Kelvin

We used Alwitra VSK for ours. We probably should have used Sarnafil in hindsight as there are several trades in the area that specialise in it whereas no one has experience of Alwitra and I had to use a Glasgow based company. Make sure your joiner gets the plywood deck as flat and smooth as possible and make sure the flat roofers are meticulous in brushing any crap off the deck. The single ply stuff will show up any imperfections on the roof. The other thing to be clear about is the order all the overlapping trades need to work in. This has caught me out requiring a second visit to complete the flat roof that wasn’t in the original quote.

It couldn’t be more different in Blairgowrie. The council tip guys are friendly and helpful. You can take whatever you like there (within reason obviously) regardless of where it came from. No appointment booking. The only thing you need to do is register your trailer with them and get a certificate of entry, not that they’ve ever asked for it. It’s saved me a fair bit of money. I took them a box of Quality Street the other week. 😂

I wouldn’t have them in the house let alone the loft. I’ve even decided to not fit PV panels to the roof for a variety of reasons one of which is the (low) fire risk. I know of two house fires caused by faulty PV installations. We’re also installing our EV charging point stand alone and away from the house to make sure we never park the leccy car near the house. Can you not construct a metal shed to mount it all in?

I tidy every night as well. It’s more efficient for everyone and safer as nothing to stand on or trip over.

@ProDave I’m at this stage now too. My intention is to not use the Protect VC foil stuff that’s come with the kit and use Pro Clima instead. What did you use out of interest?

I’ve had the MKM man visit my site 3 times this week flogging me kitchens, bathrooms, and doors. He also mentioned prices for materials coming down.

5 July 2021 is the date they came with those numbers. There’s a massive disconnect between bodies setting rates of pay and companies competing for skilled people.

My son in law (also spark with all the certs) is 24 and earning similar. I know someone doing a self-build that didn’t heed my advice about getting the trades lined up months ago now can’t get a quote from a plasterer let alone get anyone. I think I’ve solved this for them though. I started a thread last year about self-builds becoming unaffordable for the self-builder who can’t do much of the work themselves. I was chatting to the boss of the company who did my kit erection and if you go down the turnkey route he can’t see folk building a HH for much less than £3300/m2. He told me he’s lost money on ours. 86 man days so far and I stopped them from doing the coom walls upstairs as it made the airtight barrier too hard to fit.

Just to be clear. I never did ours. I had an excellent groundswork guy. The only digging i’ve done are the trenches for various services around the place. Top soil you want stripped and piled up with something over it. All the vegetation off it too obviously. Because we did cut and fill to level ground we re-used most of the material but that needs rolling in layers. You then dig back down to solid ground for your trenches. Stones and boulders we piled up to use in the dry wall. We didn’t need muck away for the excavated stuff we didn’t use (mostly from the retaining wall) as the farmer took that. One thing we did do that made an enormous difference is put down loads of MOT all around the house (4m min for us) plus a big offloading area. I’m glad we did this as without it we couldn’t have offloaded much very easily! It also means our site is mud free and dries very quickly when it does pee down. This means the slab and garage slab are both clean.

I’d probably buy rather than hire. Digging straight lines at a certain depth and width to match the dimensions on good level ground isn’t hard. Where it gets hard is when unknown problems rear up and how best to deal with them. Our 1.4 acre plot is on a slope so there’s only a small area you can easily build on. It needed a degree of cutting and filling and a bit of thinking about that all took skill and experience to do. I was chatting to my BCO and he marvels at the skill of the groundswork team on difficult ground and tight sites like ours.

Yes something is wrong. £200/month just for hot water is more than our entire electricity bill. If it has an immersion heater as a backup to heating the DHW make sure it’s not permanently on. Using Samsung SmartThings to control the automation is a bit cheap. It’s ok as a retrofit product. I have some familiarity with it so can maybe help with that. Given it’s new and they are still there puts him in a powerful position. Compile a detailed list of ALL the issues not just what you’ve listed here. Refer to them as a defects list not a snagging list. Pay particular attention to what the sales particulars and sales pack say and the as designed performance against what he’s bought. Also look here: https://www.nhos.org.uk/about-nhos/ For example, the last house we bought was a new barn conversion with a 1.5 acre paddock. The sales particulars described this as a beautiful grazing paddock for horses and went into some detail about it. The sales pack we had as part of the selling contract also had this detail. I pointed this out to them during the conveyancing process and they were pretty vague about it but verbally said it would be tidied up. We concluded the sale and the paddock was left looking like a builders yard. They’d used it for their welfare huts, storage, machine parking, and dumping area (they’d chipped an entire tree in the field then spread the chippings over several square metres to 10cm deep) After a bit of a battle with them they eventually agreed to remove the rubbish, plough the field, bring in some top soil for the worse areas, machine harrow it, and seed it. Our defects list for this house ran to 158 items and every one of them got fixed eventually including replacing a front door and a set of patio doors. We were the first buyers of what was 8 barn conversions. Most serious prospective new buyer for the others came to see us and we made it clear to the builder they did this. I also identified the most amenable builders that were on-site and was able to talk them into fixing defects directly rather than going through the building company. About 60% of the defects got resolved this way. I got on well with the site manager too and he was really helpful. It would be worth identifying who these people given they are still on the development and see amenable they are.

I can support the looking after yourself comment above. I’ve been doing 12 hour plus days on-site 6 days a week since March. I’ve also been training since December for the Cateran Yomp in two weeks (54 mile walk in 24 hours) I am knackered. However good effort in getting going. Well done.

Landscape fabric is used to hold the soil together, improve moisture retention and prevent weed growth. You’ve got 100mm of compacted MOT, then a mortar bed then tiles. What purpose do you think a fabric layer will provide. Google laying a patio and you won’t see a fabric layer anywhere.

This has come up on mine too but only on the dormer window where it joins the pitched roof. My joiner has said typically you see a lead flashing come from under the window and under the standing seam roof. Also not detailed in our drawings.

Definitely cut them yourself it’s easy enough. I helped a pal do this last year and it saved him about £5k

I doubt outdoor temp change will crack the plastic. It’s been hit by someone.

My wife’s uncle has this on his Huf Haus. Seems to work fine. Bit of splashing in very heavy rain.

They do. Mine came with the windows. It’s all piled up in my garage though because we are fitting them side by side with an 18mm post in the middle they don’t fit so we’ll need to use Kooltherm insulation and tape.

Cheers. It’s for my garage/workshop

No joy when I tried in Perthshire. I haven’t put much effort into it yet though.

Co-incidentally I had this very conversation yesterday with the BCO who visited our site. His thing to always check is the 1.1m height. He said so many builds fall foul of this. As soon as he left we went straight up to measure it as we’d added a kerb for the Velux windows for the standing seam roof. We’re just under but with the FFL we’ll be well under.

It’s 3.4m x 1.7m

yes one dormer. I’ll take a picture of it and add it. We doubled the length of ours to allow a bath and shower

It doesn’t sound like much but it can significantly add to the cost. A friend extended the length of their design by 1.5m and it added £25k to the cost.

6.1m