Dropping a boll%*k - what has been your best / worst moment

[Moonshine]

I haven't even started on site and just found out full WAC testing wasn't done for the soil samples (my mistake), so can't send the excavated earth to landfill.

 

Hopefully i can get it tested and back before i want to start!

 

Go on, what have been the forum's best / worst clangers, as i am sure i am going to have loads to come.

[patp]

Our best moment was when, having had the third buyer drop out of the sale of our house after we had signed our contract but before they signed theirs, we discovered that the local council were considering allowing our piece of land to be included in the building line!!!

 

We have had a very bad moment, but not our fault, when we found a four inch cast iron water main slap bang under the planned site. £17,000 from our bank account into Anglian Water's bank account was the, very painful, solution

[Bored Shopper]

Great moments - lots of them, particularly this huge sense of delight and relief when an item which you purchased on sale months ago is finally delivered - AND IT FITS!!! When your worktops turn out exactly as you designed them - even better! When the flow of the house is so nice you just love walking around. When the utility is everything you have ever dreamt of. When the sunlight starts reflecting from the mosaic panel which you have strategically placed there hoping it would work - and it did! Generally, we are still having this very great moment when I sit in the garden and look at the house and say to myself: "8875ng hell, we did build this!!".?

 

Heart-sinking-cold-sweat moments also were in abundance:

when our first team of scaffolders turned out to be a scum gang and got us into a massive row with our very sensitive neighbours and refused to take the scaffolding down to re-do it correctly.

When the careless builders left Knauf slab insulation laying around on site and left and we got a call at 00:30am from neighbours saying our insulation is flying along the street like in a ghost movie.

When a freak storm shuttered the low boundary wall and it collapsed onto the neighbours' car.When the builders stopped building and effectively left with our money.

When the LPA killed my so-well-designed sunroom as it brought the ridge height 500mm above neighbours treshold.

When walls started to crack due to wrongly placed steelwork.

When the boiler drowned in condensation and nearly died.

Oh, that's a big one - when BCO said that our front door (£3k!) was too narrow to pass the regulations, and this was not picked up neither by our shit of a PM nor by the all-awards-winning-grand-design windows company.... ?

[nod]

  On 25/02/2021 at 18:37, Bored Shopper said:

Great moments - lots of them, particularly this huge sense of delight and relief when an item which you purchased on sale months ago is finally delivered - AND IT FITS!!! When your worktops turn out exactly as you designed them - even better! When the flow of the house is so nice you just love walking around. When the utility is everything you have ever dreamt of. When the sunlight starts reflecting from the mosaic panel which you have strategically placed there hoping it would work - and it did! Generally, we are still having this very great moment when I sit in the garden and look at the house and say to myself: "8875ng hell, we did build this!!".?

 

Heart-sinking-cold-sweat moments also were in abundance:

when our first team of scaffolders turned out to be a scum gang and got us into a massive row with our very sensitive neighbours and refused to take the scaffolding down to re-do it correctly.

When the careless builders left Knauf slab insulation laying around on site and left and we got a call at 00:30am from neighbours saying our insulation is flying along the street like in a ghost movie.

When a freak storm shuttered the low boundary wall and it collapsed onto the neighbours' car.When the builders stopped building and effectively left with our money.

When the LPA killed my so-well-designed sunroom as it brought the ridge height 500mm above neighbours treshold.

When walls started to crack due to wrongly placed steelwork.

When the boiler drowned in condensation and nearly died.

Oh, that's a big one - when BCO said that our front door (£3k!) was too narrow to pass the regulations, and this was not picked up neither by our shit of a PM nor by the all-awards-winning-grand-design windows company.... ?

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I wonder if your pm could add the bottom bit to his CV

Love it ?

[Bored Shopper]

  On 25/02/2021 at 19:20, nod said:

I wonder if your pm could add the bottom bit to his CV

Love it ?

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 I mean, seriously! The guy tells you - "You don't worry, I'll watch over every aspect of the build, that's what you pay me for", and then never checks that the door opening in the brick/block walls is wide enough, never takes interest in the final design/dimensions of the windows/doors ordered (to be fair, we ordered windows and doors ourselves, not via PMM - but that was based on the opening dimensions he/builders provided and from the company he/builders recommended!). A professional PM would still double-check or at least point it out to the client that the actual door opening is a regulated thing and might be worth checking... And the windows company, who knew full well this is a newbuild so the openings are done from scratch and are subject to BCO approval, did not bother to point it out either. 

 

Funniest thing (not really, but hey) is that : imagine the installed door opening must be A, and the doorframe total width be B (to pass the BC). The window guys designed and drawn a narrow door of C and D dimensions, respectively (c.5cm narrower than BC regs), and the final manufactured end product was STILL DIFFERENT and had dimensions of E and F! We could not believe it when we compared actual measurements to the drawing and found the TOTAL difference betwen A/B and E/F to be 11cm!!!  And we raised this with window people. And they offered to make another door at half price (and they would take away the old one). Naturally, the reply from HWMBO cannot be quoted in polite society, but in the end they produced a new correct door free of charge. But we did get some grey hair...

[Big Jimbo]

Other than that Bored shopper had a blast, and would do it all again in the morning,?

[Bored Shopper]

To be honest, I start feeling the itch :)))) I'll probably need a month or so to manicure the garden into submission, and then I will have this buildlust 2.0 :))

Luckily, my sis is going to buy a house this year, so she has it coming :))))))))))))

[Gone West]

It wasn't our best moment when we found out that the whole insulated slab had to be cut up and removed .

 

 

[Moonshine]

  On 26/02/2021 at 09:04, PeterStarck said:

It wasn't our best moment when we found out that the whole insulated slab had to be cut up and removed .

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Ekk! at least that wasn't your dropped boll$%k, that is a horror story and has me starting to worry about my 300mm slab / retaining wall foundation.

Edited February 26, 2021 by Moonshine

[Gone West]

  On 26/02/2021 at 09:09, Moonshine said:

 

Ekk! at least that wasn't your dropped boll$%k, that is a horror storey and has been starting to worry about my 300mm slab / retaining wall foundation.

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Don't worry about it. It all fades into distant memory with all the other things to work out.

[Faz]

Pretty lame I know in comparison to the above but all I can muster is sticking 2 holes through the side of a lorry with the forks when offloading a pallet which was loaded too close to the sides.

 

Mind you - the aggregates lorry (thanks Mick George) demolished the front corner of Plot 2 yesterday...

 

 

[Oz07]

  On 26/02/2021 at 09:04, PeterStarck said:

It wasn't our best moment when we found out that the whole insulated slab had to be cut up and removed .

 

 

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Didnt cost you owt though!

[Oz07]

Put at SD lintel in with floor joists above. Realised too late, not that anyone else did. Came on here tried to get a crash course in Kn to kg. Paid an SE a couple of hundred quid to do proper calcs and work out all was ok. 

[joe90]

Well I have racked my brain and can honestly say nothing went wrong with our build, no mistakes made! Only problem the bricklayer had was the gable wall blew down two nights in a row in windy weather, they ended up propping it up with scaffold overnight whilst the Mortor was still “green”. Good news was I paid a fixed price so it cost me nothing !.(I was a project manager in a previous life and on site every day).

Edited February 26, 2021 by joe90

[Oz07]

Reading Churchill my early life atm. He says something like misfortune is a good thing. It teaches you lessons that if things went well you would not of learned. I always get a spec of lintel manufacturers nowadays and make sure that the always thorough and detail minded brick layers follow these lintel schedules. 

[joe90]

  On 26/02/2021 at 20:41, Oz07 said:

misfortune is a good thing. It teaches you lessons that if things went well you would not of learned.

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true, but at my age (ancient!) I have made all my mistakes ?.

[Dave Jones]

  On 25/02/2021 at 19:20, nod said:

I wonder if your pm could add the bottom bit to his CV

Love it ?

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who was responsible for the drawings stating the front door opening size ?

[Dave Jones]

biggest mistake ive learned is never to take any notice whatsoever of the architect once the build has started. What's on paper doesn't always translate to reality. Find good trades, pay them well and use their knowledge wisely.

 

 

[nod]

  On 28/02/2021 at 13:31, Dave Jones said:

biggest mistake ive learned is never to take any notice whatsoever of the architect once the build has started. What's on paper doesn't always translate to reality. Find good trades, pay them well and use their knowledge wisely.

 

 

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Definitely 

 

My brother is a Brickie 

But I wouldn’t recommend him to anyone ?

[ToughButterCup]

  On 25/02/2021 at 17:24, Moonshine said:

...

Go on, what have been the forum's best / worst clangers, as i am sure i am going to have loads to come.

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Here you are ..... One of the many steep learning curves we have experienced. 

 

More than one bollock (lets see if gonad gets through the filter )  dropped here.....  Loads more images on the thread linked below.

This is the thread that deals with it.

 

3 years later, and I can honestly say that, although traumatic at the time, a lot of good came out of it.  Our bank balance hurts more than it should perhaps.

 

But, as they say,  if ya can't take a joke, don't start a self-build.

[ProDave]

I guess a disappointment was when my first ebay bargain ASHP was found to be dead 11 months after buying it (first time trying to fire it up)  It had been sold by a business seller as "new"

 

It turned out it was being sold cheap as end of line as it was a discontinued model and no longer supported. Tough. 

 

Then some good fortune when I found that the company I had bought it from was owned by a much larger company that owns a well know builders merchant.  An email to the CEO of the parent company resulted in a replacement, current model ASHP being delivered as a replacement.

 

Previous house now, still related to heating, I self installed a new oil boiler.  After 2 months it stopped working.  So I took the burner out to investigate.  I was somewhat surprised when a load of water came out as I withdrew the burner.  Cleaning it all up and emptying it, revealed a pin hole in a welded seam, and water was slowly drip drip dripping into the burner chamber and filling it up.  the boiler manufacturer not only replaced it, but paid for a plumber to remove the dud one and fit the replacement.

 

Current disappointment is render issues I have, an ongoing discussion with the supplier is in progress......

[Dave Jones]

render... god i hate that stuff.

[Bored Shopper]

  On 28/02/2021 at 13:27, Dave Jones said:

 

who was responsible for the drawings stating the front door opening size ?

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 Windows guys came to the site, took all the measurements, spoke to the builders to ensure the openings are as seen and no further modifications are made, received reassurances that if needed the openings can still be tweaked a bit. Then they produced the drawings... And then they manufactured it randomly...

Oh, and they installed the utility-to-garage door so that it opens INTO the garage which makes it impossible to get out of the car ?? When we looked at the drawings, it did show opening into the house, not into garage, but they never checked   anyway, they've re-done it as part of the new front door package to make up for the blunder.

("someone else's common sense" etc etc...)

[Dave Jones]

  On 28/02/2021 at 17:27, Bored Shopper said:

 Windows guys came to the site, took all the measurements, spoke to the builders to ensure the openings are as seen and no further modifications are made, received reassurances that if needed the openings can still be tweaked a bit. Then they produced the drawings... And then they manufactured it randomly...

Oh, and they installed the utility-to-garage door so that it opens INTO the garage which makes it impossible to get out of the car ?? When we looked at the drawings, it did show opening into the house, not into garage, but they never checked   anyway, they've re-done it as part of the new front door package to make up for the blunder.

("someone else's common sense" etc etc...)

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Reason I ask, building control normally pick up obvious errors on drawings like narrow doors, too close to boundary etc (who did the drawings ?) when you send them plans before work is started.

[Bored Shopper]

  On 28/02/2021 at 17:36, Dave Jones said:

 

Reason I ask, building control normally pick up obvious errors on drawings like narrow doors, too close to boundary etc (who did the drawings ?) when you send them plans before work is started.

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This is an interesting point. BC had seen our plans with the front door opening width clearly stated and did not bat an eye lid. If the door were to be manufactured to fit that opening precisely, the width of the clear space to pass (which is Part ** regulated) would still be too narrow by 2-3 cm!!  Naturally, when the door was manufactured even narrower, it all went pearshaped.
However, I won't be surprised, as the BCO only realised our project does (originally) included a garage when we actually built one. He was hugely surprised when he turned up on site one day and saw it...