Omnibuswoman

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/

It is difficult not to feel overwhelmed and dispirited when reading about the legacy future generations have been gifted. I have made a number of changes to my lifestyle in recent years including giving up flying, changing to electric car, and giving up all animal products, and now we are building a low energy home in which to continue our low energy/low impact lifestyle, but it feels nothing like enough. I read yesterday that when he was PM Gordon Brown had committed to making all new homes highly energy efficient (I don't quite recall the details of the standard) by 2016. Our current incumbent quietly let that drop a year or two prior, committing all of those new homeowners to the cost of retrofitting decent amounts of insulation and suitable heating systems. I have to work hard to not just think 'oh well, might as well do x, y or z as we are all f**ked anyway'...

I'm watching this with interest as now thinking about our build beginning (hopefully) in October. Even for just the workshop we had supply issues - ordered plastic fascia and soffits from a company online. The warehouse contacted me on the delivery date (about 5 days later) saying all they had in stock was one piece of soffit, and nothing else. I ended up cancelling the order as we were finishing up and heading home. Very frustrating.

I hope it’s correct!! although having it in writing means I could rely on it if they were wrong. i read the judgement carefully just in case, and we are definitely not going to do anything towards building the house until the s73 application has gone through, and we’re in a position to apply for CIL exemption, even if the CIL is £0. Better safe than sorry!

This was the advice I had in writing from my local planning authority - as long as our s73 application doesn't enlarge the building, then £0 CIL will apply (the planning permission we are seeking to amend was granted prior to CIL).

You guys ????

ooooh, a future Olympic competitor maybe!!

After three visits to our plot (two ten day trips and one long weekend) we have made quite a lot of progress with building the workshop - in no small part thanks to this site and the generosity of members in sharing wisdom and advice. I've learned a huge amount, and am delighted with what we have achieved so far. Below are some photos of the work in progress which largely speak for themselves. We had help in the first tranche from my son and his friend who had finished Uni for the summer, as well as from my parents who live nearby. The second and third visits were just us with my parents, when they were not playing bowls. We have a new-found admiration for builders and others who have manual jobs - the stamina needed to perform physical work continuously over an 8 hour day was a shock for us desk-jockeys. And the weather gods were not always kind - the first visit saw torrential rain and high winds for the first five days, and our most recent trip was during the heatwave where we were working in 34C heat for much of the day. Noah's Ark to Raging Inferno. Spending time on the plot has been useful from the point of view of considering the design of the house, and how life might be for us living there. We realised that the south-facing aspect means fierce and unmitigated sunshine, so we will need to ensure we have sun-shading in some form over the balcony to stop us from frying in the middle of the day, and to reduce solar gain through the bifold doors. Having seen the distant views towards Dartmoor from the roof of the workshop (the equivalent of our first floor of the house), we have amended the window in the second floor from a velux to a dormer in order to create a corner where we can sit and take in the views. This will be part of the minor amendment application that goes in shortly. Here are the photos of the work in progress... (many of the photos I have are in HIEC format, so I wasn't able to upload) 3582792D-760C-40AF-8AFE-0403A9C4A3D8.mp4 BC9D98F1-B908-4BDC-BE64-36BE05B11D14.mov WhatsApp_Video_2021-06-10_at_21_54_37.mp4

I'm the same - boats, planes, cars all have the capacity to upset my delicate balance system. I find pendolino trains particularly affect me for some reason, and especially so if it's dark outside and I can't use my vision to normalise some of the movement. The house looks brilliant. I love the pure white render - have made a note of the name as our house will be rendered in white. Love the front door too. Very stylish.

Same here (we are staying in an old mining hamlet across the valley whilst working on the workshop) - this used to be my great granny's house. My grandad, and great-aunties and uncles all grew up eating fruit and veg grown in the 'contaminated' soil. Two of them have lived here all of their lives and were daily consumers of potatoes and veg from the garden. All have lived into their 90s. I suspect that the arsenic is a preservative if anything! It was heartbreaking having to scrape away the topsoil on our plot last year.

New question: On the south side of the building (the direction towards which the pent roof slopes down), we need to put a baton along the edge of the roof so that there is a small overhang to allow water to run off into the gutter. (see attached picture) Do we fit the baton on top of the fascia at that side, or cut the fascia shallower to butt up against the underside of the baton? IMG_9338.pdf

OMG, I'm on my way to screwfix now!!!

I think part of the problem has been that when we cut the noggins, the wood was extremely wet, but not universally so. As it has dried, I suspect some rafters have dried more than others, leaving such a lot of discrepancy. The other explanation is that HWMBO is crap at measuring and cutting, but he had my mum supervising so that's the less likely of the two options. Luckily we have an old MDF wardrobe here in pieces waiting to go to the dump - I can cut the fibreboard back of the wardrobe into strips and use these to build up the gap between the front of the shorter noggins and the roofline. Or in the case of bigger gaps, some bits of 9mm ply. Any gap between the back of the soffit and the wall can be to some degree disguised by the cladding, and a bit of trim at the end.

We have reached the stage now of putting the fascia and soffit boards onto the roof, swiftly followed by fitting the EDPM roof covering. But we have hit a problem... Measuring the distance between the outside of the wall and the front of the rafters (and the external noggins), no two measurements are the same. E.g. front wall external noggins are as follows: 12mm, 12.5mm, 12.9mm, 12.8mm, 11.7mm. The plywood roof is in place and screwed down. It largely meets the front of the noggins/rafters, but not by any means universally. In places it overhangs by almost 10mm, ranging from 1mm upwards. However, just to complicate things, the overhang of the roof ply doesn't marry up with the variation in the length of the noggins. E.g. One of the back wall external noggins which is 12.8mm long sits perfectly flush with the roof ply. The next two noggins along are 9mm and 10mm shorter than that, but the overhang of the roof is just 3mm and 2mm respectively. So if I build up the front of the noggins so that they are all the same length from the wall (for my soffit board), some will protrude beyond the edge of the roof. What do I do?? My plan for the fascia is to fit upvc facia board (don't shoot me, I just can't womanhandle fascia boards 4.8m long and fix them in place - upvc is lighter!). All and any suggestions most welcome. Thanks! Workshop_noggin_detail.pdf

Yes, I noticed that the penalties were quite severe. I have emailed South West Water to find out their interpretation of the words 'boundary of the property' but have heard nothing back as yet. I will chase them up about that, and will ask the septic tank supplier who have quoted for the work for their thoughts/experience of the interpretation of the general binding rules. The only downside I can see to taking the septic tank option is that the ground is not very permeable - it is something called shillet - which means that the permeable pipes need to be about 45m long. But the company we are thinking about using are a local firm so will be quite used to working with this kind of ground.

Our neighbour to the east links to the drains for the property in front of it - when she built her house, the house in front was her fathers, so they just connected to their foul waste pipes. That means there are no other sewer pipes we could link to anywhere on or near the driveway, sadly. The regulations that say that we have to have permission to install a treatment tank if the property boundary is 30m or less from a mains sewer- I think this is enforced by the Environment Agency, but I would need to check that. The question of boundary is discussed above, but I'm interpreting it as our boundary - the part outlined in red on the plans - which finishes around 45m from the road where the sewer is located. We're lucky that we do have plenty of land (the garden is 35m by 20m, with a bit excluded because of a TPO zone). In the long run, a septic tank will be considerably cheaper than digging up the road, and paying foul waste charges on the water bill.

We have water and electricity coming up from the road at the bottom of the driveway. The electricity DNO are kindly digging the trench and allowing us to use this for our incoming water supply as well as electricity, and telecommunications. However, the main sewer is a bit further away in the road, and would require us to pay to dig along the road for about 30m to reach the nearest manhole, or fund the building of another connection, which the SE said could be really very expensive. We've plenty of land on which to build a drainage trench - we've acquired the land to the east of the plot, where the X and Y are noted on the plan above, and other than avoiding the two TPO tree zones, we have a lot of metres of land to play with. The quote from the company that installs water processing tanks is just £6,500 plus VAT (and I may be able to zero VAT it or claim the VAT back), which is very considerably less costly than going down to the road and connecting to the main sewer.

We started building our workshop at around the peak on wood prices back in May - cost 50% more than my original budget in the end, largely due to the cost of the wood. We are now sweating about the decision to build a TF house, and our architect has even suggested that we rethink our choice of building material. The difficulty is, having made so many plans based around TF for environmental reasons, we are struggling to find another option with which we are comfortable. I'm starting to wonder if we ought to consider one of the large TF companies for a quote, as we have thus far only planned on a stick build from a trusted builder who can build us a passive house. This is the stuff that keeps me awake in the middle of the night if my brain starts whirring. I've even begun wondering if we are bonkers to think about starting a build now!

well done on coordinating them. In our case it is just about putting in our conduits for water and telecommunications, which I believe is our responsibility as it’s all on our land.

It’s most definitely not a euphemism!!!!

FURTHER UPDATE: (Apologies if I’ve already posted this somewhere - I can’t recall) I went back to WPD before accepting the £3k quote to query again why we needed to fund the cable upgrade (as I suspected that they needed to do this in any case). Having read their licence terms, I found that I could request data on the demands on the cable, which I duly requested. Having done so, it put them in a bit of a tailspin. This resulted in a phone call from someone more senior, wanting to know why I wanted this information. I explained my suspicions about funding a necessary local area upgrade. Next thing I know, I get a new quote: £938… (not the data I asked for though!), but they spontaneously decided to fund the upgrade themselves…!!! Now they’ve been in touch offering for me to pop my other utilities in their trench at no cost to me. ☺️

Thank you Ian. Yes, our title plan (attached) shows in red our plot, plus the initial stretch of driveway, the green is shared ownership, and yellow belongs to the neighbour but over which we have the right to pass etc. I am very happy to interpret the term ‘property’ as being our land only!

Does anyone know whether the term 'property' in the general binding rules, as in '... main sewer 30m from the boundary of the property' means the house itself, the edge of the bit we own solely, or the bit where the street and private property (in our case, our neighbour's driveway) meet? Our house is down a long driveway. The house is @12m from the driveway. We solely own the final 15m of the driveway, we jointly own the middle 15m with our neighbour, and the remaining 15m is owned by our neighbour and meets the street. The sewer is a further 30m down the road from that. My inkling is that joining the main sewer might make our project financially unviable, so I am keen to be allowed to install a water treatment system on our plot. Thanks

We only need to take 15-30cm off the four front and four back sheets to be able to land on a joist centre, so that’s the plan. So far so good.

? Thanks! weve limited the overhang as our house will have a stoop for rocking chairs and shoguns ?