Omnibuswoman

I think we will need a hardwood sill as the weather down here is pretty wet and often windy.

@Onoff the front of the door is flat, so I presume we will need to add some kind of weather board or something to allow rain to run over the edge of the doorframe onto the ground outside?

Thanks, that’s really very helpful OnOff. The doors in the picture are the front doors, not the back door. Here is a pic of the inside of the back door.

I should have sent HWMBO to stay there! He had covid last week. Thankfully it was only as bad as a standard bout of flu, and he has made a good recovery. I was thinking it would be handy when our builders start work - a nice spot for lunch or a brew.

The workshop construction continues, albeit at a slow pace. We have now turned our attention to fitting the doors, and there are some details I’m unsure about. 1) How do I hide the tyvek where it comes in around the door frame? Should I fold it around the jack stud, then put the doorframe woodwork on top of it? See photo of my dad working on the bottom of the door frame. We haven’t cut the tyvek for the doorway yet, but plan to do that tomorrow. 2) How should I construct a lip at the base of the door to stop rain coming in? I had planned to use some spare 2x4 pieces of treated timber (the off cuts from the stud work), but am concerned it will perish. 3) DPM - almost all the way around the workshop we laid a black DPM strip between the block work and the sole plate of the stud wall. However, on the front wall we forgot to put that in, and now the tyvek is on the outside and the ply sheeting on the inside, I’m not sure if it’s worth the hassle of taking the ply off and unscrewing the screws to try to dig out the cement between the blocks and the sole place, and slide in a DPM. Is this worth it? How vulnerable would not having a DPM here make the wood frame? Below is a pic of the workshop with 3 piece suite we are trying to give away. It made a nice place to relax during our tea break.

What does the correct drawing look like?

News flash - I’ve just read that the planning application has now been refused again (fifth submission) so this may well not be an issue for us after all!! The local Neighbourhood Development Plan had set the area as being outside of the village boundary (the dividing line being our garden wall), and this was relied upon to decline it.

Ahhh interesting. I’m quite deaf so little of this stuff even registers with me! Our plot is already going to be pretty quiet (in my view) as it’s two houses back from the road, in a small village. But next door may get planning permission for five new houses, which will mean months if not years of construction work nearby. At 8am on a Saturday morning we may well be glad of the high levels of soundproofing!!

@joth have you built yet? Is the soundproofing level what you had hoped?

Yes, this is the issue. HWMBO is a very light sleeper and needs both quiet and darkness to be able to sleep well. So we never sleep with the windows open even in a heatwave. I’ve taken to sleeping in another room with the window open when we have a spell of super hot weather. We were hoping to overcome this in the new house with a combination of metal roller shutters over the bedroom windows, à la most European countries, plus some in-room cooling we can deploy ahead of bedtime (too noisy for sleep).

Good question! I’ve just checked and that wasn’t calculated (we only asked them for an overheating assessment/advice and the calculations and shading strategy met that brief). I have assumed that even with the shading strategy we have, excess heat would still pass through the walls during extended periods of very high temperatures, and that in periods when the outside temperature doesn’t fall below 20c at night we would want to cool our bedroom down for comfort. I had thought that MHRV wouldn’t be sufficient for this, but it sounds as though it could be. Our builder, who is passive house trained, will do our M&E work later on. I’ll ask him about this idea. Thanks! M

I’m also interested in sharing an order on one of these FCUs. Not sure if it’s helpful but my brother lives in Ireland…

We used Greengauge Building Energy Company for our overheating modelling using the PHPP spreadsheet. Highly recommend - I was very pleased with the report they produced which helped us to make some design decisions about shading our east and south facing windows. We will have dark roller shutters on our East facing windows, and a retractable canopy over the south facing bifolds. I also plan to grow a wisteria or grape vine on the sunniest sides of the building to provide some natural shading in a decade or so. One piece of advice the engineer, Mitch, gave us was that external blinds should be dark to prevent heat coming into the building, and internal blinds/curtains should be white to reflect heat/light back out again.

We recently used Greengauge Building Energy Company to do our overheating modeling using Passivhaus calculations. We had Mitch work on ours, and I really liked him a lot. We received a detailed report analyzing the house for heat demands, overheating, shading etc. Came up with some pragmatic solutions to help us keep large scenic view windows that risk the house overheating. http://www.ggbec.co.uk/