ProDave

The main thing that jumped out at me was things like nhbc are NOT about improving standards. And those that have had problems have had great difficulty getting nhbc or others to pay to fix them. Thankfully we don't need (or want) a mortgage, and don't intend to sell within 10 years, so have saved ourselves the cost of such a white elephant.

You need to send a PM to one of the administrators and ask them, and they will set it up for you @TerryE @PeterW or @recoveringacademic

Suggest the battens on their side with reduced insulation. space them 400mm apart and then you can use 18mm chipboard as the final floor straight onto the battens, then carpet.Total thickness 54mm plus carpet plus air gap. If fitting a wooden floor, find an engineered floor that can span 400mm and fit that direct to the battens. forget any OSB underlay sheet.

When he's finished the electric wacker plate.

Your house is on stilts on a slope. Put a meter box underneath round the back somewhere where it's hardly visible. Just build an extra bit of wall underneath to put it in. Agree that SSE will fit an internal meter. The house I am wiring at the moment has the new meter inside in the garage, and the one I did at the back end of last year had it inside in the plant room

If taking a SINGLE phase supply out of a 3 phase board, you use a single pole MCB. I would not advise using a 3 pole mcb and only using 1 pole. Maximum of 80A for your 16mm cable. Have fun finding the right mcb for it. CEF have a 63A single pole https://www.cef.co.uk/catalogue/products/4553645-63a-single-pole-10ka-type-b-mcb?q=Lewden+single+pole That might be the largest you can get for that board, which is fine as long as your maximum demand does not exceed 63A

There's a French one you can buy in kit form.

What spec are you looking at? basic double glazed or good triple glazed? When I was looking for good windows I was pleasantly surprised to find Rationel were the cheapest, and almost the best, so it was an easy decision. A lot of folk up here seem to find the same thing. But the question above needs answering. Do you have free choice of any window supplier, or just the few your TF company uses? As to longevity, I chose aluminium clad timber, as painting windows every few years is not on my list of retirement hobbies.

I couldn't find a drawing that showed it well, so pictures and a description is better. It's a cut roof framed on site, hung from a bog Kurto ridge beam, using 195 by 45mm timbers for the rafters. That then got clad with 100mm wood fibre board acting as a sarking board (a BR requirement in Scotland) and then a non tenting breathable membrane, counter battens then tile battens then tiles. Later It was insulated from the inside using Frametherm 35 fitted from below, then a layer of OSB Finally it will get covered in airtight membrane, battens to form a service void, then plasterboard. That's what I am working on at the moment. Originally I was going to use blown in insulation, until I found out the cost. I then worked out Earthwool Frametherm 35 had the same insulation U value, was less than half the price, and was a DIY job rather than having to get someone in to blow in the insulation, so I could do it at my own pace bit by bit. Regarding timber floors. What is it you don't like. Mine are 300mm JJI I beams with 300mm of Frametherm 35 in them. They will have UFH before the final flooring. My builder did his best to convince me to have a sold floor but it would have been a lot of material to import and pay for to build up the ground, and it would have forced me to make decisions on the exact layout of some rooms to lay in the drainage at that stage, again I preferred to leave those decisions until I was ready, something you have the luxury of being able to do with a timber floor.

As you own the land, why any cost at all? Or is it a case of you "should" pay for it, so you will be paying yourself £500? Our old house has a deed of Servitude (Scottish name for the same thing) to have to soakaway under an adjacent farmers field. I don't recall any money changing hands for that, just some solicitor time.

There is always conventional strip foundations and an insulated timber floor, like we have. Re insulation types and decrement delay. We have a timber vaulted warm roof covered in 100mm wood fibre board, and then 200mm of Earthwoll between the rafters. I have been working today right up in the top of the vaulted roof on the mezanine floor. The sun has been shining on it all day. It was not overheating up there at all, and my IR thermometer could not detect any difference in the internal temperature of the part of the roof compared to any other part of the structure. In fact the only solar gain I could detect was the considerable warming of the floor where the sun was shining on it through the windows.

Not me personally, but my plumber friend who has just built his own house, had an 11KV single phase overhead line re routed and buried.They buried the section between 3 poles and routed it around the outside of his plot. I don't know the exact cost but it was in the region of £10K, and the cost was shared between the buyer and the vendor of the plot. They did all the digging and laying of ducts to get the cost down to that. DNO here is SSE. There is another potential plot on our road but it not only has 11KV overhead lines, it has the pole mounted transformer that feeds half the street. Rumour has it, the cost to get that moved would be in the region of £50K, making the land effectively worthless.

This is written into the local policy up here. There is a general presumption against building in the hinterland around towns. the exeptions are: It is an infill plot between existing houses. It is in an established development or group of houses It is garden ground to an existing house. So it's clearly written into the local planning policy here that you can reasonably expect to get PP to build a new house in an existing garden. P.S our plot got permission because it met both of the first 2 tests.

@Stones How ar you getting on with Iresa? they were supposed to take over my supply on 14th April, and I submitted a meter reading on line on that day. I have just had a bill from SSE up to a few days ago and on querying it, they say they have not had any notification of a change of supplier or a final reading from them. I have just submitted a support ticket.......

The thing about a block skin on a timber framed house, is building regs require the cavity to be ventilated, so even if insulationg blocks were used, the cod air able to enter the cavity would negate most of any extra insulation provided by the block skin. That's why I wanted to avoid it. The other advantage of an EWI system with render is because there is no cavity, there are no vents needed, so you get a crisp clean render, not interrupted by rows of vents you get with the render on a blockwork wall.

You will need to work out the U values of the wall, but I think with just a 150mm frame (filled with insulation) a cavity and a blockwrok skin, you will struggle to meed building regulations. It is now considered normal to put a layer of Kingspan type insulation on the inside of a timber frame of that thickness. Remember the blockwork skin is mostly an expensive rain shield. It adds very little to the insulation as the cavity has to be ventilated, and you are not supposed to fill the cavity between a timber frame and a block skin. What is the motivation for a blockwork skin? is is just appearance or "that's what we do"? You could consider what I have done, a 195mm timber frame, and 100mm wood fibre external wall insulation board which directly takes render. Same overall wall thickness but much more insulation. Fitting the wood fibre board was DIY and I just got somebody to render it.

You don't need to act dumb when talking to BT, they act dumb enough for everybody to share a bit of dumbness. Re the bad connections, they were old ones. Basically running down our road is one 20 pair cable as far as the big submerged junction box. From there it splits to two houses by that junction box, then carries on down the road as a 10 pair cable. For some odd reason there are two junctions in this chamber, with about a metre of cable between them. As far as I can tell all pairs were connected in all cables. then to compound it, a few years back there was a line fault, and a portion of the cable was replaced and a new junction pit installed where the new section met the old. So when they came to connect us it was a case of find an unused pair, of which there were two, and the first one he tested was "faulty" so we had the only good one left. the Engineer who came yesterday, who I have to say was streets ahead of the original one, re made a lot of connections in this one junction pit. He said they all looked pretty ropey and corroded so as well as re terminating ours, he did another half a dozen of the worst looking, so he may well have improved the braodband of others in the street. He then ran some tests on the line and said the signal is somewhat weak and put in a request to change the exchange end to a different profile. Today a speed test tells me we have blisteringly fast 4Mbps download. It just makes you wonder how many people are suffering with poor broadband, and if they cared to complain and get it looked at, by taking the trouble to make sure all connections are good, running some tests and selecting the correct profile at the exchange end made a huge improvement. I guess they just can't be bothered to give that level of care unless you make a fuss.

It might help a bit to clarify this is usually a 2 stage process. At foundation time, Open Reach visited to advise where the nearest connection point is, and supply any cable needed (which we laid across the plot and under the road when the road was up for all the other services. Actually connecting that cable to the network only got triggered when we contracted with BT to supply a new phone connection. Only then did work start to connect us (and as you will see from my thread it wasn't a smooth ride)

Well a result. I finally got them to address he poor BB speed issue. This evening an OR engineer arrived (he had driven up from Hartlepool this morning!!!!!) He has only just left after spending 3 hours working on our line, pulling all the junction boxes apart, re making connections etc. When he arrived we had barely 0.9Mbps We now have 3.5Mbps, faster even than we ever got at the old house. Many of you will be thinking "gosh that's slow" but to us out in the sticks, that's fast. Just the compensation matter, now the technicalities are at last sorted out.

Watch the local bees don't take up residence

Open Reach, a communications company, are just about the hardest company possible to communicate with. I think we have all battled with them. Eventually when you get your job passed through to your local man on the ground all will get easier, but to get to that point is like pushing a rock up hill.

Interresting about insurance. My site insurance is due for renewal this week. It's a pretty much complete building structurally but only just starting first fix inside. Do I renew the site insurance for another year, or convert to unoccupied buildings insurance?

Okay, this is what I am working on. View from above. I am creating a framework around the shower former area LEVEL with the top of the posi joists, and some cross members as well. I will later add cross members on the drain hole side of the former, one either side of the drain hole, but not until I actually have the formers so know exactly where that is (not theoretically) This is how it looks from underneath The cross members are screwed and glued to the underside of the top member of the posi joists, then packers cut and fitted in to also take support from the bottom member The plan is, the shower former, AND the boards for the rest of the room, will all sit directly on the posi joists, then the whole lot will be tanked and tiled. I am NOT planning plywood anywhere. There is another part to this, slightly related, is that most of the room will have a non structural OSB or ply deck suspended UNDER the top member of the posi joists, to support UFH pipes under the final floor. .

That's normal practice for under building here, known as "Block and flat"

No, that's quite separate. That is up to the council tax valuation surveyor to decide it is "finished", which may be before or after building control decide it's finished.