Happy Valley

Canopy going up this week with bespoke brackets

Couple of others I missed. The ground floor raft and the 1st layer of ICF with spurs to hold up the top raft. ICF was faced in solid block and covered in tanking slurry prior to back fill. All retaining wall ICF had 200mm concrete core and the rest of the house is 150mm core.

I've been poor at uploading pics over the last 12/13 months and we are now about 2/3 month from finishing (hopefully). So the construction is ICF on a 200mm concrete raft faced with natural stone and block work with K rend - well two rafts as one is at first floor level being built into a hill. Monopitch warm roof is GreenCoat PLX steel. Hopefully the pictures will tell the story. We live in an old quarry and are lucky enough to have great views. Flat roof annex on our current home was demolished to make way for the new build. Existing house will be sold shortly.

Just fantastic - wishing you many happy years there.

I want to backfill the water first (approved in principle after inspection) with the blue tape then put the leccy 30cm above it again with the yellow tape, sand around the pipes etc. What I don't want is Electricity North West not accepting that they are almost in line vertically.

Thanks for the responses. Water pipe has been inspected by United Utilities and they are happy subject to seeing some WhatsApp pictures at either end. It has the proper end caps on and is a continuous run. It is purely the leccy that I am concerned with before we backfill over the water.

I cannot get an answer for love nor money out of Electricity North West regarding the trench for our connections. The site is an old quarry and we have had to pecker out some stone to get the 25mm water supply to a depth of 750mm. Electricity North West say that their supply should be 450mm deep and if side by side with other utilities should be 30cm apart horizontally. The bottom of the trench is approx 20cm and 30cm at the top in width. There is no guidance on laying services over the top of one another. Does anyone have any recent experience of whether the electricity can be laid 30cm over the top of the water connection?

Not sure he could have foreseen the pandemic leading to massive price increases......he had a beard but I don't think he was a wizard 😉 For an architects house I thought it was rather bland from the outside.

It's just arrived today and looking at the box it is the same as yours.

We are soon to install an 8.5Kw Ecodan - is this one of the "affected" units?

We have a 3 pain 5m slider and a 2 pain 3.8m slider both manufactured by Sunflex. Slightlines are only 20mm and they line up rather than stagger when fully open.

Put a copper roof on with an earth connection back down to the ground... .... in all seriousness it should not be an issue. We have a two layers of steel mesh reinforcement in our 200mm concrete slab and rebar within our ICF but they are both completely encapsulated within the concrete.

Yes everything is within the insulated envelope of the building so just the inlet and exhaust from the outside to the unit to insulate.

Got asked a question by the chap doing my SAP calculations: Is all your ducting insulated? Well that got me thinking as all the ducting to plenums (75mm plastic flexi pipe) is within the fabric of the house having a warm roof and the garage where the inlet and exhaust exit to. Is there any worthwhile advantage to this?

Had ours done in February - Cemfloor was £2160 ex VAT for 100 m2 at 70mm - that included £400 for the hire of the pump. So that's £21.60 per sq m Dried hard within 2 days

A powerful recirculating hood will remove the nasties before it gets in your MHVR unit. We didn't want a hole in the outside wall so went down this option. The MHVR vent is 4 feet away from the recirculating unit and 8 feet from the vent exit. Our induction hob is an island and hoods are limited if not against a wall. We went for a large Cookology 100cm ceiling unit

Thanks for the responses. SWMBO has now decided she wants a stone colour! I think we will be going for porcelain as house is built into a slope and there are steps up either side. Want the best grip in poor weather plus don't won't any major maintenance.

I like the simplicity of the box design and use of space. The WSW windows might bring a lot of heat in the summer unless you have plans for shading.

We have just been going through the same quandary. UFH heating throughout. Initially we wanted engineered wood floors as we have solid wood maple and oak in our current house. However we have come to the decision to go with LVT throughout. Oak effect wood and granite effect in the wet rooms. One reason was that we had heard that engineered wood is a no no in a kitchen due to staining and problems with them lifting if get damp. As we wanted a continuous floor between rooms LVT became our favoured option. We have found one with a built in underlay for £22.50 ex VAT per metre (was £25 before negotiated discount) which is a lot cheaper than the engineered wood but looks just as good. No doubt their will be rugs added to bedrooms and the snug!!

We are looking at 600 x 900 size slabs of anthracite/black for our patio, steps and walkways. Will need about 85 to 100 sq m. Limestone appears cheaper than porcelain but is it best avoided? Does anyone have any preference of brand or supplier. Cheapest currently found some is £22.50/sq m ex VAT for Limestone black from Stone Pavings Direct

We put 3 pipes in the ICF prior to pouring the concrete having discussed the size of pipes required with the installer. The ASHP will be behind the garage.

We are 11 months in and got about 3 months to go. Have a main builder and source plumbers electricians and others myself. We have a metal roof so used a specialist there and there have been some delays in supply of their materials and their labour but nothing that stopped other work. Structural steels come from a local company and no delays there. Overall we have only had one 2 week delay when we were doing the ground works. Ordered the kitchen appliances last November and they are coming next Monday!! Ordered the windows/sliders early August and they were fitted Jan/Feb although initially were planned were late Nov/early Dec. Trying to plan ahead all the time and so far so good but also expect some hold ups/hic ups.

Designed plans for the MHVR unit have changed in reality with our ICF build. Initially we had the manifolds in the plant room on the ground floor but we have fitted them in the loft as there are way more ducts to the 1st floor than the ground. It's a warm roof. The unit is still within the plant room but moved slightly because of the manifold change. Luckily we have enough room in there to do this. There is a cupboard above the plant room which means we can hide all the pipework from the loft to the unit well and again allowed for variations in locations of the manifolds and unit. Our original design came off our plans emailed to a company with no one visiting the build. As already alluded to it is advisable to have some degree of flexibility if possible to move things around.

OK so not an unusual size. No infiltration test has been carried out.

It goes to a sewer in the road, professional company did the calculation based on 1.10 l/s