Kelvin

People are very wedded to their wood burning stoves. I was chatting to someone local recently who said the ban would stop them from self-building. Seemed an odd deal breaker to me.

What are the concerns?

There’s a new retirement estate in the local town. It’s all two and three bed bungalows that are all timber kits. From what I understand the phase 1 development had them all made off site and quality and logistics was a problem. They created an on-site ‘factory’ and made them themselves for the later phases.

The other consideration with a timber kit is your financial exposure. It’s been done to death on here so I won’t repeat that. Suffice to say that there’s little to no materials risk with stick built as you buy what you need when you need it.

Yes it can do and you can also get voids. However, like every other job done well by professionals it will be fine as they’ll account for this. I had to stop the people insulating our house and do a lot of it myself.

Your wall build up will be different though with all different materials and densities so it will be much better than the garage.

Our timber kit is square. Not so much some of the internal panels. However we had many many issues with ours largely caused by the incompetent builder the timber kit company uses. Being built off-site in a factory doesn’t make it any more likely that it’s accurately built to the drawings. The lean to porch bit of our house was 100mm too high at the rear of the panel (it’s sloped as it’s a flat roof). Plus it wasn’t any quicker to get from start to weather tight. They planned 4 weeks and it took them almost 9. The services routing from the porch bit (where the plant room is) to the main house was completely wrong and I had to make it up as I went along.

Yes biggest miss for our house is not using it. I’m happy with the result we got and it’s all working well but it could have slightly been better. By the time I’d found out about it, it was too late and I couldn’t find anyone locally that did it. Although when we got the airtightness test done the guy that did it said he’d just started doing it as an extra service. Next time 😂

Everyone that’s been in our house has commented on how quiet it is. The sparky was in the other day finishing some stuff off and mentioned how quiet it is compared to any house he’s been in. Both outwith the house and within. I don’t have a direct comparison but our garage is metal with 80mm PIR sandwich. It’s obviously built very differently and isn’t sealed for airtightness other than what the construction achieves. You can pretty much hear everything that’s outside just as clearly as if you were outside. However it doesn’t heat up much in the hottest days and only requires a little bit of heat input to the area you’re working in to make it usable on the coldest days as long as you’re active. I’ve been quite surprised at how well it performs thermally.

Velux 1600mm x 942mm. Top hung and 3G. They are very heavy. 500mm and 1390mm from floor to where the ceiling starts to curve. We are building a full height/width wardrobe on the gable end wall of the bedroom which is partly why we did what we did.

Very true. Here’s some pictures of what we did to make what would have been smallish rooms feel much bigger. The bedroom is 5.2m x 4.4m with a 2.5m ceiling height. The sitting room is a similar kind of size in an L shape but is 2.9m to the ridge beam. The coomb picture shows how much is lost given Heb Homes do this in both sides albeit I built ours 100mm further into the room to give is more flat wall space behind the bed.

We vaulted one half of the area upstairs and raised the ceiling height in our bedroom. It’s coombed too we left it all open on one side so the angled ceiling meets the outside wall rather than creating wasted pointless cupboard space we’d never use. Heb Homes standard upstairs layout wastes a lot of space and creates long narrow bedrooms which is a common problem with room in roof designs.

What we did in the upstairs sitting room. Transformed what would have been a small awkwardly shaped room.

Our heat pump is, to all intents and purposes, silent in normal operation. Our near neighbour’s oil boiler flue is far louder plus it short cycles so there’s a big boof noise when it starts up. The noise issue is overdone in my opinion. The Samsung in our previous house had a double fan and a much older design and was slightly noisier. It was below a window and even when the window was open it wasn’t that noticeable. Because it’s running for a while you tend not to notice it.

As many do on here we don’t have heating upstairs other than electric UFH for the dormer bathroom. I did fit a wall socket in the ideal locations in both rooms for an electric wall panel albeit I’d probably just use a portable oil filled rad or similar if it was ever needed although I know we’ll never need to heat upstairs.

I spent weeks trying to buy on marketplace with no joy. Buying seconds from the hire place was a great bargain.

For Heras fencing try the hire places. I got an absolute bargain from a large hire place in Dundee. They can’t hire out anything that isn’t in good condition to commercial building sites so have piles of decent fencing sitting about. They were glad to get rid of it. I bought enough to do over 120m plus some spare with feet and brackets for just over £1000 delivered.

Is there any danger of damage during construction?

Good stuff. Hard work this isn’t it. 😂

I would look at the metal roofers website for best practice. I seem to recall them preferring sarking but exterior grade plywood is also ok. This is from the VMZinc website for example. https://www.vmzinc.com/en-gb/technical-support/technical-drawings

Actually it’s slightly worse than that as we also have an internal wall that runs the full length of the house constructed the same way as the external walls minus the window and cladding obviously. It’s 430mm thick. Our rooms could have been a lot wider had we gone with SIP walls. However they are more than wide enough as the open plan area is 5.5m wide.

I’ve just measured ours and they are 510mm thick as I forgot to add the 3G windows in. No not SIP. Ours walls are based on a space frame design so the basic wall itself is 300mm. We liked the look of deep reveals so it was as much an aesthetic decision as functional.

Our walls are very thick for a new build. Over 400mm from the front face of the cladding to the face of the painted wall. Fortunately we didn’t have any space constraints but it still wasn’t easy getting the panels in using a tele-handler.

You could hand ball smaller SIP panels in. People use cranes and tele-handlers just because it’s easier and likely safer. I’d stick build anyway. In fact if I was building again I’d stick build regardless of ease of access.