Built my own house .....and loved it! AMA

[Tinkobell]

Realise this is not exactly a novelty these days....but wondered if any budding builders have any Q's. I loved building a house. Would do it all again if I could! Ask me anything about that highs, lows and any build info.

We took a 6 month tenancy lease about 4 doors away....in the process adopted a stray cat which is now ours. The build finished 2 weeks ahead of schedule within 12 months. We had to be out of the rental house on time.
The builders told me that they would clean up....but of course they didn't really. I was in there each night for at least a week getting rid of the dust. The dust worried me as DH is asthmatic, but it was ok in the end. Once you've tidied you become a bit of so and so about the reintroduction of new dust from sanding down, attending to snags etc.

@Fab....I very much like that approach. Developers often focus on the whistles & bells in order to look sexy for sale. But for your own home, whistles & bells date or fall out of fashion. Spend well on good structural materials. If you really love solidity, block & beam floors are lovely and offer brilliant sound proofing throughout the house. Good gutters and high quality roof tiles are also worth spending on.
For tiles and sanitary ware - keep in neutral and as timeless as you can.....these things date so quickly, even within 5 years.
Nice wood is worth spending on too for door leafs.

.....but you will still need to at least have realistic headline budgets or ranges for your kitchen, bathrooms etc. You can't live in a beautifully built shell with a microwave on the floor! Depends on your circumstances though.
I've a friend also doing a self build who is going to rent a large caravan.

That's brilliant to hear, @Tink, exactly my philosophy. I'd rather have a B&Q kitchen in a top quality structure! Apart from the block and beam flooring, what materials did you use for the structure?

Floors - ground floor block & beam, second and top floor - concrete hollowcore plank - dead solid.
Stairs - oak clad, steal chassis, glass balustrade.
Walls external: block inner skin, machined brick outer - looks like a handmade....Weinerberger.
Steel structure, beams and all roof joists.
Tiles roof: Spanish slate, cupa pizzaras. Lead hips and valleys.
Stone dressings: dry cast stone from Dorset.
I specified bricks and roof tiles (drove around looking at Other houses I liked) and i sourced the drycast stone.

It sounds gorgeous! Did the £1900/sqm include everything down to the floor coverings? Did you go for anything like underfloor heating? And what did you put on the floors?

Hardwired internet and quality re-routers is essential. Builds a good chance to sort out best fibre supplier and get great connectivity working throughout the whole house.....for Mumsnet of course 😁

Budget included everything, all coverings. No underfloor on top floor, it is nuking up there and not usable. We call it the Tenko room.....ought to have put aircon in, mistake!

Did you go for wooden or tiled floors, or carpet?

Could you have put in vents to let the heat out on the top floor?

Tiled large format concrete look tiles kitchen and hall. Everywhere else we've got sisal carpet.

Bathrooms obviously tiled too. Nope top floor just plain hot it's aleady vented but no good if it's 30 plus outside.

How long did you work with your architect on the design for before submitting for pp?

^^

@muddie..around 3 months I'd say from receipt of brief to plans submitted. It's well worth doing a mood board...,even just on your iPad or PC showing pictures colours, textures, materials etc that you like so that the architect can incorporate. One thing we wanted was a view straight through front door to rear garden which with a bit of an early nudge, he could do.

I love the straight through front door to garden idea. Are the doorways lined up with a clear view out into the garden?

Just going through the same process, lovely to hear a success story. My current quandry is UFH and flooring. Do you have UFH on the first floor? And how do you find the UFH with sisal covering?

And also - you said upthread that you used a project manager for the trades. Did you pay the individual trades separately and directly, or did it all go through the main contractor / PM? And on a similar note - did you buy materials yourself, eg windows and doors, or just specify what you want and the contractor purchased them?

@UFH I've looked into before and I think UFH is fine with sisal. It lets the heat through no problem, because it is an open weave. I think the main flooring that can be slightly problematic with UFH is floorboards, because the wood expands with the heat and can warp, and its no good really for suspended floors because the boards need to be thinner to let the heat through. In-wall heating, could be a solution for wooden floors.

That's at @LeakyLoftHatch, not @UFH!

Yep doors do all line up front to rear....it's great.

• Project Management - we were a bigger build. But builder supplied their own project manager and used their own subbies. Our building company was Polish and so we're all their trades. They were fastidious to the point of having OCD. The QS checked all the subbies credientials - e.g. Gas Safe and NIEIC certifications etc.

The builder sourced 90% of the materials but all of the payment and receipts went through him to enable us to just pay VAT exempt. He reclaims all the VAT paid (excludes carpets and some fitted items) We had monthly site meetings. At first these seemed a bit useless but as time went on they were invaluable....builder, architect, client and QS were always at the meetings which were around 3 hours per month.

Re: UFH and sisal. Yes you can do it. Some fitters won't though. The technique is to turn up the heating and allow expansion. The underlay is just the regular rubber crumb type, but it is glued down onto the concrete floor. I hope we never have to remove it!! The sisal is just cut and laid as normal. We've had no gaps, nothing funny. Works well. DD dropped a glass of water on hers though and beware, the stains are forever.

We specified what we wanted and the contractor bought. There's a few considerations on this point:-

• VAT exemption and reclaim (upthread)
• Site insurance....if you purchase bulky goods with your money and you leave those goods onsite they are not covered under the contracted builders site insurance. His site insurance ends the day you move in. I did actually purchase all the decorative light fittings (Lighting Styles online) they came on a pallet. They had to be stored in our rental house downstairs hall and loo as they wouldn't have been insured on the site and were very stealable.
• Contract Margin ....the builder knows what he wants to make from a job. In our case, this was more or less agreed upfront. If you go stripping out margin on goods then the contractor is just making margin on his labour cost. This is bugger all. Whilst it's important not to get fleeced, the financial health of the builder is vital....too many go bust mid-job, then you're into finding a mop-up contractor willing to take it on and most critically offer the new build insurance and guarentee which you need for resale and your lender will also demand.

Does the £1900 figure include demo of the old building?

Did you know it is called an 'enfilade', when all the doors line up?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enfilade_(architecture)

@Safeguarding ....yes it did. Demos took about 1 week, further ground works maybe another week. Week 3 foundations were being marked out then poured. We did have hidden asbestos which a specialist came in to bag up. This took £900 of contingency fund.