Omnibuswoman

@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/

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!!!