Kelvin

Rural Perthshire. All overhead lines round us. One power cut for a few hours in 3 years. We had more power cuts in Cambridgeshire. Cooking could be done with our portable induction hob connected to the car as could some heating but it’d beed to be really cold with no power for long enough to really drop inside the house. The EV is rarely below 50% so that’s a fair amount of power available to run a few things. The bigger issue for us is access to water and getting it into the house as everything is pumped.

Our service cable from the pole comes into the kiosk on the right through ducting onto a 38mm hockey stick. The cable from the kiosk to the house comes into the kiosk on the left. It’s 35mm SWA and also ducted. All on a sand bed as per DNO instructions with warning tape above. The kiosk is a larger 3 phase one rather than a single phase despite the single phase supplyThis was also on advice of the sparky who said the single phase boxes were too tight.

And the council house I grew up in. The house was stupidly big and as nice as it was I never felt comfortable in it.

Our previous house had a particularly huge entrance hallway that was 10m x 5.5m with a 5m ceiling height. The staircase went up the middle to a galleried walkway to the bedrooms either side of the house. The staircase itself was a bit cheap but it certainly had a wow factor when you walked into the house. It also had two long corridors downstairs that took you off to the two wings of the house with all the other rooms. But it was an awful lot of wasted space. We did eventually put a big dining table in it so was great for family dinners. The house we built is half the size but we use all of it so oddly it feels bigger than the previous house.

Long corridors waste a significant amount of space. As does a stairwell in the middle of a house unless you want to make a feature of the entrance and stairs. We mostly designed out the internal corridors as there were two, one upstairs and one downstairs stairs, both pokey and dark. The neat feature of our stair design is it hidden behind the kitchen wall so takes up very little floorspace and creates a big cupboard off our kitchen and a wardrobe under the stairs off the guest bedroom. The 45° roof pitch and ridge beam also gives you a lot of flexibility in how you finish the upstairs ceiling both in height and style. We also removed the coomb storage on one side of the upstairs and made the other side slightly wider. Consequently the two upstairs rooms feel big and airy. A room in roof design creates quite a neat compact looking house on the outside and plenty of extra space on the inside.

Yes. These two things aren’t really connected. Every home needs ventilation and air circulation regardless of however else it’s built. If you want the room to be pleasant and free from mould it needs to be insulated, heated, and ventilated to let fresh air in and remove stale air.

Why? Every question that gets asked on here is generally answered with people giving their time to do it. Consequently there’s useful information for anyone else with a similar question. Buildhub is publicly searchable so it’s a great resource for everyone.

Plant room size is an interesting debate. At the start I wished I’d gone a bit bigger as we made the hallway 400mm wider by stealing it from the plant room. However as necessity is mother of invention I made it all fit relatively neatly and the wider hallway is far nicer. Unless you’re going to also use the plant room for storage space with cupboards and shelving then it just needs to be big enough.

Our previous house was a barn conversion. Huge thing with the lowest ceiling at 3m. The conservation officer absolutely insisted that the windows could only go where the holes in the walls were. Consequently most of the window cills, other than the living room, were all above head height 😂 The windows were enormous and gave you a good view of the sky. I bought my wife a step up ladder (as a joke) for her birthday so she could see out of them. 😂 I also fitted a camera on the external south elevation attached to a screen in the kitchen so we could see out into the paddock to keep an eye on our really old horses and chickens!

Yes Gryphon Roofing from Glasgow. I wouldn’t recommend them unfortunately. There are a couple of others that quoted but they seemed reluctant to travel. If I was doing it again I’d use Sarnafil as there seems to be more installers.

We’re happy enough with the finished house. It’s the right size for two of us. I should have put more thought into cooling the house than I did but it’s mostly addressable. Where I missed an opportunity was despite getting planning for the detached garage to be built like the house with an open plan living space above it we elected not to do it and built a metal garage with the same dimensions. Part of me also wonders what if we’d gone into the side of the hill instead as my wife’s architect father was keen for us to do. Next time.

Are you saying there’s a possibility the roof won’t be insulated at all? That’s a huge mistake if so. Warm moisture laden air hits the back of the cold OSB and condenses which eventually leads to mould. It absolutely needs to be insulated and a warm roof design is typically the best way to insulate it and avoid condensation and mould. What flatroof waterproof membrane are you using?

As far as finding someone to do it. They do exist especially in the SE. There are specialist builders out there who do builds on such a grand scale. Who builds the houses for the rich and famous after all. I’m sure there was a TV programme about a builder who only worked on high end large scale builds. The CEO of the company I worked for had an extension built that effectively added a kitchen and dining area plus landscaping. Cost £1.5 million. A friend was telling me about an Edinburgh town house that was being renovated top to bottom and they were flying in the best people for each stage from around the World!

There’s space then there’s useable space. Our last house was twice as big as the one we built. The one we built feels bigger in part because we use all of it. I reckon we used 60% of the previous house at a push. There was one bathroom I never used once and was only in it a handful of times. I know someone that lived in a huge house. Not as big as this but still huge and a bit sprawling. It was terrific but he said they spent their life walking miles everyday as it was badly laid out until they eventually remodelled part of it to create a better living space with kitchen living room and a couple of bedrooms and an office. Almost a house within a house. All done to a high standard. He is a network consultant and placed activity monitors all round the house to track how they used it. They found they rarely used the rest of the house. To add it’s a stunning looking thing and more power to you for considering it. Our plot is on a similar slope and for a brief while we contemplated doing the same on a much smaller scale but similar idea.

Why is it so big? Do you really need so many bedrooms? You could half the size (which would still be enormous) with a similar design. There’s a £2 million saving. Unless you really need a commercial sized building I’d seriously rethink the design especially as you are already baulking at some early estimates.

It wasn’t Heb Homes was it? 😂 I had a similar experience.

I’ve been open about the issues with our timber kit on here albeit not a SIP kit.

You might not need one if your neighbours have them on the same sewer line. I didn’t want one coming up through the roof of the house either so we extended the drainage into the detached garage and the SVP comes up through the garage roof. We also fitted the garage with a shower and a dog bath.

😂 maybe not but I was listening to Miles Davis earlier on vinyl which is a good use of electricity. Music and heat. I also have a valve guitar amp. That just produces heat 😂

This is true although I would recommend heating the upstairs bathroom floor with an electric mat.

A few years ago I tested the temperature at various points on the amp and the heat sinks peaked at 47°C and the core components in the case averaged around 37°C. I’ve also got a tube amp and the tubes get much hotter than that. My surround sound system has 13 speakers and a sub-woofer. Getting back to the original question. Heating a high performing house is generally the easy bit. Cooling them is a bit harder and needs more thought.

The TV has a FALD backlight screen (full array local dimming) which tends to get warm. The Musical Fidelity amp has a large heat sink on either side of the case and they get very hot, almost too hot to touch.

I’ve finally got around to installing my Hi-Fi amp and AVC surround sound amp. Both are very meaty amps so get hot when running. The Musical Fidelity amp runs hot all the time and Denon AVC amp really only gets hot when pushed. The TV also gets hot plus there are several other devices in the rack all generating a little bit of heat. It’s more than enough to heat the TV room which is 4m x 5m. Opening the doors and it will add a little bit of heat to the rest of the house. Add in two people and two dogs and it’ll be unusable in the summer. 😂

Now you know their motivation for the inspection. Expect a follow up letter. I’d get all your ducks in a row now to establish whose responsibility the wall is. It might also be worth having your inspection done to get an ‘expert’ opinion on why the wall is failing rather than just your opinion it’s the roots of their bushes.

The main thing is to avoid winding on too much of the strapping. I loaned a set to an old neighbour one time. I asked him if he needed instruction on how to use them. Aw naw he says. Dun it loads. I got back a mangled mess of strap and ratchets. Took me two hours to unravel the mess he’d made of four sets of them. So there’s definitely a wrong way to do it. The same guy couldn’t mount the strimmer wire for his strimmer. Wouldn’t accept any help and spent his time strimming a bit then taking the reel apart to unwind more wire and strimming some more.