarrier is indeed zero rated for new builds. & their responses to two emails I sent were very helpful, although they weren't prepared to say, "If we come along & your building is already at x ACH, we'll guarantee to get it down to 0.6 or better.". That's not a big surprise really, although a guaranteed result would certainly mean I'd be more likely to go ahead with them.

There are different ways of dealing with this problem & each way carries different risks. If it were me, I’d be saying he’s broken the contract because he didn’t, “provide a high quality outcome for the works”, (that’s a quote from your contract), so there’s no reason the client should be bound by a contract that the builder broke; he’s off the job, & he’s not getting any more money. If you want to carry on fulfilling your side of the contract, so the builder has no opportunity to say you’re in the wrong then you need to write to him, if you haven’t done so already, to tell him the work is no good. Just two or three sentences should be enough. Do not mention anything he’s done wrong other than the Posis & the steels – you don’t want to give him the opportunity to argue, at length, over some trivial matter. It’s highly unlikely he will order, pay for, & wait for delivery of a full set of Posis & steels, & have them all installed & looking as they should do, within 14 days of receipt of your email/letter. & if he tells you he's going to fix his work, as @saveasteading says, you should insist on a formal proposal for a schedule of the remedial works, so he'll have that to squeeze into his 14 days timeframe as well. Also, your contract says mediation should take place. Your contract isn’t specific about the kind of mediation, so this would just need to be a short meeting with you, the builder & a mediator – it doesn’t even matter if the builder chooses the mediator – you don’t have to agree to the mediator’s suggestions. So if you want to still be seen to be upholding your contractual obligations (even though he broke the contract), email him to offer mediation, at your site, one day this week. As I say, if it were me, I'd not be even giving him these opportunities.

Good luck, @Nick Laslett, & thanks for your airtightness details. You certainly sound as though you know what you're doing, so I have saved a copy of your post in my "Airtighness" folder, which I will hopefully remember to look at when I start to select (or others start to propose) which products will be used in my build.

I should think you're right. Email sent. I'll report back.

I'd worry about my lungs. Do the AeroBarrier team zero rate their invoice, @Nickfromwales?

Don't say this until you know the cost of correcting the work is a lot less than the amount he's going to say you owe him. If he's going to get nasty with you, your starting point for negotiation should be: He's broken the contract, by consistently undertaking poor quality work & overcharging, so you're going to force him to pay a competent builder to undertake the required remedial works, because he has demonstrated over the course of several weeks, he's incapable of doing the work to an adequate standard himself.