Buzz

Bumped into the builder who built our house the other day and got talking about, amongst other things, the cost of building now compared to two years ago he said he is now £30 m2 for block work on a full build but that will include all materials, labour and scaffolding .

Another fan of glulam beams here , this one was just over 12m and tele handler friendly , you can leave some of it on show rather than boxing around steels.

Didn't aim for passive standards but didn't want B regs either, so ended up with 150 mm full fill in the walls for a u-value of .17 ,175mm in the floor , but the roof was more complex due to fact that we have 300m2 on the ground floor and only 120m2 upstairs (room in roof) and 100m2 of vaulted ceilings but achieved .11 using a mixture of pir and rafter roll in various configurations . To get a lower value on the walls would have been quite simple buy using insulated plaserboard but we were happy with what we had . Are you looking to build to passive standards?

The size for the house seems to be open to interpretation as to how you measure a house ! The architect has it at 365m2 the builder has it at 420m2 , when I questioned this the architect said he did not include the integral garage and only counts the internal floor area left after all the walls are in , the builder counts the total floor area to get his m2 number ,I did mention to the builder that the architect does not include the garage in his m2 and his reply was ,well they ain't f@!*ing free. The only reason for not using TF was cost , they worked out so much more expensive than brick and block on our build, May not be the case for everyone or you.

Hi @SBMS when i was going through this process i contacted 4 TF company's and sent over our plans for pricing, MBC , Fleming, Solo and English Brothers. MBC had the best product and a comprehensive list of what was included and what was not , they were as you would expect for the best product the most expensive at 120k for the passive frame and another 60k for the raft . Fleming were 90k but not passive spec , they came across as a decent company to do business with but with every step closer to signing with them the price just kept getting going up ,I expected a small uplift as the final details were added but from memory it went from 60k ish to 90k pretty quickly. Solo ended up around 60k but got the feeling that I wouldn't be happy with them, no idea why I thought this just had that feeling if know what I mean. English Brothers ended up at 68k and if I had have gone down the TF route these are the ones I would have brought from , liked the owner Jay and even had a tour of the factory and had a brew with some of his team, came across as I nice family business. I did contact all of them to let them know i wouldn't be using them for our build and did get a call back from Fleming and English Brothers to see how I was getting on which was nice, I asked them how was the timber frame business was doing as timber prices were at this point were going through the roof and they both said 30% more expensive now than when they priced my job and only going one way. They all priced our plans around 3 years ago MBC were the only ones who I didn't have anymore contact with after the 1st round of pricing so don't really know how much the price would have gone up from the original quote , but by far the best TF product I saw if you can afford it .

Yes mate , it is called whipping and any good carpet shop should be able to sell you a piece of carpet and have it whipped for you , normally pay per Lm + the carpet, nice thing is you can then have exactly the size you want or shape .

Same here , he/she noted that we were having it fitted on the plans and that explained why we had no trickle vents in the windows and never raised the question again.

It think you have 3 choices here . Add extra to the outside or Add extra to the inside or Do nothing. Are you going to mess the floorplan layout up if you were to add 50mm pir onto the inside of the exterior walls ?

To be honest I would contact the architect who's name is on the approved plans before I exchanged and sound them out about making changes, you should get a very good understanding of what scope the planners gave them or what hoops they had to jump through to get the original plans through. At least then when you sign on the dotted line you know exactly what you are buying.

@flanagaj a couple of thoughts on this question, as I understand it from other posts you are (potentially) purchasing a building plot with pp approved for the above design. I also see you have asked questions about alternative layouts ,plinths and room in roof possibilities. Forgive me if this sounds rather obvious but you have brought a piece of land with pp for the house above but you don't have to build that house , you can build whatever you want as long as the planning department approve it . You cannot lose the right to build the design sold with the land as long as you start within 3 years so if the design is not quite right for you now is the time to ask a few questions re-sumit and change it .

Decisions Decisions at this stage and would need to see the calculations for performance vs cost before i made a choice, we opted for 175mm of eps 100mm then 75mm Cross lapped for a u-value of .12 but our is 300m2 and fairly square

Or just put 200mm of eps in the floor , much cheaper than pir will give a similar u value to 150mm pir and you won't have to make up the 50mm with another layer of something.

Not missing anything there that is exactly what they did for us .

Another one here who used the Melton via a broker and found them easy to deal with, if you get them on board now as @Conorsaid they will stump up 80% of the plot purchase on completion leaving you with more than enough to get you deep into your build before you need another release of funds .

Hi @Post and beam , to give you and idea we had 250m2 at 55mm thick and paid £3900 worked out at £260 ish per m3 , they started at 8 and were long gone by lunchtime.