Gone West

Hi, welcome to the forum. As others have said for a bungalow the roof and foundations will cost more and foundations could be a significant proportion of the build for many reasons. We have built a two storey PH near Sandwich.

Yeah it's Wren, gloss white.

I was told it will be flush fronted.

Hi, welcome to the forum and good luck with your search. I believe there are others on here from your neck of the woods.

Don't know if these help.

I'm not sure that the picture is correct in showing how it should be done. It's important that water doesn't collect on the top reveal. On my house I had the top part of the reveal inset from the side pieces so the cladding goes over the top of the front edge of the top reveal with a 3mm weep gap between the cladding and top reveal.

We planted a lot of herbs as plug plants last year and they’ve really grown well. We had a mixture of culinary, and flowering types for the pollinators. We also planted a prostrate rosemary in a pot which is supposed to trail but ours is resisting at the moment. Hopefully gravity will take over soon. We also took some cuttings from a wild honeysuckle and they are doing well. Wendy’s keen on growing herbs and has parsley, chives, sage, thyme, basil, bergamot, bloody sorrel, tarragon, sweet majoram and lemon verbena. I’m more interested in the flowering herbs. Some like hyssop attract the bees and can be used in cooking.

I made some. The inflow to the MVHR should have the lowest flow restriction of any of the ducting. I have 125mm diameter ducting and in order to maximise flow into the unit I used 45 degree bends and a short pipe run. The vent I made was 230mm square and by using a grille and insect screen of that size I got slightly better flow area than the ducting. IIRC I used 2mm or 2.5mm stainless steel woven mesh for the insect screen. Some of the mesh companies give flow rates for their different products.

The only problem with those is that they cause a significant restriction to flow. I bought a couple and gave them away for that reason.

@Vijay It's a tough lesson I learnt early on in my build. It doesn't matter whether it's C16, C24, regularised or sawn, it's all crap. The amount I sent back was incredible. Sometimes they didn't even bother to collect it. If I had to use cut timber then I didn't buy it until the day it was going to be used and then fitted it straight away. Engineered timber is so much better.

We bought an Ego self propelled lawnmower, strimmer and hedgecutter recently. The lawnmower came with a 5Ah battery which I use in the others. No complaints yet and charges quite quickly. May consider getting a 2Ah battery for the hedgecutter as I'm getting weak in my old age or maybe eat some more spinach.

When I was considering a ground coupled heat exchanger all the ducting was anti-bacterial and the coating was a form of silver.

The overall U value is 0.10

We did most of the build ourselves. I did the circuit design, first and second fix electrics and had it checked at each stage and finally signed off by a friend of my son in law. I also did all the design and first and second fix plumbing although we don't have central heating. I also designed and did all the fixing for the MVHR system.

We have build to better than PH standards, U = 0.09 air tightness = 0.47 and don't have UFH and heat the house to 23C with towel rails as the main source of heating. If you are happy with 20C or less then it would be easy to heat without UFH depending on where you are in the country. There might be a problem convincing a buyer if you wish to sell the house though. We wouldn't be happy with a cool house.

We have a single storey gable end on our sitting room which is just over 4m high. We decided to have it 3/4 glazed to have it look a little different to the normal fully glazed gable. It also reduces heat loss as the corner of the gable faces North. The biggest installation consideration is the weight of the glazing which in our case was 6mm triple units. The installers broke one of the units carrying it from the front to the back of the house. IIRC it weighed 150kg and was unsupported.

I've been using rainfall data from my local Met. station to compare groundwater levels and rainfall for the last few years. https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/pub/data/weather/uk/climate/stationdata/manstondata.txt

Using an old type onion cesspit would be better than a septic tank because septic tanks usually have baffles or separators built into them which would make using them as a water storage tank more difficult. The old type ceespits were just a simple tank which had to be emptied when full as there is no outflow, as there is with a septic tank.

In my previous Victorian farmworkers cottage we had the original rainwater harvesting system which the early occupants used as their water supply. There a bit more about it in an earlier thread.

@Balraj Appadu Welcome to the forum and good luck with your project. Touchwood Homes will do everything from groundworks up. Some friends of ours used them nine years ago and have been very happy with the build. https://www.touchwoodhomes.co.uk/build-method/ https://www.touchwoodhomes.co.uk/foundation-systems/

My BCO insisted that all external softwood be treated, even behind cedar cladding.

That's right, although some friends who built a self build also renovated an old outbuilding on the site and had 100mm Icynene sprayed onto the inside of the walls as IWI and draughtproofing. The only problem was it was done in the winter and apparently Icynene doesn't stick that well to cold surfaces and it pulled back slightly in places which had to be rectified but other than that it worked well. It was done about nine years ago and the building used as a artists studio.

We used 350mm Icynene to insulate our house (PH) and got an airtightness of 0.47ACH without any membranes or tapes. According to the manufacturers 100mm is supposed to be enough for good airtightness.

I see, I hadn't appreciated the basement and retaining walls aspect.

That's quite surprising. What types of EPS are you talking about.