miike

Ah I've been looking at the 'notional dwelling specification' and reading it as the standard which must be achieved. The limiting fabric u-value of 0.20 makes things much easier. The 0.13 came from the target value for the pre-2022 regs.

For a pre-2022 Part L building reg on new builds, the min u-value is 0.13 for flat roofs. If the building has multiple flat roofs and terraces, does the SAP assessor/bc work out the worst performing part of the roof and pass/fail based on whether this is within the min values? I'm wondering if the u-value can be averaged out across all areas - for example equal parts are 0.11 and 0.15. I've heard that the SAP assessor can also consider the building performance as a whole, and a below standard roof can be offset by improvements in other areas. However, I haven't been able to find confirmation of this. Is anyone familiar with these rules who can advise?

I have a £250k CIL exemption on my build so I've also been naturally paranoid about falling through into one of the loopholes that loses you the exemption. My CIL officer was helpful though - I submitted all the necessary forms, then asked them to confirm that I have done everything correctly and if I can now submit the building commencement notice. They confirmed in writing, then I submitted the commencement notice, and after they acknowledged it, I once again asked them to confirm in writing that all necessary steps for the CIL self build exemption have been completed. They replied back saying I was good to go and what the remaining steps would be once the building was complete. Prior to the building commencement date, I didn't even go on the plot with so much as a pair of hedge trimmers in fear of being accused of starting work (I think in reality it's when you bring on heavy machinery). You can ask your officer to explicitly state that all steps have been completed so far, and if you can now submit the commencement notice.

Why are you paying a right to light surveyor to come out? It has already been granted planning permission, and planners seemingly took this into account. Are you planning to change the design and submit a new application based off the new assessment? If you're not, then what benefit will the new assessment be to you? Do you have an example of a single case anywhere in the UK where someone has been granted planning permission, built to their approved design, and then been successfully sued by their neighbour for loss of light? If not, what exactly are you worrying (and spending money) about?

They also mention in their last post about seeing plots going for £30-40k. If they’re looking at the very bottom of the market, price wise, for plots, then it’s probably worth pointing out when an architect they’re looking at is at the other end of the spectrum. @morsing Just to prepare yourself on planning time lines, I bought a plot already with planning permission. I applied to change the design to a more contemporary one and it took 2 years from the app being verified to receiving approval. The actual building work is straightforward in comparison.

Strom are one of the top end architects. I'm pretty sure I read someone on here saying they got told by Strom that they don't work with people with less than a £3.5k pm budget, and that was a few years ago when things were cheaper. But if you can afford them, I think their houses look great.

How many did you get on the Grand Designs bingo card?

That does include the windows, so I'm at £1,161 m2 to watertight. I definitely feel that the build industry has cooled down a lot recently, it is much easier to find people with availability and negotiate discounts on materials than a year ago. The 200k would be to finish but based on prices I've recently managed to secure for a number of different things (tiles, bathrooms, flooring), I'm feeling reasonably good about it.

Build Update: For anyone curious how costs have been stacking up so far, we are getting close to a shell. All the hard stuff has now been completed (~100 muck away loads, leveling out the sloping site, foundations, basement, steel beams etc.). The semi-submerged basement has been completed and we're building the brickwork for the upper floors now. I changed from TF as their engineer wanted to use a huge amount of steel to support the frame so it ended up being more cost effective to continue with masonry. 3G windows have been ordered and should be here early November. I've changed the cladding from render to a long format Scandinavian brick that I really love (google 'the burnt timber pavilion' to see an example of it). My original estimate was £544k to bring it to a shell, I'm currently on track for £590k, with the main increase coming from additional steel beams and the fancy brick. This leaves me with £200k for the internals. I've been pretty active the past few months in sourcing bargains for this stage and I've done pretty well - I've been managing to source materials/items at massive discounts which leaves the majority of the budget for labour. I've already bought a kitchen for the house for £4.5k which was a used designer one with gaggenau appliances, but the owner just needed it gone from their Chelsea townhouse ASAP so sold it for peanuts. Bit early to buy it but it was the perfect size and couldn't pass up at that price.

Thanks I'll take a look. What I've found in my current apartment is that the sun heats the place up through the glazing and the insulation then stops that heat leaving. So I would assume a similar situation in the new house but I'm not sure how you would factor the sun into heating requirements. Does your first floor gain much heat from the UFH on the floors below? I have a semi submerged basement and then two floors on top, so I could have UFH in the basement and rely on that to heat the upper floors as well. I can use a gas boiler for hot water.

My timber frame is going up in about 6 weeks time and I'm considering my options for heating the property. The house is 508m2 and I've been quoted £58 supply and install for UFH. An ASHP would be ~£10k installed, even with the £5k grant, for a house this size. This brings my total cost to fully heat the property at £40k. The timber frame has a U value of 0.15 - 0.09 and the windows (140m2 total) are triple glazed and U 0.6 - 0.8. So the property is going to be well insulated. I'm currently living in a new build apartment which has extensive double glazing and a B EPC rating (81 score). In the year I've lived here, I've turned the UFH on for 4 days when London was -8C and the internal temperature dropped to 17C. The heating has been off every other day and it is usually too hot in here and I'm trying to cool the place down. I would imagine my new house is going to similar, with keeping it cool due to the large amount of glazing being a bigger issue than keeping it warm. I'm connecting gas regardless as it was only £750 to do, so I can use that for hot water, but for heating the actual house I'm considering alternatives to UFH as I'm anticipating minimal demand. I see three options for me: 1. Suck up the cost and do full UFH throughout. Use either an ASHP or gas boiler to power it. 2. Partial UFH - instead of doing the full house, put it in the bedrooms, bathrooms and main living spaces. This would be about 250m2. 3. No UFH - I can get a good price on german made infrared heaters and place them in most rooms in the house. I anticipate only occasional need to heat the property so they wouldn't be used very often and would cost ~£10k. There will be a MVHR system. If I could go with option 3, then it would enable enough funds to install air con in some of the rooms, which I feel would be a better use of the money. Curious to hear from people who have a highly insulated house and how often they actually need to use their heating.

I was advised something similar. Paid £2500 + VAT.

Use upwork to hire someone. I paid ~£200 per CGI image.

If they'll send you a BIMx model of the house, you can use the BIMx mobile app which has a 3d mode that you can use with Google Cardboard VR (£20).

£35.1k for new stairs, £17.6k for an ASHP on a 122m2 house that's (presumably) already hooked up to gas 😬 Maybe there was a miscommunication about what 'mates rates' means, and you're actually paying him a lot extra to help out his company's profits, rather than the other way around. Why don't you tell him what your actual budget is and ask if he can advise on what changes you'd need to make to get it there.

That's a very good price but I don't see them listed as one of the companies that Natwest would accept a warranty from - https://www.intermediary.natwest.com/intermediary-solutions/new-build-hub.html#structural Not sure if it's different with other banks.

I applied for quotes from LABC, Self-Build Zone and Protek. LABC - £13.5k inc audit fees SBZ - £7.5k inc audit fees Protek - No quote received after 2 weeks For me, the warranty is just a piece of paper that lets me either get a mortgage or sell the house in the future, so I went with whichever company could provide it the cheapest.

The Canton Fair is on next month - it's the biggest trade fair in China with 60,000 exhibitors. Looking at flights + hotels now. A couple days there and I should have a pretty comprehensive list of who to buy from.

I think almost every electrical item in my current house is probably made in China. CE certificates can be verified using the certificate number - this is part of the due diligence you've got to do with these companies.

I'm frequently purchasing products from China and shipping them to the UK for my business. I could buy the same products in the UK but they are typically at least 4 times as expensive, and usually just ordered from China and then rebranded with the UK name on it anyway. This has naturally led me to browsing alibaba for potential supplies for my new house. Some initial pricing comparison shows that I could get most things to the UK for about a third of the price I'd pay here. And you can get everything and anything - wood flooring, stone cladding, tiles, bathroom suites, kitchen countertops, stairs, balustrades, lighting etc. The key issue I see is quality control - knowing who the right person to order from is the biggest hurdle with China. Alibaba offers trade assurance for certain sellers which gives you a lot of protection if things go wrong, but obviously it's much better to get it right the first time. I'm considering putting together a list of all the different materials I need, shortlisting 3 or 4 different manufacturers in China for each material and then flying out there to go visit them. I can see the factories and inspect the products, decide who I want to order from, then put in a big order for everything and ship it all together in a container. Has anyone on here tried doing something similar?

Work has started now - timber frame deposit has been paid and site has been cleared. Excavation was supposed to start this week but has been pushed back to next week now due to waking up to a couple inches of snow covering the site, which was unexpected. Electricity and Gas connections have been paid for and were under £1500 together. Waiting on the water connection quote but spoke with them today and they said they expect it to be sub £500 as there's a pipe running along the site boundary. I'd budgeted £9k for connections so that was a nice start. I will update on costs as I go along for anyone interested. 10 year warranty with self build zone is £5.5k - waiting on a protek quote to see if it'll be cheaper. I also found that a local fibre optic company is installing 1GBS full fibre along the road next month so I've asked them to include this site in the work (current max is ~50mbs in the area). Question for people who chose a name for their house address, how did you decide what to pick? I was originally going to call it Redwood House due to a redwood tree on the site but unfortunately had to remove it due to it being rotten internally. Other suggestions I've had are Onyx House and Maple House.

I assumed there would be a lot to learn but these EPDM training videos do make it look quite simple - https://www.rubber4roofs.co.uk/how-to-install-a-classicbond-one-piece-epdm-rubber-roof I have builders taking it to the watertight stage, it's at this point the remaining work can either be subcontracted out or done myself. Electrics/plumbing I wouldn't even consider trying. But laying the UFH pipes, screed, landscaping etc. these are things that don't necessary seem out of reach to potentially learn.

Following a conversation with a builder about roofing, I found that for my flat roof house I could get qualified on a one day course to install an EPDM membrane myself (which would give me a 20 year warranty on any roof I installed it on). There are then additional introductory roofing courses of ~2 days to cover the basics of roofing. I would then be paying £10k for materials to install myself vs £30k+ for a roofing company. The roof is a pretty simple design and comes with an initial plywood layer from the TF company, so would need a vapour barrier, rigid insulation, plywood, membrane to be installed. I'm still doing some research into what exactly would be involved, but this seems to be an opportunity for a big saving compared to the effort of learning the trade. This brings me onto the question of what other elements of the build offer the biggest opportunities for savings relative to the time needed to learn how to do it? From my initial thoughts, I'm thinking flooring and painting.

Planning was a nightmare, I did a write up of it here - https://forum.buildhub.org.uk/topic/30935-2-years-later-and-planning-is-approved-my-long-battle/ A Developer would have a £250k CIL payment to make upfront for this, which instantly makes a big difference to their margin. Then from April they've got a 25% corp tax on their profit. They also will usually have developers finance at ~1% per month on top of the build costs. Say both myself and a builder could both get this built with materials and labour coming in at £1600m2, they'd then be at £2100m2 with the CIL. Financing costs would then bring them to ~£2300m2. They'd have financing costs on the land as well which would add another few hundred per m2, so they'd likely be in at £2500m2. Add in £2000m2 to the house costs for the land and you're at £4500m2 all in, with a £6000m2 sale price. Of that £1500m2 they'll pay 25% in tax, giving them a net return of £1125m2, or 25%. That seems pretty standard to me.

There's been some modifications since that rendering - primarily reducing the top floor glazing by 1/3. The CGIs were done independently of the architect, I had someone do them during the planning process to show how the materials would look to the PO. The glazing reduction makes it easier to support the structure, there's currently £20k of steel works on top of the £100k TF to get it standing. For the kitchen, I'm looking at a similar style to this - https://www.solakitchens.com/skog/ Let me know if you disagree with any of these sums but I see: ~£6k dekton <£1k slotted wood veneer panels ~£1k lights ~£1k sink ~£5k cabinets So around ~£14k before appliances. They've got a wolf range cooker in there, which is obviously as expensive as it gets, but still available used for ~£10k. Wine fridge another £1-2k. To me, that's an un-compromised luxury kitchen for £25k.