Kelvin

That manhole cover isn’t great when installed like this. I know this because I have exactly the same one only a bit bigger for my headwork chamber for my borehole. The frame is too flimsy for the heavy lid so any cement they batter around the frame to secure will always break. The frame needs to be secured in place then cemented. In my case I had a cover and frame made and resorted to doing it myself.

The garage is a good suggestion. We built ours first and it’s been a great storage area and place to work when the weather has been shit.

On the PMing yourself and bringing trades in point. Here’s my experience of that. Nearly every trade overlaps with another so a job gets 90% done. Getting some of them back is hard work so make sure you don’t get talked into paying all of it until they come back. There are three jobs I’ve ended up finishing myself because I couldn’t get them back fortunately I hadn’t paid them. Also try and use local trades and guys that all know each other. All the issues I’ve had about getting folk back have been with the trades that were furthest away and unknown in the area. When it comes to material choice I rather wish we’d gone with slates for the pitched roof and Sarnifil for the flat roof. The reason is one of maintenance. Tilers and Sarnifil are both common in my area so if we have any problems it’s easy to get local trades to fix it. Instead we went standing seam for pitched roof and Alwitra for the flat roof. There’s no local knowledge of either in my area. Both are lovely materials and both roofs look great. My point is research which skills are common where you live and consider sticking to those materials. This is more of an issue if you live rurally.

I was just saying yesterday I wonder how all the self-builders were getting on in this rain. I was paranoid about the insulation getting wet so waited until we were weathertight before fitting it. Take a wet piece and put it somewhere dry and see how long it takes to dry. I had roll that got wet on one end. I put it in the garage at home which is dry with a lot of air blowing through it. The insulation was still wet weeks later. Personally I’d be removing it but my house is a closed panel timber kit.

People looking for PH houses will be interested in PH detailing. Everyone else isn’t interested. The EPC rating ought to matter to people but if they don’t care during an energy crisis they won’t care at any other time. Not one of the trades that have been at my house care about any of the performance criteria. They were shocked at the air tightness score having never been in a house under 1 ACH before.

It’s doable, plenty of folk do it. Depends on the site, how exposed it is, where it is, etc. I go camping etc and I couldn’t have done it and there’s just the two of us and two dogs.

You could never get the house that we rent to C. It’s G currently.

Yes, 80% done. 209m2

No for self-build too. We’ve got it.

Yes I have pair of those too. I found the knife made neat straight cuts much easier.

I used a long knife and kept with regular sharpening on the electric sharpener it cut through knauf insulation easily with little effort.

@JohnMoYou’ve posted a picture of your retaining wall before. It’s really nice and I’m likely to do something similar. My concern with wooden posts concreted in is the likelihood of them rotting just above ground level. Have you done anything to mitigate that?

Here’s an article that discusses it. https://professional-electrician.com/technical/thermal-insulation-and-its-effect-on-flat-twin-earth-cables-niceic/

The ARB. Very helpful when I spoke with them. You can only complain about individual architects rather than a practice. The guy I spoke suggested there is the possibility of this changing in the future.

Yep completely agree on the construction drawings. It caught us out. Where HH are getting it wrong is in this area. They build ‘kit’ houses so they produce a standard construction pack for their various house types. The problem I ran into with the construction drawings was they didn’t match certain elements of my house so when we came to that detail it was either not in the drawings or it was wrong for our build. I spoke to them about this and they admitted that most of the standard houses end up being bespoke but they’re not resourced well enough to detail them properly. I wouldn’t be surprised if they became more strict about how much you can change their standard design.

Welcome. Also building in Perthshire.

Could it be white mould? Given all the leaks you might expect some mould anyway.

I’m not a massive fan of dormers either and have ended up with one as it was the only way to get a big enough bathroom to accommodate a bath and shower while keeping the upstairs floor layout the way we wanted it. In hindsight I would have removed it completely and just made the upstairs layout work but was overruled. That said, it’s detailed well I think and is a nice contrast of shapes and colours. However as Gus says planning did hint about massing when I briefly spoke with them early on about no dormer especially given the big garage roof. There are loads of dormers a bit like this in rural Scotland so it’s a common look. The flat roof still needs to be finished.

Oh it’s worse than that. The builders told me about another build where they did use this QS. One of the roles of the QS is to help the client manage the finances to come in on budget or maybe even under. I was told by the same QS that he’d save more than his fee for example. Anyway this other client ran out of money and couldn’t afford to finish the house. The first thing that got ditched was the MVHR system. The problem was they scored 1 ACH so the solution was the slit the airtight membrane around the windows at the suggestion of the QS so not the M&E people, nor the architect, or builder but the QS. Clearly there’s two sides to every story so there might have been more to it. What I didn’t understand was that this was a full completion build using their affiliated contractor so why was the QS necessary at all.

The worst one is the QS wanting a percentage of the build cost. HH have a retained QS they ‘encourage’ you to use. I didn’t for several reasons: He was an arse to deal with, the cost was horrendous given it’s a kit house so almost 50% of the cost is literally done for him, he asked me to send him all the quotes I had already got for him to format into his spreadsheet and send it back to me for £2500 😂 His total cost would have been close to £12k. I did it myself plus estimators on-line.

They were and are in breach of contract. The house as built isn’t quite what was designed. I’ve spoken with the ARB already. The slight challenge is my issue isn’t with an individual architect it’s with the practice generally as you deal with multiple people when working with them.

Doesn’t give the view justice. But when finished you’ll be able to see straight through from the hallway to the hills in the distance

We’re still building. I’ll take a picture from the doorway to give you an idea but it doesn’t give the view justice. I also rendered our house in 3D to give us a rough idea of how it might look internally.

@IanR I appreciate what you’re saying about rainwater attenuation in rural settings but something @saveasteading said in response to a comment I made about our situation struck a chord with me. That was something like you want the rainwater impact to be much the same (or better I guess) after you’ve built as it was when it was just a field. As I mentioned, our burn, which is always flowing, discharges into the river Ericht which runs through Alyth. We’ve lived here for two years and have seen how high the water level quickly gets over the winter. It’s flooded out the market square a few times. I wouldn’t be comfortable if I thought I was contributing to that.