Kelvin

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.

My one experience of ‘a proper’ architect practice was woeful and negligent frankly at every level of dealing with them. Their comms was shockingly poor, their drawings full of inaccuracies, shambles over setting the house on the land costing me weeks of delay, errors in planning submission, non existent site management that led to build problems, inability to manage their main contractor and a general lack of care. I even had to research and draw the visibility splay and tell them to submit what I drew as they wanted to hire a consultant! They are all members of the ARB and this was under an RIAS contract. Colour me cynical. My wife’s father was an architect and he was very good. He worked closely with an SE so never drew anything that couldn’t be built. They both worked into their 80s too and specialised in old buildings. It always drew a smile when these two old buffers turned up to a site in an old Bentley and proceeded to clamber up onto church roofs etc. He made two simple suggestions for our house build that the actual architect we were paying really ought to have suggested. Sadly passed away before we achieved final planning permission although my other half is glad to some extent, that he didn’t witness the shambles Heb Homes and their builder made of our simple two rectangles house. He would have been apoplectic and probably given him a heart attack.

My experience is the other way around. I asked for a rainwater soakaway but the architect neglected to include it. However planning stipulated we needed to add one anyway. Our burn drains into a river which has burst its banks flooding the town a few miles below us. Therefore I didn’t want to add to the flood risk problem for the town.

I researched this and there isn’t anything as far as I could find. The best I came up with was some low profile clamps. After our standing seam roof was fitted I decided not to fit panels on the roof for three reasons. Firstly it’s a beautiful looking thing to my eyes and PV panels would have ruined the look of it. It requires the roof being penetrated and while there are products especially for metal roofs I didn’t want the roof penetrated. I couldn’t see how they’d be fitted without the roof being scratched dinged or damaged in some way. In the end I’ve gone for ground mounted panels. There is a fourth reason and that’s fire risk. It’s a tiny risk but friends of ours lost their 6 month old self-build to a PV fire caused by faulty cabling. The panels would have covered the whole of the roof on the left.

I doubt it’s as simple as this but one of my windows was doing the same. Turned out to be the gasket which had come out of the rebate and was fouling the hinge.