ProDave

Our present house has 100mm PIR in the sloping part of the ceiling, and 300mm rockwool above the flat ceiling. I know we are on a quiet road, but when a car does go past, we hear it via the window, not through the walls or roof.

I recall Jeremy was looking into the option of sourcing a 12V air blower pump to replacer the mains driven one as standard. That would make it a lot more viable to power by it's own solar panel and battery (with a mains charger to turn on if there was not enough solar generation) I don't know the outcome of his research. Don't forget to look at the Conder as well (that's the one we have) The Conder, Vortex and Biopure all appear to be the best 3 treatment plants in terms of effluent quality that I could find when I was looking and all work on the aeration by an air blower principle.

To separate the pallets, forget trying to pull individual nails. I lay a bit of 8 by 2 timber on it's side with one end against the house wall. Stand the pallet upright so the plank you are trying to remove is along the ground and resting against this bit of 8 by 2 and one of the pallets cross members is right next to the 8 by 2 (I can see I am going to have to take a photo as I doubt that description makes it clear) Then hit the cross member of the pallet very hard with the FBH Sometimes the nails come out of the cross member, sometimes they pull through the plank. t helps to keep your pallets dry. The ones that have been inside all the time come apart really easy. The ones that have been left outside, the nails have rusted and they take a lot more hitting to get them apart. For firewood, I put lumps of pallet on the fire WITH the nails in. They riddle through into the ash pan afterwards no problem. Most people recommend against this.

One of the things you accumulate during a self build is pallets. Everything comes on a pallet. Some good, some bad, some ugly, some not even worthy of firewood. One of the things our plot needs is a shed. Somewhere to put the lawnmower, strimmer, garden tools etc should we ever find a buyer and move into the static caravan. I don't have any spare money to buy a ready made shed, not that I think much of the way most sheds are made anyway. So a while back I said to SWMBO "I am going to make a shed out of those pallets" The reply was not exactly "oh that's a good idea dear" Some (most?) pallets are not fit for making stuff. But I have rather a lot of these that all my wood fibre board came on. When dismantled they each yield four 6ft long 5" wide planks and they dismantle relatively easily. So these planks will clad 3 of the walls of the shed. So lets start. First you need a base for it to sit on. Well I have the three large pallets that my windows arrived on. Quite substantial and put together will make a base 9ft by 7ft, so big enough just for a garden tool shed. Lay them on the ground with the corners and ends of the members of the pallets supported on concrete blocks. To support the mid span, drive some stakes in as far as I can then fic these to the middle of the pallets. Not only does that give extra support, but it anchors it all down for when the wind blows. Of course I forgot to take a picture of just the base, so here is the base and the back wall. The observant will notice the base is slatted with big gaps. The gaps are not even enough to fill in to make it a solid floor. So the floor will be over sheeted with OSB using the pallets as the "frame" and the OSB as the finished floor surface. Today I built and added the first end wall. So one other end wall will be made from the final pallets (still to be dismantled) The front will then be clad with some different wood, a load of 6" X 1" planks that have been used as temporary bracing during the build. the front will incorporate two windows and a door. The roof (probably the only bit I will have to buy) will be corrugated bituminous roofing that I used previously for my wood shed. This is a fill in job, low priority, but fun (more fiun than sanding and re varnishing the windows of the old house)

My roof is (starting from the outside) Tiles, battens, counter battens, breathable membrane, 100mm wood fibre board (used as sarking) 195mm rafters filled with two layers of Frametherm 35, 9mm OSB, 25mm battened service void, plasterboard. Originally I was going to use blown in insulation to fill the void, until I found the price. Frametherm 35 gives the same U value as the blown in insulation would have, at a much lower cost, plus it's a bit more of the job I can DIY. The frametherm is nice(er) stuff to work with and is stiff enough to stay put when you press it in between the rafers before boarding (I have a test piece that has been in place for 6 months now, not boarded, and it hasn't fallen out or slumped) In my case the wood fibre on the outside is mitigating any cold bridging and adding to the insulation, rather than having extra on the inside. I think the overall U value is about 1.3

I got the best price for all my insulation (Knauf Earthwool Frametherm 35) from SIG

I saved the scaffold hastle by buying my own. Like having your own digger, it is so nice not to have any pressure on time to get a job done and scaffold off hire. and being a scaffold tower system (kwikstage) it is dead easy to alter it around as jobs need.

I am confused. I thought this problem was the result of building work done and a supporting wall being replaced by a beam. But your drawings seem to show it has always only been supported by a floor joist? My previous 1930's house was like this. The downstairs wall was about 1/3 the span from front to back. But upstairs a brick wall that separated two bedrooms meant a lot of weigh supported mid span by the floor joists. When I bought the house there had clearly been a lot of movement, the bend in the floor was clear to see and a door frame was very out of square. The surveyor noted it was at the limit of acceptable deflection and if further movement was noted a steel beam should be inserted under the wall to support it. In the 13 years I was there it did not move any further. As part of the work I did on the house, I re fitted the door frame and made it square. The plaster did not crack again and when i sold it, there was no mention of it at all on the buyers survey.

AND all my tools are 240V

Another one to say that is some very nice looking brick laying there, you should be well pleased with that.

i share the concern that 50mm is not enough insulation. You need to get some more insulation UNDER the existing joists as well as in between them.

I I don't think so. The "issue" with an ASHP up here is they are perceived by the planners as noisy, so they want to know where they are in relation to neighbours and they wanted the specifications in particular it's noise rating. That's why if you have a massive garden and it's a loooooong way from the neighbours you can ionstall one under permitted development. An oil tank is not noisy so won't be a planning issue, but my be a BR issue? I know with this house building control had to approve the location of the oil tank, and in our case allowed it to go right next to the end wall of the house, which is apparently unusual as most pople have to keep them a few metres away frm the house.

Not sure about a building warrant, but you do know in Scotland, planning permission is needed for an air source heat pump, unless it is something like 100 feet from all your boundaries (I can't imagine any council houses meeting that) A ground source heat pump does not need PP. Thankfully I realised this just in time to include it on my plans. I am guessing the cheap A2A unit mentioned is a single outlet unit, think air conditioner in reverse, so would only heat one room.

Going off topic here, but when I lay my upstairs flooring (chipboard and carpet) I will leave a strip of boards probably 300mm wide that are only screwed down around the perimeter of each room and can be lifted should I need to add e.g any extra wiring. I did this in my previous house and it worked well. the only reason I did not do it in the present house was we have UFH upstairs.

So just what did they do for their £420? I am a bit of a simpleton, so can someone explain to me how a 50 metre pipe can cause a problem with chlorine? Surely the amount of chlorine in the water is what leaves the treatment plant. If your 50M of pipe is going to cause an issue, then why does the several miles of pipe between the treatment plant and your house not cause an issue?

Re modern day living / lifestyles. I used to be a buy to let landlord. One of our properties was a 1980's 1 bedroom flat. Timber framed (4") and double glazed. It was "normal" for tenants to turn off the bathroom fan because of the noise, then complain about the mould in the bathroom. That's when I decided to ignore wiring regs and remove the fan isolator switch so it was not possible to disable the fan. Light is on, fan is on (then stays on with a timer) NOT negotiable and no facility to disable it. Trickle vents on windows were NEVER open. One tenant in particular complained of "water running down the walls" On investigation, the heating was off so the flat was cold (were they happy to live like that) and every room had a clothes horse with dripping wet washing hung on it. They didn't seem to want to use the clothes line outside or the tumble dryer in the shed. After that tenant left (god riddance) I never had a condensation problem again. I guess it boils down to "poverty" they could neither afford to turn the heating on or use the tumble dryer, yet expected the landlord to magically solve the problem. So the ideal social housing will have mvhr AND heating that you CANNOT turn off.

I was going to use a filter mound, which is a pile of expensive graded sand (would have been about £1000 worth of sand) but between planning and building warrant, building regs changed and whereas it used to only be 5 metres, now (in Scotland) a filter mound must be 10 metres away from a road (and 5 mertres away from a building and plot boundary) and that left me insufficient room. A filter mound is intended for ground that does drain, but the water table is too high for a conventional underground soakaway. You do the percolation test in the same way de determine the percolation rate (and size of the mound) except you dig your 300mm deep test hole at ground level, so perfectly doable with just a shovel, no need for a digger. There are other proprietary systems like the puraflow which discharges into a tank full of peat and then down into the ground, but BC rejected that one for my site without saying why.

That is true of Scotland, and indeed that is how I got the present house plot. But where we were down south in Oxfordshire, I found several lovely looking potential plots, found the owner, only to be told it has tried and failed for planning before. Even what look like obvious infill sites that would be pretty much guaranteed to get permission up here were "green belt" and not allowed, even if between two existing houses in a village. That may have relaxed a bit now? The one that stands out to me was a lovely little timber barn in between two houses in the village, refused permission to convert to a house several times.

I disagree. I lived in Oxfordshire for the first 40 years of my life. I only recall two building plots coming on the market with estate agents in the time I was a home owner. I would love to have bought a plot and built a house then, but it seemed the only way was to buy a plot with a house on it, knock it down and rebuild, so the plot alone has cost you "complete house" money. It was a breath of fresh air moving to the Highlands where bare plots are always on the market with agents and it is so much easier, indeed considered pretty normal, to buy a plot and self build.

Looking very nice indeed. In some ways a similar render system to what we used, except ours was troweled on. How did they plasterboard the vaulted ceiling? scaffold inside I presume (that's probably what I will do)

How much did that cost?

Let me give you some examples of what I mean by "out of touch" My first house was a horrible little 1 bedroom "starter home". Fair enough I bought it because it was all I could afford, literally the cheapest house on the market in the county at the time. Fair enough it served it's purpose. But even that I had to choose carefully. they took 1 design and replicated it across the whole development. That meant some houses had a living room facing north. Absolute madness. Parking for that development was a communal car park at the end of the row of houses. I hated that for security and difficulty if you want to work on your car. So next house I wanted better. But all I could find with new houses was more of the same, just slightly bigger houses. It would have been so easy to do away with the communal parking, make each plot just a little bigger and give each plot it's on site parking space and still have the same number of houses but they just didn't so that. And then throw into the mix you want a garage, well if you do find one it would be tiny, and the only other parking would be in front of the garage. Don't even get me started on wanting to park a caravan, and a trailer....... I solved that issue by buying a 1930's semi on a corner plot with it's own drive and plenty of space to park whatever I wanted, space for a decent sized garage and space to in fact extend the house and double it's size, all for the same money of a mass builders shoe box site. I guess we have been lucky with our self build plots that they have both been very wide, though not particularly deep plots so have the flexibility for all that we want.

Can you post a plot layout with adjacent bits of land and what they are used for? Even something hand drawn would give an idea. Does the vendor of the plot own any other land, particularly any adjoining land, if so what is the present use of that adjoining land. It is building control you need to be speaking to. See if you can arrange an on site meeting with them to discuss options. you say an on site drainage system was refused due to ground conditions. Has a proper percolation test been done, if so post it's findings. I am surprised planning have refused a particular drainage scheme, it's usually the other way around that planning will pass something and you later find building control refuse it. This happened to me and for an anxious few weeks had no drainage solution (= no house) until a solution was found that building control agreed to. that's why it's building control you need to be talking to now. If building control agree to it, then when you submit your final plans you just describe the drainage scheme and make it clear building control have greed to it. All the schemed you have described would work, but that does not mean they would be allowed. I did one scheme where they pumped raw sewage up to a public drain at a higher level, and trust me, it's bad news if the pump ever fails, and a very unpleasant job to replace it. If you want to proceed without risk at the moment, make an offer to buy subject to obtaining full planning permission for the house you want AND building control approval to build it.

I agree, and for some time I have always thought major house builders are out of touch with what most people want (either that or what I want is so different to the average buyer?) That is one reason why I self built the last house and am self building the new one as so much of what I see the mass house builders churn out just does not appeal to me. Up here most houses are at least partly room in roof, so part of your sloping roof has to be insulated as a warm roof so to me it just seems daft to make the little triangle at the top a cold roof and not just make the whole thing a warm roof, but that little triangle of cold roof is what most builders still do.

Interesting topic My previous 1930's 9" solid brick house had condensation issues on the cold walls, most notably in a built in wardrobe on an outside wall, only "solved" by leaving the wardrobe door permanently open in the winter so it didn't get so cold in there (sliding doors can be left open without getting in the way) but I never had issues in the loft. Present house is 2003 built timber frame to standard (at the time) methods, 6" insulated frame, 300mm loft insulation. I have never seen any condensation or other issues in the loft. which is perhaps surprising as I know the loft hatch is not well sealed. In fact this house is a very dry house in all respects, no condensation problems anywhere not even on windows or mirrors in bathrooms. My new house will have even more insulation, and the thing missing from the present one, attention to detail to get the air tightness better and mvhr. The new house is also built with a warm roof so any loft space will be warm and inside the sealed envelope of the house. Perhaps warm roofs are the answer, and from my own experience I can't see them as being vastly more expensive. Yes it will use more insulation as you have to insulate a larger area, but it makes air tightness detail a LOT easier. In fact having embarked on this warm roof detail, I now find myself when looking at the cold rof in a new build I am currently wiring thinking "gosh the detail of this roof and it's insulation is absolute rubbish"