I demolished your house, but I'm not moving the debris!

[Jeremy Harris]

@epsilonGreedy, it's probably worth looking back at the history of this forum, and it's immediate predecessor, Ebuild.  I joined Ebuild in 2008, as a complete novice.  Others here were member of Ebuild long before I joined ( @caliwag and @Temp immediately spring to mind).  This forum is structured in the same way as Ebuild, but with a more robust management team and a determination to be fair, unbiased and non-commercial.  We're community run and funded to keep the forum free from any commercial influences.

 

It took me from 2008 to 2013 to acquire what I thought was enough knowledge to start a self-build.  I was hopelessly optimistic about my understanding of the domestic building sector and the way it works, even after 5 years of research (and I'm a 65 year old scientist, so acquisition of knowledge is in my DNA). 

 

I cannot believe that there are any shortcuts for self-builders in learning how trades work, and what a self builder needs to know in order to avoid the worst consequences of the inevitable problems that will definitely occur in every build.

[Onoff]

Look at what's already being passed on here by builders sharing experiences of what went wrong with e.g their slab pours. Others following on benefit from this immensely whether it be by being better equipped knowledge wise, stricter with their overseeing of contractors or just being mentally prepared for what can go wrong when it does.

[newhome]

9 minutes ago, Onoff said:

Look at what's already being passed on here by builders sharing experiences of what went wrong with e.g their slab pours. Others following on benefit from this immensely whether it be by being better equipped knowledge wise, stricter with their overseeing of contractors or just being mentally prepared for what can go wrong when it does.

 

Not just slab pours but almost anything that goes wrong is shared by so many for the benefit of others. Even more remarkably I even got a Welshman (and a Midlander) to visit bonnie Scotland to help me with my heating disaster. That was beyond the call of duty on any level! 

[epsilonGreedy]

10 minutes ago, Onoff said:

WTF would you want to? I live in a traditionally built house and have seen / been in a non traditional timber framed one too Passive standards. I know which one I'd rather live in. And that builder did a huge amount of the work himself.

 

 

You do at least provide the evidence some requested  ?

 

I feel that an endevour to produce an ordinary house within 18 months for under £1000 / sqm is significant but not here.

 

Had I arrived on this forum with an intention to create a passiv house bolted to the side of a Scottish sea cliff, insulated with Mongolian Yak wool and featuring a roof garden fertilized with unpasteurized Andean lama milk I would have been fast pathed into the forum cool gang.

[PeterW]

12 minutes ago, epsilonGreedy said:

 

I feel that an endevour to produce an ordinary house within 18 months for under £1000 / sqm is significant but not here.

 

Exactly the same remit I had so as I said, come and have a look 

[newhome]

14 minutes ago, epsilonGreedy said:

I feel that an endevour to produce an ordinary house within 18 months for under £1000 / sqm is significant but not here.

 

Had I arrived on this forum with an intention to create a passiv house bolted to the side of a Scottish sea cliff, insulated with Mongolian Yak wool and featuring a roof garden fertilized with unpasteurized Andean lama milk I would have been fast pathed into the forum cool gang.

 

That's BS frankly. My house isn't built to passiv standards and I did deliver it for under £1000 m2 and I've never felt sidelined because of that. And there are others here who have managed their builds for under £1000 m2 just fine. Why therefore is that anything 'significant'? It's not on everyone's agenda to deliver under £1000 m2 and much of that is often to do with what I call the vanity items. Those can add significant amounts to a build. 

 

Maybe however how someone is perceived is more about personal style than the type of build? 

[Stones]

 

4 hours ago, Mr Punter said:

@laurenco if you do go down the crush-on-site concrete route I would be really interested in how it works out in terms of time, costs, dust and noise etc as I have been put off in the past.  The build we have just done is town centre and it would not have been possible but I would consider it in the future.

 

I'd be very interested too, to see how it stacks up with what my builder told me.  I suppose a lot depends on the quantity of material that can be processed per hour, and the quality of said concrete...

 

I had a lot of rotten rock on my site, and top soil / sub soil riddled with stone.  It did cross my mind to riddle it, but I thought the cost would be prohibitive.  It really would be interesting to find out how it would have stacked up vs the cost of buying in and transporting aggregate to site.

 

@epsilonGreedy  I was looking back at your intro post.  Am I right in thinking this is your 1st self build?  I've built 6 now, and have learnt on all of them, not least how damn exhausting it is and the trade off between time / cost / sanity. There are many different ways to skin a cat...

 

 

[Dreadnaught]

@epsilonGreedy, could you consider starting a blog? Finding the time might be difficult I realise but if it’s photo laden it might not take too long. I for one would find it interesting. And I think you have a lot to contribute.

 

I joined the forum about the same time as you, and I have been consistently impressed that you seemed to be picking things up more quickly than me. I have already learnt a lot from the threads you started. And, as I said in a PM to you some time ago, I generally enjoy your contributions, and I recognise that some of them are somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as I think you yourself acknowledged. 

[Declan52]

29 minutes ago, epsilonGreedy said:

 

You do at least provide the evidence some requested  ?

 

I feel that an endevour to produce an ordinary house within 18 months for under £1000 / sqm is significant but not here.

 

Had I arrived on this forum with an intention to create a passiv house bolted to the side of a Scottish sea cliff, insulated with Mongolian Yak wool and featuring a roof garden fertilized with unpasteurized Andean lama milk I would have been fast pathed into the forum cool gang.

You are just being an arse now. Your costing of under £1000/ sqm doesn't really mean much. The main factor in how much your build will cost is it's location. Anyone building in the south East of England will have more to pay than I did in NI. It's just how it is.

 Mine isn't passiv. I just had a budget of just over £100k and built the best house I could with that.i kept it simple and doing most of the work myself I could put the money saved here into the fabric of the building. I have a wbs and a pellet stove so am about as far away Mongolian wool and roof gardens as you can get.

Apart from grand designs it wasn't a term I was even aware of. So to basically make fun of people here who have chosen to go down that route ain't on in my book. Why even spout all that. It might have seemed funny to you when you typed it out but it's really not. Comes across as a bit sad to be honest. Lots here have saved for years and spent all that time researching how they could build a passiv house and just because you have lifted a few blocks and ordered some concrete you think it is fine too post that.

[Mr Punter]

3 minutes ago, Dreadnaught said:

@epsilonGreedy, could you consider starting a blog? Finding the time might be difficult I realise but if it’s photo laden it might not take too long. I for one would find it interesting. And I think you have a lot to contribute.

 

I joined the forum about the same time as you, and I have been consistently impressed that you seemed to be picking things up more quickly than me. I have already learnt a lot from the threads you started. And, as I said in a PM to you some time ago, I generally enjoy your contributions, and I recognise that some of them are somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as I think you yourself acknowledged. 

 

See 

 

[Russell griffiths]

Getting back to crushing up a house I have recently just done a few rough sums for this and my conclusion was it wasn’t worth the effort 

 

my situation. 

If you look at my blog you will see I had an unexpected amount of concrete on site I didn’t know I had. 

 

So eight truck loads to remove from site. @ £140 per load cash. 

 

After all all this was gone I needed to make a Matt for the piling rig and also fill in under my floor

7 loads of crushed concrete bought in @ £140 plus vat per load, 

hire of skid mount crusher for 1 day £1200 plus vat plus fuel plus excavator to load crusher. 

Total about a couple of grand. 

Unless you have a lot to crush I would bite the bullet and get the big lumps removed and track all the bricks into the ground to make a nice hard standing to work on and park. 

 

In the  end I paid to remove two loads from site of the biggest nastiest lumps, the rest has been buried in areas I know are going to end up as parking. 

[epsilonGreedy]

1 hour ago, newhome said:

My house isn't built to passiv standards and I did deliver it for under £1000 m2

 

 

So you keep telling us, from what I understand your house is a cavernous mansion which distorts the significance of the per sqm cost.

[newhome]

2 minutes ago, epsilonGreedy said:

 

So you keep telling us, from what I understand your house is a cavernous mansion which distorts the significance of the per sqm cost.

 

No more than you keep banging on about yours .... and you ain't even built it yet! And it's hardly a cavernous mansion 

[Hecateh]

30 minutes ago, epsilonGreedy said:

 

So you keep telling us, from what I understand your house is a cavernous mansion which distorts the significance of the per sqm cost.

 

27 minutes ago, newhome said:

 

No more than you keep banging on about yours .... and you ain't even built it yet! And it's hardly a cavernous mansion 

It's a big house - not a huge house by any means.  It's cavernous because, for reasons beyond her control, she lives there alone.  

[Onoff]

3 hours ago, newhome said:

 

I even got a Welshman (and a Midlander) to visit bonnie Scotland to help me with my heating disaster. That was beyond the call of duty on any level! 

 

They've been known to travel a lot further for free beer & pies  I believe.....

 

The Mongolian Yak wool dig...what utter BS that is. From what I can make out most on here go the pir route. The eco warriors inhabit the GBF! Really interesting piece in the Passive House mag about how raft type foundations are finding favour with "traditional" builders as the materials can be strictly costed and ordered which you can't do with a trench. Also the labour can be less costly than a traditional build e.g you don't need say a time served "brickie" etc to lay sheets of eps, erect pre built walls or pump foam.

Edited August 23, 2018 by Onoff

[epsilonGreedy]

2 hours ago, Declan52 said:

Your costing of under £1000/ sqm doesn't really mean much. The main factor in how much your build will cost is it's location.

 

 

Not true, £ per sqm is a vital self build metric and why it is oft quoted here. If London is excluded I think regional build costs vary by say 15% across England and Scotland.

 

Eye balling the data here https://s3-eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/homebuilding-assets/prodwebsite/content/uploads/2011/09/16093731/Homebuilding-Build-Cost-Table-April-2018.pdf indicates:

 

Level of finish accounts for a 60% cost variation.

Build route (diy or main contractor) is surprisingly small and per meter costs drop 15% between small and large houses.

[PeterW]

32 minutes ago, epsilonGreedy said:

Level of finish accounts for a 60% cost variation

 

How do you get that from the data in that table ..??? I can’t see where it comes from. 

 

34 minutes ago, epsilonGreedy said:

Build route (diy or main contractor) is surprisingly small

 

It’s about 12%, or the margin a general builder would be looking for on a job 

 

36 minutes ago, epsilonGreedy said:

per meter costs drop 15% between small and large houses.

 

Yep - larger houses are cheaper per sqm as the prelims and underground drainage costs, services etc are pretty static whatever the size of the house. 

 

That table is very generic - worth a read of Spons to get the detail behind it and also the regional variation. 

[epsilonGreedy]

11 minutes ago, PeterW said:

How do you get that from the data in that table ..??? I can’t see where it comes from. 

 

 

Table Build Route C (Main contractor + subbies)

Region NE

2-story

Large house

Standard finish £833 

Excellent finish £1340

 

1340 / 833 = 60% increase

[Onoff]

Shouldn't this have been hived off to a separate thread? Crushing concrete excites me, the rest of it bores me silly tbh.

[ToughButterCup]

5 hours ago, Onoff said:

[...]

Crushing concrete excites me,

[...]

 

Clive, it's Friday. you've had a long week. Pub tonight?

[PeterW]

6 hours ago, epsilonGreedy said:

 

Table Build Route C (Main contractor + subbies)

Region NE

2-story

Large house

Standard finish £833 

Excellent finish £1340

 

1340 / 833 = 60% increase

 

Ahhh ok..!! 

 

They aren’t just about finish though - RICS used to include the standard builds and it was roof - concrete tiles vs roof - clay pan tile etc it’s not just about kitchens and bathrooms and bells and whistles but I can see where you were coming from. 

[Gone West]

7 hours ago, Onoff said:

Shouldn't this have been hived off to a separate thread? Crushing concrete excites me, the rest of it bores me silly tbh.

We're hoping to to have all the rubble crushed on site and used for our driveway etc.

[ToughButterCup]

12 hours ago, JSHarris said:

@epsilonGreedy

[...]  

I cannot believe that there are any shortcuts for self-builders in learning how trades work, and what a self builder needs to know in order to avoid the worst consequences of the inevitable problems that will definitely occur in every build.

 

That is almost the core of our endeavours. (The core is the emotional decision to start in the first place)

Theres talk everywhere of encouraging Life Long Learning. And what's self building about if not constant learning? In the school of hard knocks and oh sheeeet moments.

 

This thread is yet another of those.

There's good news embedded in all this. The more often we cope - even partly successfully - with  difficult episodes, the better we get at dealing with them (research evidence provided if you PM me). 

 

The main factor in encouraging success is a good supportive but straight talking network of  what is known in the trade as Critical Friends.  The art is in choosing your supportive Critical Friend. Both parties need to agree to act as such.  (More)

 

Anyone know of a place where we might start looking for a few Critical Friends ?

[jack]

7 minutes ago, recoveringacademic said:

Anyone know of a place where we might start looking for a few Critical Friends ?

 

GBF?

[Jeremy Harris]

1 hour ago, jack said:

 

GBF?

 

I looked in there the other day, when sitting in my car and bored, so was using the tablet that doesn't have any ad blocking.  What I found hilarious was that the top thread, which was absolutely massive, literally hundreds of posts, was about a poor chap suffering from serious health problems induced or exacerbated by particulates and smoke from his neighbours wood burning stove, yet the adverts at the top and bottom of the page were from a wood burning stove company!

 

Bet that's one advertiser that didn't realise that their ad was being directly linked to hundreds of critical posts about wood burning stoves...