Kelvin

Octopus. They installed my meter when the plot was literally a field with planning and no warrant (so no address) It took them 5 months from initial contact to meter install though hence why I went early. I asked for a temp supply but it is in fact our permanent supply.

User error. Switch auto updates off or schedule them to the wee small hours

What I’ve been finding up here in Scotland at least, is that some things are much quicker than they state. My SEPA registration for the PTP was a week. Our new address registration 3 weeks etc.

The switch to digital everything is, on the whole, pretty good because the service offering can be broader. However there are some downsides as discussed on here. Another example is DAB. Broadly it’s great. However you hit a black spot and no radio. With analogue the service would reduce but at least you could still hear Janice Long. Also the digital radio reception in most modern cars is shit.

😉

I live on a farm with no working phone line. There is a copper cable but it needs replaced. Down the road, where our plot is, there are a handful of houses served by an overhead cable. Not one of them use it as the broadband speed is barely useable and the voice quality using a phone is also poor. Consequently everyone either uses a mobile phone for comms and LTE for internet access which is also slow. I don’t see the situation improving any time soon around us. We use Starlink and wifi calling. A previous plot we looked at had no telephone line at all into the various houses there and the quote to get one was several thousand. It also never had a mobile signal and this was before Starlink was available so it made the plots worthless to us. It wasn’t even all that rural as there was an urban area down the road.

All of the groundwork for my site has been done without a welfare hut. He has one and would have used if it was peeing down all day. It’s freezing up here too. The kit erection team don’t need one just a loo and the trades for the rest of the build have also said they don’t need one. In fact one of the guys said that if you make the site too comfortable folk get lazy.

Yes the gender thing can be a challenge as my other half has found and she’s pretty tough. She in sales so has a way about her that wins people over. If you are direct with people but stay reasonable I found it works better.

It’s interesting to me because I happen to have two boreholes side by side (about 6m apart) The one with the water is 147m deep and the dry one is 137m deep. I’ve had various folk from private water companies tell me all I need to do is cap it. However my concern is that by not backfilling it with suitable clean material I have a fast track for anything on the surface to get into our water. Certainly SEPA best practice is to backfill it.

I’m surprised your solicitor didn’t mention the indemnity. It’s less the solicitor and more your buyer’s lender although solicitors can get a bee in their bonnet about stuff. It will get resolved so don’t worry about that it’s more what needs to happen for it to be resolved quickly. Just because your solicitor has spoken with council it doesn’t mean you can’t still take out an indemnity. It really depends on what conversation they had. If it was a generic conversation with no house details etc then it might still be ok. Also from my own personal experience of this I took control of sorting all this out when it knocked our house sale off course. I had several issues to resolve. Our solicitor was just hopeless at chasing things down. They are all too busy and working from home wasn’t helping either. Your solicitor might well be better of course. But if they aren’t don’t just sit back and wait for them to do it all. e.g. our title hadn’t been registered correctly by the solicitor that we used when we bought the house. The solicitor handling the sale was simply emailing the land registry and not getting anywhere. I called them and eventually got through to a very helpful person. I explained my predicament, how it was holding up our house sale, we were moving to Scotland, rented a house, buying land and it was all falling apart. Appealing to her human side basically as most folk have experience of buying and selling houses and the stress that goes with it. Consequently she expedited it the same day. My solicitor had been dealing with it for three months and couldn’t believe I sorted it in one phone call.

My other half plans on making some kind of mural with all the samples we have and we have loads of them.

It is somewhat ill thought through. BT Openreach would love to switch all that old copper ‘crap’ off. It’s expensive to maintain, unreliable, not scalable and requires them to employ thousands of people to maintain the network. As always though they don’t have an answer for rural areas which is a consequence of privatisation. It’s the same with the postal service and public transport. It’s hard to offer a full service in rural areas but the quid pro quo was you have all the urban areas so that subsidises the rural areas. Except they now have competition in the urban areas and that competition isn’t interested in the rural areas either. I’ve not bothered putting a telephone line into our self-build. I’ll put some ducting in just in case they ever run a cable down the road but that’s never going to happen. Therefore my only options are a shitty 4G service or Muskrat’s Starlink service which I’ve been using for a year and it’s brilliant if dear. I am unconvinced at the longevity of it though. Living rurally is a choice for us obviously and the price we pay for the clean air, great view, quietness and solitude is shitty services and expensive energy so you do your own thing. On balance it’s a compromise I am happy with.

I have hated all of the dealing with the so called professionals and their incompetence and lack lustre approach to everything. Now we are actually doing physical stuff it’s much more fun and rewarding.

Congratulations. That is quick. You’re already ahead so use the time well. Took us 13 weeks for planning and 7 weeks for the warrant with a 5 week gap between gaining planning and applying for the warrant.

Don’t blame you. The impact of COVID on us has been about 6-8 months delay but that includes the royal PIA of selling our house in Cambridgeshire and then the crap service from timber kit company as we went through planning and warrant. Had I been braver I’d have started the planning process before completing on the plot but too risk adverse. We’d nearly be done by now. That said had there been fewer delays it would have meant starting groundworks in November last year which would have turned our site into the Somme. As it is we started mid Feb and it’s been exceptionally dry and mild so the site is tidy and clean the foundation mostly done. The current cold snap has stopped anymore concrete work but we’ve moved onto drainage etc so it won’t hold us up too much.

Sure and it’s a bugger if you’ve been at it for 8 years and an eventual VAT reclaim of £30k sitting waiting to be claimed. The last three years for the self-builder has been horrendous. I am in awe of anyone that built through COVID. Clearly it’s been horrendous for lots of people for different reasons but this thread is about the self-builder.

We’re doing the same. 12m x 8m is huge. Ours is 10.5m x 6m and after pouring the foundation yesterday it feels pretty big. We went for 80mm insulated panels and roof with insulation under the slab and under and up the foundation. Our total cost including groundworks, floor insulation and installation is well under £40k ex VAT.

Not quite a comparable analogy. The VAT reclaim can be a lot of money that pays off credit cards, finishes the house, funds the landscaping. It’s part of the reason that makes self-build doable for a lot of us. I also figured 14 months ago that inflation was going to soar so consequently we started compromising before we even had planning. I really wanted a big garage/workshop with a room above, fully insulated and plumbed in clad and roofed to match the house. However I canned that and now building an insulated metal building that’s the same footprint for about half the cost. The house was going to be 3m longer adding another two rooms with a second staircase making it almost self-contained living room and bedroom and bathroom. We removed that which has probably saved £35k. Inflation has taken us from a healthy budget and easily doable to compromising and it being a little tight. Fortunately we do have other funds to access should the worst happen but that was never the plan as we wanted the proceeds from the house we sold to fund every aspect of the self-build. My approach has been different so far in that I’ve locked in the prices for a lot of the big ticket items last year by paying hefty deposits. It’s probably saved us £10k-£12k minimum. While I am capable of doing a lot myself I don’t want to spend 5 years plus doing it so we are aiming to fund trades and go as fast as we can to reduce the impact of inflation. We’ll be in by Christmas 😂 I gave up a relatively highly paid job to manage all of this and will go back to work in some capacity once we finish. One thing I will be doing myself is rebuilding the 120m drystone wall that runs down our boundary. It might take me a year or so but it’s a cost we can’t swallow by bringing someone in.

You can still have weekly calls with them with progress updates, plan for the week etc. I realise it’s 240 miles but I’d still be making the weekly trip at least until things seem on track.

You’ve got two options. Contact the council and ask what’s going on with it. That might be a quick process or it might not. Alternatively take out an insurance indemnity that protects the buyer (goes with the house) If you decide on the latter DO NOT contact your council about it as once you do you can’t take out the indemnity. Indemnities are very common.

You need to ‘grow a pair’ I’m afraid. It’s your house after all. I suggest you have at least weekly meetings with them and agree what work is going to be completed that week. There’s also no reason why you can’t point out the electricity bill to them. Whether they’ve done it because they don’t care or just didn’t think is up you to decide. I suspect the latter. My build is a mixture trades and suppliers some of which I have a contract with and some it’s just a list of what they are going to do and how much or how long and a day rate. I don’t have a contract with the groundswork team for example but I do have a fixed price. I’ve been on-site every morning and he walks me through the plan for that day and we make any decisions that need to be made. I then go down at the end of the day and photograph everything that’s been done and note anything to raise the following day.

The issue is that they are leaving it on 24/7. Had they only switched it on when they were using the facilities it’d be a third of that cost. Therefore I’d raise it with their boss. You might need to swallow this bill but not 100% of the next one if they just leave it on.

I needed 300mm trench blocks 7.3N. I ought to have added that to my post. However smaller sizes also seem difficult to source.

Just a heads up on sourcing these in Scotland. It’s been almost impossible to source insulated blocks from any manufacturer locally in Scotland. I tried 8 different building supplies companies. They all appear to be on short supply or they’d only deliver a full artic load whereas I only needed 8 pallets. I also struggled to get any company south of the border to supply them without me organising the haulage which was going to cost a fortune. In the end I managed to find a company in Scotland who agreed to bring them in from Ireland as part of their regular delivery as a favour. If your build requires insulated blocks get ahead of the sourcing problem by sorting it out early. It’s delayed finishing our foundation wall by a week.

It’s why I won’t have anything like this that’s subscription based ever again.