Omnibuswoman

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 ?

Picture of front noggins

Another roof-related panic question: when we fit the roof ply (today), does each sheet need to be in contact with a joist/rafter at each corner - ie do the edges of the sheets need to sit at the joist centres just as the wall ply did?? we’ve added external noggins of 22cm which throws my beautiful calculations out as to starting at the front corner and working back in whole sheets. If I do that, the edges won’t be at centres because I’ve added 22cm on the front….

Impressive!!

Problem solved, courtesy of Ali Dymock's amazing YouTube videos and the span tables linked to above. We need 10x2s for the 4.6m span, and will put in some noggins for stability/to better support the roof. 18mm ply on top, with EPDM over that. It actually looks achievable now, although we only have until the end of the day on Monday which might be a challenge. I can see that Ali Dymock left his garden room wrapped in tyvek membrane all winter, so if we run out of time to do the cladding it won't be the end of the world as we can return to it later on. Where would I be if not for the buildhubbers?!!

Thank you all. I am on-site now but will review these suggestions tonight when we finish. We are working on our corner posts now and I’m delighted to find everything is perfectly aligned and square ?

Quick update, and bit of a panic about the roof.... We have three of the walls done now - 1750mm studs (2x4s) with top and sole plate, fixed into the blocks with hammerfix screws. Overall height is 2310mm which feels generous for my height (1.6m) and even adequate for HWMBO. So far so good... We are going to move on to the front wall today, but I have started thinking about the roof and panicking that my design isn't sound... The workshop is 6.5m long and 4.6m wide. I had planned a ridge plate (2x10) with 2x6 rafters coming up to meet it, covered in 18mm ply. I ordered two 3.6m lengths of 2x10 for the ridge plate. I started looking at how to fix them together, and then had a panic about the roof design not being sufficient and collapsing in and killing us all.... So now I'm considering whether to do an almost flat roof by adding an extra top plate on the right hand side, and running timbers across the 4.6m width sloping down slightly to the left hand side. I spent a lot of last night looking at roof trusses and the design of trusses, but it looks quite difficult to get right, and I'm still worried about the roof falling in. Any and all thoughts will be hugely appreciated!! Photos of progress to date attached...

yes we will, just to be sure. I’ve read horror stories of errors that have only been detected after completion leaving the house under-heated.

I second this. We are building a near passive house and the key to this is air tightness.

No, he left Camborne for London in the early-mid 90s His mum was a local youth worker. His dad is a bat expert, so some of you may have come across him in the planning process!! His dad actually helped me out when I had a phone call from Cornwall Nature Police after a vindictive Neighbour tried to report me for “crimes against bats” when we had a hedge trimmed!! (The only bat nearby was in fact the Neighbour herself...) I was deeply moved by Don - his hard work and compassion. He had just lost his wife when the programme was made. Incredible man! Where is the G8 being held? Scrub that - Carbis Bay! You did say that. Sorry!

thank you. Should I put a layer of plastic sheeting between the ply and the stud, or just tape up the ply joins?

Down near Camborne! My boss (in London) is from Camborne. He comments on how people imagine Cornwall is just a county of pretty fishing villages with no rough bits, but there was an excellent TV programme featuring Camborne food bank a few months ago. Simon Reeves I think. It really highlighted rural poverty and social exclusion.

No, I got muddled between breathable membrane and VCL, so have gone with breathable membrane around the outside of the stud walls. Thanks for the advice about the roof. I’ll see if I can drop some of the ply from the order and get some OSB for the roof. This forum is worth its weight in gold!! I don’t know what I would do without your fantastic input!