Thedreamer

I've just used 2800 of the Spax screws for our chipboard. They seem to have worked well. It's amazing how quickly you go through these. For odd wee jobs where I had to use a manual screwdriver the Torx screw made life so much easier than a standard screw. I'm sure there will be a reason for this, but why are all screws not just torx types?

Most of our guys just sit in their van for breaks and bring a thermo flask. We also have a couple of chairs in the storage container. At the start we mention they are welcome to use the toilet in our house but most do a jimmy riddle behind a tree. I've seen a number of portaloo blown over here, don't fancy being responsible for that.

We have two internal load bearing stud wall supporting the Kerto beam. Often people change their minds with sizes of rooms etc so would it not be in your interest for a non load bearing stud to be built on site by your joiner. I plan to build these once the air tightness & insulation works have been completed.

A couple of joiners are attaching the last bit of our chipboard as I type. I purchased these Spax screws they seem to be working well. Don't forget the expanding glue foam as well.

Don't know if this is an option for you, but do you have a full height bedrooms? We have incorporated a top hung veluxs in the bedrooms upstairs. We originally had in our plans for a full balcony to fit a couple of chairs etc but had to do away with it because of the budget, but a large top hung velux has provided us with similar feeling to a juliet balcony.

Well done. Looking forward to seeing the next entry.

I was in touch six months before I actually needed the windows to discussing options etc with the sales team. After a while they were chasing me probably when targets were due at their end of months/quarters. When I was finally ready to committed I compared all the quotes and delivery/offloading procedures. I didn't bother playing the suppliers off against each other, but just said they were a little above my budget, a day later came back with 5% off, they probably just add this onto their mark up in the initial quote to people who don't ask. Also I would presume you are going for triple glazed, there was not much difference in the price on my quote with double glazing. So made sense to upgrade. I was little disappointed with after service as one of the alu clad panels were dented on transit it took a while to address but they did eventually put this right at no cost to me.

To be honest when it comes to the HMRC it will just be somebody in call centre. As in this case it's going to be muckaway company's liability @Simon R checked with the HMRC what more can he do. I would just document the call time and if possible have a reference to have some kind of a trail to the HMRC opinion.

No I think the VAT should be zero rated for the digger and operator but the muckaway is standard rated. I've edited my earlier post above. To get the muck away zero rated you probably need the whole groundworks or the build to a single contractor.

@Tennentslager I thought it looked like an old carpet from 70s, hopefully it will be warm. It was very itchy and scratchy to handle. @Redoctober UFH is an option for a suspended timber floor. I think @ProDave has done this on his I believe you use a dry screed mix on top of the subfloor, don't know whether the system differs. At the moment our heating is going to be electric and our stove. I want to utilise the firewood on our croft and hopefully next year make a peat stack. The house is classed as a crofter's cottage, so looking to use the croft to heat the house where possible. I want to use the electric radiators really just as a quick boost early in the morning. Hopefully the amount of south facing will provide sufficient solar gains for most of the day. Although it can be windy here, generally the temperatures are fairly mild through the winter and the recent snow was fairly rare. The house is well sheltered from the prevailing wind coming off those mountains behind the gable end and from those cold north winds behind the house. Here is a couple more that my wife took when I was working overtime in the office ?

@vivienz Was thinking a bit more about this. I see that the HMRC mention this as being a service that you can't get zero rated. ? I guess this is kind of the reverse of getting stuff delivered to site which you also can't claim. So I can understand the HMRC's logic. Strangely if you hired a lorry to provide a muckaway without a crane this would be standard rated but if you paid for a separate digger and operator to be on site and fill the lorry it would be zero rated. This was not an area I had too much experience in as on our site we dug hardcore out of the ground to make the access and spread around the site, the hole dug was then filled with the clay so we didn't have a muck away just paid for plant hire and an operate to shift material around, so it was all zero rated.

Usually P&M hire is standard rated, if the builder just hired the lorry it would be standard rate and no VAT would ever be reclaimable. However usually the muckway service is for both use of the lorry and driver as a single service therefore it should always be zero rated. It would be worth going back to the contractor and asking for them to change the invoice as you won't get it back on the VAT reclaim at the end.

As the winter weather has prevented us from moving forward with the rendering and other exterior work we have been working on finishing off insulating the suspended timber floor. We had a short wait for the plumber to install some drainage below joist level, once this was done it allowed us to finish off fitting the insulation boards. We then used expanding foam along the edges of the boards to ensure no gaps. The next job was fitting the frametherm as the second layer between the joists. I'm using frametherm 35 between the studs but I wanted to use a 90mm layer of frametherm 32 on top of the quinn therm boards. It's a bit more expensive for the frametherm 32 but the quality compared to the frametherm 35 is very noticeable. I have found the quinn therm and frametherm work well together. It took a while for the order to come to site and we had a bit of a race against time to get this fitted before our joiners came back on site to fit the chipboard, which is the next job on the list.

Strictly speaking it is connected to how the load of the house is distributed if it's onto timber than it would be closed panel timber frame if not then probably SIPs. But I don't believe there is much in the way of difference.

Good job @vivienz once the plasterboard goes up it starts to look like a home.

Yup, I can see the arcade look. Last picture looks a bit like a face. A friendly face. The build is looking good, is that you nearly up to date?

Did you see the video? Are those bits that get lifted in, like SIPS panels but in a roof?

A lot of houses being built here on Skye use roof cassettes. https://www.ruralhouse.co.uk/process/ I wonder how strong these are compared to the traditional rafters/sarking combination?

I didn't need this for our mortgage. But our lender Scottish Building Society lends once the land has planning permission. https://www.scottishbs.co.uk/mortgages/self-build-mortgage#product-info Presumably others will follow the same policy in England. I'm not aware of buildstore fees including any additional insurances or warranties. We nearly had a deal brokered with Newcastle Building Society and the insurance policy was just for the money lend, rather than connected to the build.

That's good to hear you got the grant. The scheme is not that well known and it appears to be just word mouth that allows others to find out about it. Are there any other works you can do to get the quote lower. I went down the route of ducting rather than blinding the trenches and the one of SSE employee mentioned "that everybody would be doing this if they knew it could save £2,000". Our connection fee of 210 meters with a SSE also paying a for road crossing was originally quoted at £9,600 in 2015! After deducting the SSE grant, use of ducting and changing the route slightly this came down to a final net figure of £4,500 after deducting for the cost of the ducting. Seems to be with the electricity companies if you don't ask you don't get.

Have you considered this? https://www.mygov.scot/self-build-loan-fund/ Actually scrap that I don't think the numbers would add up for your project.

Similarities with my self build which I am also project managing. Project managing is lot of work and for me the best plan was to stagger the build over a few years. This allowed me not to be rushed into making decisions. I live in a small community so I already knew which contractors I wanted to do particular jobs. In addition our contractors have worked with each other before on other jobs so know the standard of each others work. This is important as you don't want your different contractors complaining about work done before them. For the groundworks this has been the only area where I did not supply the materials. My joiners and roofer just worked on a labour only basis as they are not VAT registered therefore the only way to get the VAT back would be me ordering materials. What type of superstructure are you building timber frame/double block/SIPS etc? I wouldn't get 20 quotes that seems very excessive, do you have any family/friends connections who could recommend contractors? If going down the sub contractor route I would go for 3 quotes this should be sufficient. I would also recommend purchasing the latest edition of the Home Builder's Bible which provides some average prices and will provide a starting point for considering quotes. I think it only costs around £15 and it really is a no brainier when your investing significant sums into a self build.

Where in the UK are you building?

My experience has been very different. Our nearest timber frame manufacturer is a good three hours away. I phoned them twice and never got a call back. I believe some manufacturers can also be inflexible if you wish to change insulation levels. Although they often have a scale of rating of thermal performance so choice is available. For me I'm happy to plod away and fitted PIR/Frametherm myself which will reduce costs further. I would however expect a close panel timber frame kit to be more thermally efficient. I noted what you are saying about staged payments. But it's still a lot of money up front for a deposit particularly if you working in arrears on a self build mortgage. For me and guess others considering stick build. The fact that a kit goes up in a day or so is not really that beneficial if that comes at a cost. Our timber frame went up in June/July so not really concerned about getting wind and water tight. In every aspect of my self build. I work under the triangle of cost, quality, speed. This is discussed in the Home Builder's Bible. You can never have all three. Therefore if the kit goes up quickly it's come at either cost or quality, in this case cost.

Have a look at my blog @DonGillies Our self built is stick built. A couple of experienced joiners can knock together timber frame panels very quickly. - cost wise I checked kit houses prices for a similar size and it was a cheaper. - I didn't really want to buy an off-peg design and I would have imagined it would have been expensive for it to be design and cut by a manufacturer as presumably they work on economies of scale. - I could review the timber we used - It allowed flexibility to make any final changes as the kit was going up - No risk of foundations and kit being out of sync - The big one for me. Timber frame kit is paid in advance, Stick building with timber you are paying for the materials in arrears. - Not a huge one but I would prefer to give money to local tradesmen in my community rather than a kit manufacturer for the same end product. We have a room in roof design, so ordered prefabrication attic trusses, I think this is one area we wouldn't change. As this would have not been cost effective. In terms of plant hire we hired a telehandler for two weeks (£650), used for offloading trusses, lifting ridge beams and attic trusses.