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Not great to be honest. Door company called me from site about 30 min after arriving to say aperture was too short. Builder then threw his toys out the pram saying “I told you we shouldn’t have raised the floor under the opening”. Builder’s foreman then measured the door and spotted it was 4mm higher than specified by the door company’s own surveyor as confirmed in drawings. Builder agrees to shave off some of the extra cement he had put down. We had asked him to put down 8mm. For reasons unknown to me, he had put down about 18mm (wtf?!?). Door company is then apparently happy and installs the door. I send architect to inspect. He calls me up and says “I don’t wish to alarm you, but the gap above the door/below the steel is only 3mm to 4mm and SE specified 8mm max deflection.” Lots of swearing and shouting. Lots. i tell door company they need to take the door out and reinstall it 4mm lower. They say architect is wrong and there is 8mm of space. Architect then measures again and discovers some “concealed space”. Foreman and architect get laser level out to measure current deflection (about 75% of the load on the roof has been on for a few months already) of the beam. turns out the beam has only deflected by “just less than a mm” and that taking into account the “concealed space” whatever that is, there is 6.5mm of space at one end, about 7mm of space in the middle and about 8.5 or 9mm at the other end. The reason for this is that the steel isn’t perfectly level. Architect speaks to SE to ask him what he thinks. He asks if the door is top hung or bottom hung. Architect confirms it bottom. Engineer says it should be fine and that there isn’t much load on that beam anyway and 8mm would be the absolute limit and only in extreme conditions like 20cm of snowfall on the roof. I’m really not happy. This is a really expensive door (£11k including installation) we still have 26 square metres of seedum to lay on the roof. It’s maximum weight when fully saturated with water is 55kg per m2. There are also a couple of skylights still to go in which will add a bit of weight. In total, close to 2 tonnes when seedum is fully saturated. Architect points out that because of the loading, not much of that extra weight will bear on the beam. He is right about that, but it still freaks me out. He also says that as most of the weight has already been on it for a few months, I can take comfort from the fact that there is only “at most, 1mm of current deflection at the middle”. All extremely stressful and completely avoidable had everyone just done as asked and agreed on the drawings.

I was so naive and hopeful. Been chasing this insani24 company for a couple of weeks and after prevaricating a bit they eventually admitted that despite me ordering the damn things on 10th June, they still have no clue when they will receive them, let alone when I will receive them. 6 weeks have passed since ordering and nothing...

Update: the builder has finally fixed it. Doors going in today, hopefully the 8mm of concrete will have set in time as it couldn’t have been poured more than 40 hours ago.

A slot drain.

You are making the same mistake I made, which is to assume the bricklayer lays rows of bricks which were identical in height. I haven’t got the link to hand, but there is a video on a thread here of my rear elevation which shows the brickwork, and somebody commented that they were really impressed with it. It really is a thing of beauty. But three amount of mortar between each row is not identical. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter because the brickwork was finished before the door company attended to do the survey. At the point the aperture was measured and some changes were required, and he has only partially done the change, which is what has reported in the 8mm discrepancy. i agree with @Temp’s observation.

I don’t understand the confusion. Builder was instructed to build an opening that is 2372mm in height, from the bottom of the opening to the top. The bottom was to coincide with a level which was 170mm above the top of the slab. Builder has constructed an opening that is 2380mm in height and only 162mm above the slab. So by packing out the bottom of the opening with some cement board - which is what I asked him to do this morning - he would fix the issue. Simples. Builder has a complex personality issue which sometimes gets in the way of things. Complex.

Well if we do that, we will have an 8mm deep divot rather than a flush threshold. There are three tracks for this sliding door, so it would be quite a wide divot.

Door company came back to me. They said they can work with it being up to 4mm out, but more than that is “not great”. They suggest adding a 6mm thick cement board. Very similar to what I suggested! Back to speak to the builder!

Thanks. You are right @Russell griffiths that i often worry too much. This building project has brought this character flaw into sharp focus! As a layman, it's difficult to know when 8mm matters and when it doesn't. E.g. relative to the 10mm space around the frame, 8mm is 80% out, whereas relative to the overall aperture 8mm is pretty tiny. But I guess they will work it out. The way I left it with the builder is: you will be here when they install the door and I won't, you know the level of the finished floor level and so you better make sure they can achieve this notwithstanding this 8mm discrepancy. So it's on him.

Sorry, i mean the height of the aperture is 8mm too much. The bottom of the opening needs to be 8mm higher than where it is. So if they just installed the door without correcting this, the door would be 8mm too low.

The aperture for the sliding door we have ordered is 8mm higher than the sliding door manufacturer agreed with us when we ordered the sliding door. The aperture has been specified to be 20mm wider and 20mm taller than the door unit itself, effectively allowing a 10mm border all the way around for the compriband and fitting. 8mm doesn't sound like a lot, but if our door is 8mm lower than specified we won't have a flush threshold and instead will have an 8mm deep gap in the floor. So I asked the builder to build up the 8mm with something waterproof and solid. I suggested cement board. He said I'm fussing over nothing and the door company can sort this out when they fit the doors later this week and that 8mm is "within tolerances" and that otherwise they would struggle to get the door in. This last point must surely be wrong because presumably the door company has specified the size of the aperture knowing full well that they need to get the door into it. Actual door size is 4280 wide by 2352 high. I'm not worried about deflection because engineer has specified a solid beam above the opening and there is hardly any weight on the beam anyway. Am i fussing about nothing, or is the builder right? I tried calling the door company but can't get through.

I don't need the doors, just the carcass and soft close hinges and legs. The DIY Kitchen carcass colour I'm going for is called Dakar (which the website linked above also does), so if you could match that, that would be great. Feel free to PM details. Thanks!

I would like a base unit (carcass only) that is 750mm (W) x 720mm (H) x 560mm (D). The 750 width is not a standard width in the DIY Kitchens range and they won't bespoke it for me. I found this company (who are clearly copying DIY Kitchens' name) https://www.diykitchens4u.co.uk/750mm-highline-sink-base-unit-350mm-lh--400mm-rh-407726-p.asp but their minimum order os £1000 and I only need this one unit. Can anybody recommend a company which do 750mm kitchen sink base units as standard (to fit a 700mm undermount sink) and won't kick up a fuss about only making one unit?

I’m a bit confused now. Was going to do a secondary loop for all the hot water outlets so that we can have near instantaneous hot water supply, but that would be in series, not a radial arrangement. Is a radial really better, and if so, how does one combine it with a secondary loop.

Only downside of that approach is that painting it won’t give you the same protective finish you get with their paintwork. It is somehow plasticised and cured so that it is really tough.

Thanks, but what's a silt catcher? I get that it catches silt, but how?

Or don’t enact stupid GDPR law. Probably the only good thing about Brexit is we can get rid of GDPR.

Agreed. We are going to put non-integrated laundry machines under the worktop in our utility room with no doors. Just need to find some rubber matting to sit them on to absorb some of the vibration.

We are getting DIY Kitchens units. We want to use their bespoke painted option in one of the farrow and ball colours. Speaking to them on the phone, I now realise that it is not actual F+B paint; they colour match, or at least try to. Anyone know how accurate the colour matching is? It doesn’t need to be identical, but it does need to work with the rest of our colour scheme (which has been chosen on the basis of working with the F&B sample pot). For £66 they will send me a sample door painted in the fake F+B colour I choose, but it adds almost two weeks to the process of getting our kitchen. Wife says not to bother, architect says it’s essential. Who is right?

I think a factor of 10. No, more like 100.

Just to update everyone on progress: 17 days after my last post and I'm scratching my head to try and work out what's been done in that time. The remaining slab has been poured. Drainage trenches have been dug up. Second floor of posis has gone in. They are almost ready to start tiling the roof at the back and the windows have gone in (though this last feat has nothing to do with my builder). So they are definitely making progress. Trying to take a more relaxed approach as suggested by many on here, but it's difficult. Happy Friday everyone.

The house did flood earlier this week, which had never happened before but has now got me thinking. It was such a fun day I posted about it here. When we bought the house the usual flood risk assessment done as part of the pre-contractual enquiries was low, so really never thought it would ever be an issue... until earlier this week when London got more rainfall in 90 minutes than it typically gets in the whole of July. Watching the news about Germany and Belgium today has got me wondering that maybe these "extreme" weather events will be more common in the future. We are probably going to put one of these in at the edge of our driveway just before the crossover. So that would be our first line of defence if it rained so much that the water mounted the pavement/crossover. Then we will also have a french drain or linear drain along the perimeter of the house. The question is just whether there is any advantage in making the driveway itself permeable? At the moment, I'm not sure there is such an advantage to justify the extra cost involved.

Thanks @nod, good to know. Is that a simple linear channel drain?

Thinking about the design of our driveway which is on a 10 degree slope from the road to our house (with the house at the bottom of the slope). I am considering whether it would be helpful, in addition to the drains we are installing at the top and bottom of the driveway, for the driveway itself to have some permeability to it as otherwise when the road floods (which has only happened once since we bought the house a few years ago, but with climate change may become more common) all the water from the road will cross the pavement and slide down the driveway and onto the drain just in front of my house, which won't be very deep and might be overwhelmed by the excess water. My thinking is, even if we go for a permeable solution, the water will just seep into the soil below the driveway and make it's way to the foundations at the front of the house anyway. Whereas if we didn't go for the permeable solution, the water would slide down the driveway and towards the front wall of the house (but not onto the front door as that is on a slightly raised platform), just before hitting the front wall it would mostly get caught by our drainage system there (either a french drain, if we can make that work - see towards the end of this thread - or a linear drain), but if it's a flood it might overwhelm that drain, splash the wall and then seep into the ground anyway. Walls are white rendered. So is the only non-environmental advantage of the permeable solution in my circumstances that my white walls are less likely to get dirty in a flood? Or am I missing something here. I know that there is an environmental benefit in not displacing naturally falling water by sending it to the sewer, but I'm not sure what good that water would be doing stuck under my driveway/pooling near the foundations if I didn't send it to the sewer.

This is the film I was recommending. HIGHLY recommended: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Tales_(film)