Bricking it...New Build Novice.

[Matt60]

Hello to you all,

 

My name is Matt and I live in Norfolk with my wife and 2 young kids. We have completed on a plot with detailed planning permission and are currently having the plans re-drawn to better suit our needs and spec.

 

Although we own the plot, we can't really develop it without selling our current house which should be completed by the end of January, at which point we will move in to rented for the duration of the build.

 

The new house is a mixture of materials including a zinc roof, K-render, brick, with a slate roof to the garage section. It will be 2650 ft2 and will be a very bottom heavy 4 bedroom 2 storey house with a roof terrace overlooking the field views the the rear. My intention is to build to a semi passive haus standard and avoid an air source heat pump in favour of solar panels with a large battery bank and an electric boiler coupled with evacuated tube hot water system.

 

While having the plans re-drawn, I have tried to reduce costs as far as possible, purely as I know it will cost us more than I think, as it does for all bar the most experienced house builders which we are not. The house and garden will be planned to make it as maintenance free as possible, me and my wife work full-time and want to make the most of every spare moment we have.

 

We're hoping to get started in March 2021.

 

Regards,

 

Matt.

 

We are completely new to this 

[Temp]

Welcome to the forum Matt. Sounds like an interesting  project.

[Thorfun]

welcome. just a word of caution when planning timelines.....we had our planning application approved at the end of May and we've only just finished the building regulations drawings for submission! we have quite a complicated proposed build so that didn't help us but if you're redrawing the plans substantially and need to go through planning approval again and then need the BR drawings done I'm not sure you'll hit your Mar 2021 start date.

 

sorry to sound like a doom-monger but when we started this process a year ago I thought we'd be breaking ground June/July this year. now it looks like it won't be until Feb 21 and the one thing that I've learnt so far is that everything takes a lot longer than you think.

 

best of luck though and I hope you prove me wrong. it sounds an excellent project and I look forward to reading all about it. ?

[Gus Potter]

Nice part of the world Matt.

 

You'll get lots of good practical advice here (as I can attest to) that will help you make informed decisions... of which there will be plenty to make!

 

The main thing is to try and set yourselves up so that you have fun doing it. Keep posting if you can and take lots of photos for memories sake.

 

All the best with the project.

 

 

[Russell griffiths]

If you want to save money ditch the zinc roof

eye watering costs, and lots of alternatives out there. 

this is mine. 

If that’s the sort of thing your after. 

Ignore all the white bits I was hacking a window reveal about. 

[Buzz]

Hi Matt , we are also in Norfolk right on the cambs border, your project sounds amazing with the mixture of materials and finishes.  

Agree with the points above everything seems to take for ever in the design and planning stage . 

 

[Russell griffiths]

Have you thought of living on site, will probably save you £12-15000 in rent. 

[LSB]

We are in Suffolk so not far from you.

Your plans sound very exciting, but I agree with the comments about timing.  We got approval last July, but still haven't got the conditions discharged and then we have to do building regs.

We hoped to start in the spring, but I'm not sure that will happen.

What is your situation re CIL?

 

[freshy]

50 minutes ago, Russell griffiths said:

If you want to save money ditch the zinc roof

eye watering costs, and lots of alternatives out there. 

 

Please do share.. ?

[SuperJohnG]

2 hours ago, Matt60 said:

My intention is to build to a semi passive haus standard and avoid an air source heat pump in favour of solar panels with a large battery bank and an electric boiler coupled with evacuated tube hot water system

Welcome and defo sounds interesting.

 

Only from my own reading here but this sounds some alarm bells.

 

Why do you want to avoid ASHP? 

Solar panels - great but no Feed in tariff available   

Batteries - good but technology not quite there yet and expensive. 

Electric boiler - no COP? 

Solar evacuated tubes - ok in summer, but nobody really getting any use in the winter, hence that electric boiler will be working hard. 

 

 

I've not built yet ' due to break ground in jan. I'm going ASHP with some PV if I can afford but thats onky out of the goodness of my heart for the environment its not a cheaper route. 

 

 

[Matt60]

Thanks all and sorry for not getting back on here sooner, I have been ridiculously busy since my post but now my house move is out of the way I should be able to concentrate on the build now. Thanks for all the kind comments and advice.

 

To answer some of the points raised;

 

We should be able to start in March 21, we already had full detailed planning passed, (we could have started building that plan last year) the current application is just amendments to the already passed detailed plans and the determination date is the 12th of March. The drains and services started to be dug and brought in from November.

 

I can't ditch the zinc roof, it's part of the detailed planning and I know the planners will not allow it to be changed. There are 3 plots and my neighbour who is about a month ahead of us (footing poured last week) has already tried and failed with that. The cost will be about £20k more than slate and we made peace with that for the benefits and look.

 

We have not considered living on site, we have 2 kids and a dog and we own a ton of stuff - we moved in to a comfortable rented cottage last week and it is 11 doors up from our build. Yes it costs more, but the alternative is not workable for us and with the current pandemic if I have to shut the project down for months at least we are all living in comfort.

 

Situation re CIL? I'm not sure what you mean, it's a self build and has been accepted as such with a start date of November 2020 which is when the drain work started - we're not paying any CIL.

 

Solar panels - we don't need a feed-in tariff, the excess power will go to the batteries. The batteries I can get are the correct type, 3 years old and warrantied for 10, I am able to buy these substantially below what they are new. I may be able to supply these in the future if anyone is interested, but not before I have the ones I need. I have a friend who has a battery bank from this same source which he has been using for 3 years now and raves about it.

 

For every fan of ASHP, I seem to find 3 people who wish they hadn't. It seems to me that they can be noisy, unreliable and expensive to run. I've heard of people with £300 a month electricity bills to turn them in the winter and £1500 condensers failing after 18 months and a wait of 3 weeks to replacement. I have also been told it can be difficult to find many people qualified to service them and that this can be expensive too. I do also appreciate that they can work well in a well designed system with a well insulated and air tight build. 

 

I'm coming away from the idea of an electric boiler but not by much. I'm looking at a thermal heat store with 3 internal elements, powered by a combination of the solar thermal tubes, & PV panels/batteries to the internal elements. I'm looking at a bottle fed gas fire (wood burner look) with back boiler that will also contribute when in use and that would mean we could use that solely to heat the heat store if the electrical part of the system ever failed. With the tubes, panels and significant battery storage the top-up the system would need from the grid in the cooler months should be fairly limited to my thinking. This system also has only 2 central heating pumps as moving parts which are cheap and easy to replace and there are no service costs. The plan is to have under floor heating on both floors. I know this will not be cheap but I don't subscribe to the argument; "it will take 30 years before you get your money back"... I'd rather have an effective, cheap to run heating system than a £30k kitchen. I'm waiting for someone much cleverer than me to design the system and calculate how much it will cost to run. 

 

Thanks again for the replies.

 

 

[Russell griffiths]

With the zinc roof, it doesn’t need to be zinc to look like zinc, the planners wouldn’t know the difference in any of the materials, send them in samples and get it signed off, lots of cheaper alternatives at half the price. 

[SteamyTea]

12 hours ago, Matt60 said:

I'm waiting for someone much cleverer than me to design the system and calculate how much it will cost to run. 

Good luck with that, if you think it is hard to find someone that knows about ASHPs you will really struggle to find someone that has experience with multiple heat sources.

[Pocster]

You could do as I did 

Buy somewhere to live in ( with mortgage ) long term cheaper plus you get any capital appreciation. Also if you run over timescale it’s not an issue .

This has worked well for us .

Rent would of been 800pcm . Purchasing ( with a 40k deposit ) makes our interest only mortgage at 300pcm . Property is worth about 30k more than we paid for it after 3 years .

[Russdl]

13 hours ago, Matt60 said:

Situation re CIL? I'm not sure what you mean, it's a self build and has been accepted as such with a start date of November 2020 which is when the drain work started - we're not paying any CIL.

I think it depends on the local authority but our self build would definitely have attracted CIL if the CIL exemption paperwork hadn’t  been submitted. Hopefully you’re all sorted and don’t need to submit any forms but it may be worth checking because in our case if the forms weren’t submitted before commencement then there would have been no exemption. 

 

And still more forms to go for us when we complete. A failure to jump through any of these hoops at the correct stage will result in a big bill coming our way.  

[Matt60]

4 minutes ago, Russdl said:

I think it depends on the local authority but our self build would definitely have attracted CIL if the CIL exemption paperwork hadn’t  been submitted. Hopefully you’re all sorted and don’t need to submit any forms but it may be worth checking because in our case if the forms weren’t submitted before commencement then there would have been no exemption. 

 

And still more forms to go for us when we complete. A failure to jump through any of these hoops at the correct stage will result in a big bill coming our way.  

 

We submitted the forms, it was accepted as a self build and exemption granted.