Brand new house built in 12 weeks
Discussion
I've been having a look at some of the other build threads on here and thought I might share my own (if people are interested)
Background.
We actually built the house from new back in 2014 and due to having a time restricted offer on our previous house, we ended up selling our house without even having bought our new place - so we were living with my parents for the duration. Not ideal.
We found a site with planning permission but the house wasn't exactly to our liking but we thought we would take a punt, make some (ok, lots) of changes and then squeeze the builder to build it as fast as he could. We went from foundations to finished in about 3 months which looking back, was a bit mad, as you have so many construction and decor decisions to make during that time.
Key factors we were looking for in the new build.
- open plan living space - centered around the kitchen, but with vaulted ceiling sun room dining (with window seating) and an adjoining lounge area.
- the detached garage would actually be a purpose built outhouse and actually a living space rather than a garage, but looking like a garage from the front view (fully insulated, spotlights, plastered, skirting etc and wired for a potential future home cinema)
- a Master suite - over 30ft long to include bedroom, ensuite and large walk in wardrobe
- a home for the av enthusiast - a separate cinema room with 104" screen/JVC projector/Dolby Atmos sound system and another more discreet lounge AV system, again with Dolby Atmos, but with more discreet speaker sizes - and all rooms would be interconnected with CAT6 and HDMI routing meaning we could distribute audio and video to any room in the house (and into the detached garage if we so wished)
Once we started to design the house (within reasonable assumtion to the previously approved design) we decided to increase the ground floor to 9ft ceilings to create a more spacious feel, vault the ceiling in the sunroom, extend the kitchen area to ensure we could accomodate an island and build above the kitchen extension to make the upstairs kids bedrooms bigger.
Overall, the interior sqft ended up about 2300 and the exterior building was just under 300sqft.
So thats the background. I documented everything with tons of pictures as the build went along so if you guys are interested in my build, I'll dig them out and put them on here with a bit of a walk through/talk through of what we did as we went along. Anyone interested?
Background.
We actually built the house from new back in 2014 and due to having a time restricted offer on our previous house, we ended up selling our house without even having bought our new place - so we were living with my parents for the duration. Not ideal.
We found a site with planning permission but the house wasn't exactly to our liking but we thought we would take a punt, make some (ok, lots) of changes and then squeeze the builder to build it as fast as he could. We went from foundations to finished in about 3 months which looking back, was a bit mad, as you have so many construction and decor decisions to make during that time.
Key factors we were looking for in the new build.
- open plan living space - centered around the kitchen, but with vaulted ceiling sun room dining (with window seating) and an adjoining lounge area.
- the detached garage would actually be a purpose built outhouse and actually a living space rather than a garage, but looking like a garage from the front view (fully insulated, spotlights, plastered, skirting etc and wired for a potential future home cinema)
- a Master suite - over 30ft long to include bedroom, ensuite and large walk in wardrobe
- a home for the av enthusiast - a separate cinema room with 104" screen/JVC projector/Dolby Atmos sound system and another more discreet lounge AV system, again with Dolby Atmos, but with more discreet speaker sizes - and all rooms would be interconnected with CAT6 and HDMI routing meaning we could distribute audio and video to any room in the house (and into the detached garage if we so wished)
Once we started to design the house (within reasonable assumtion to the previously approved design) we decided to increase the ground floor to 9ft ceilings to create a more spacious feel, vault the ceiling in the sunroom, extend the kitchen area to ensure we could accomodate an island and build above the kitchen extension to make the upstairs kids bedrooms bigger.
Overall, the interior sqft ended up about 2300 and the exterior building was just under 300sqft.
So thats the background. I documented everything with tons of pictures as the build went along so if you guys are interested in my build, I'll dig them out and put them on here with a bit of a walk through/talk through of what we did as we went along. Anyone interested?
soupdragon1 said:
So thats the background. I documented everything with tons of pictures as the build went along so if you guys are interested in my build, I'll dig them out and put them on here with a bit of a walk through/talk through of what we did as we went along. Anyone interested?
YES!Get posting!
Here's a couple of starter pics to give a flavour of what we did...
A couple of 'moved in pics'
Those should give you a flavour for what we did. It'll be a bit of work for me to document the full build but if enough people are interested I'll put the effort in. I'm proud of what we achieved so I'm happy to share.
A couple of 'moved in pics'
Those should give you a flavour for what we did. It'll be a bit of work for me to document the full build but if enough people are interested I'll put the effort in. I'm proud of what we achieved so I'm happy to share.
My wife works for the HCA - one of their key missions at the moment is to prove that you can build houses, en mass, quicker than your regulars like Taylor Wimpey et al manage.
Off site pre-fab/SIPS build is well up there to getting a good product quickly.
How have you found the insurance process? Any problems getting coverage on a house of 'non-standard construction'?
Off site pre-fab/SIPS build is well up there to getting a good product quickly.
How have you found the insurance process? Any problems getting coverage on a house of 'non-standard construction'?
Venom said:
My wife works for the HCA - one of their key missions at the moment is to prove that you can build houses, en mass, quicker than your regulars like Taylor Wimpey et al manage.
Off site pre-fab/SIPS build is well up there to getting a good product quickly.
How have you found the insurance process? Any problems getting coverage on a house of 'non-standard construction'?
I'm not sure about insurance as we had a building contractor who looked after all that stuff. Although I think that timber frame construction is pretty standard these days anyway? Timber frame was absolutely essential for us to get the house built quickly and for us to move out of my parents house. Any time we wanted a structural change. the builder was able to run it past the fabricator and get us a revised cost within 24hrs. Even when we completely changed the layout at the start, the re-costed price came back within 48hrs which was mighty impressive. Off site pre-fab/SIPS build is well up there to getting a good product quickly.
How have you found the insurance process? Any problems getting coverage on a house of 'non-standard construction'?
Once we signed off the construction, it was all fixed priced from there so it was good that there were no hidden costs - any issues that arose (weather delays etc) were for the builder to worry about. We then agreed prices for any changes. Eg. How much for a half wall between the garage and the house? He would come back with a price and that would be it - once we agreed, no change. This took a lot of stress away from us from a financial point of view.
You mention about speed of house building. The builder managed to build the entire house, garage and full groundworks quicker than the kitchen provider was able to build the kitchen lol! We ended up moving in with no worktops installed - just bits of board so that we had somewhere to set the kettle and toaster
Do you have anymore snaps of the build process?
At the moment here in Norway there seems to be a bit of a thing for companies popping up that offer pre-fabricated houses, the fabrications process is done at their factories in Lithuania/Estonia and then sent over by lorry, I've watched a crew of 6 guys build the entire outer shell of a house in 2 days.
Also the father in law runs a construction business, bought some land in the mountains and built three high spec cabins on the ski slopes, same process even though it was a bit more bespoke, a team of guys turned up with the lorry with the outside walls and roof. It actually seems like a really cost effective way of doing things.
At the moment here in Norway there seems to be a bit of a thing for companies popping up that offer pre-fabricated houses, the fabrications process is done at their factories in Lithuania/Estonia and then sent over by lorry, I've watched a crew of 6 guys build the entire outer shell of a house in 2 days.
Also the father in law runs a construction business, bought some land in the mountains and built three high spec cabins on the ski slopes, same process even though it was a bit more bespoke, a team of guys turned up with the lorry with the outside walls and roof. It actually seems like a really cost effective way of doing things.
NordicCrankShaft said:
Do you have anymore snaps of the build process?
At the moment here in Norway there seems to be a bit of a thing for companies popping up that offer pre-fabricated houses, the fabrications process is done at their factories in Lithuania/Estonia and then sent over by lorry, I've watched a crew of 6 guys build the entire outer shell of a house in 2 days.
Also the father in law runs a construction business, bought some land in the mountains and built three high spec cabins on the ski slopes, same process even though it was a bit more bespoke, a team of guys turned up with the lorry with the outside walls and roof. It actually seems like a really cost effective way of doing things.
I've about 1,000 snaps of the build process - will that be enough?! At the moment here in Norway there seems to be a bit of a thing for companies popping up that offer pre-fabricated houses, the fabrications process is done at their factories in Lithuania/Estonia and then sent over by lorry, I've watched a crew of 6 guys build the entire outer shell of a house in 2 days.
Also the father in law runs a construction business, bought some land in the mountains and built three high spec cabins on the ski slopes, same process even though it was a bit more bespoke, a team of guys turned up with the lorry with the outside walls and roof. It actually seems like a really cost effective way of doing things.
I've seen a few TV shows with pre-fabricated houses - very impressive how they do it. Even the tiling can be done before the house is put together - mental!
Well there seems to be a bit of interest so I'll carry on with the thread and update what we did.
I guess a good place to start would be the actual floor plan.
I'm sure I have the actual plans tucked away in a file somewhere with the elevations etc but here's something I threw together on excel to give you an idea of the layout we went for on both floors.
The yellow shaded area's are where we deviated from the original plan. You can see the kitchen is only a small area of about 70sqft and the area above (kids bedroom) also extended by the same. These 2 areas didn't exist in the original 'approved' plans but because the extension was at the rear of the house, and it was only bringing this section level with the rest of the rear, it wasn't a problem planning wise.
This small extension only cost us about £6k extra as we did it before any work had taken place. It would probably cost more like £30k if we decided to retrofit down the line so a massive benefit doing this straight away, rather than later.
The other yellow area's upstairs is basically a reconfigured section to make our 'master suite' so that the bedroom flows into the ensuite and then continues on into the dressing room. Its designed in such a way that the dressing room can be made into another bedroom (door into landing is already installed but deactivated and hid behind wardrobes) and the ensuite could turn into a jack and jill ensuite between the 2 bedrooms.
The reason for this design is to maximise flexibility if we ever sell the house - you could make this an extra bedroom if you had a big family for example. The cinema room and/or formal dining room are easily made into bedrooms as well as they are basically spare rooms - the right hand side of the ground floor is more than sufficient for day to day family living. And then we made a cutaway space in the main hallway/landing which runs 18ft from floor to ceiling. Due to the only light in the hallway coming from the front door and its 2 side windows, this lets more light into what would otherwise had been a dark hallway with very little natural light.
As I go through the build, you will see lots of examples of meticulous planning and design to ensure the house is a home. This goes right down to having outdoor electric socket beside the outside tap - no need to run an extension cable outside when I can just connect the power washer to the outdoor socket and the water feed is in the exact same place.
Things like Christmas trees, light etc....where will they go and where do we want power for them? I have power above my kitchen cabinets which is controlled by a lightswitch so when its christmas, you walk into the living room and switch the main lights and the Christmas lights come on from the same wall socket.
We didn't leave any stone unturned when it came to how we want to live in the house - whether it be from an AV point of view or a 'useful' point of view, the house was designed from the ground up to suit our family (and subsequent family if we ever sell it)
Poor wifi in the garage? Not a problem - there is a sealed tube that runs from the lounge, under the patio, into the garage and has HDMI and cat 6 which will connect it to the broadband switcher which feeds from the router and goes all around the house
But anyway, thats all for later. It might take me a while going through all the steps and I'll update as and when I've got time, but here are the floor plans to get the ball rolling
(pics in next post)
I guess a good place to start would be the actual floor plan.
I'm sure I have the actual plans tucked away in a file somewhere with the elevations etc but here's something I threw together on excel to give you an idea of the layout we went for on both floors.
The yellow shaded area's are where we deviated from the original plan. You can see the kitchen is only a small area of about 70sqft and the area above (kids bedroom) also extended by the same. These 2 areas didn't exist in the original 'approved' plans but because the extension was at the rear of the house, and it was only bringing this section level with the rest of the rear, it wasn't a problem planning wise.
This small extension only cost us about £6k extra as we did it before any work had taken place. It would probably cost more like £30k if we decided to retrofit down the line so a massive benefit doing this straight away, rather than later.
The other yellow area's upstairs is basically a reconfigured section to make our 'master suite' so that the bedroom flows into the ensuite and then continues on into the dressing room. Its designed in such a way that the dressing room can be made into another bedroom (door into landing is already installed but deactivated and hid behind wardrobes) and the ensuite could turn into a jack and jill ensuite between the 2 bedrooms.
The reason for this design is to maximise flexibility if we ever sell the house - you could make this an extra bedroom if you had a big family for example. The cinema room and/or formal dining room are easily made into bedrooms as well as they are basically spare rooms - the right hand side of the ground floor is more than sufficient for day to day family living. And then we made a cutaway space in the main hallway/landing which runs 18ft from floor to ceiling. Due to the only light in the hallway coming from the front door and its 2 side windows, this lets more light into what would otherwise had been a dark hallway with very little natural light.
As I go through the build, you will see lots of examples of meticulous planning and design to ensure the house is a home. This goes right down to having outdoor electric socket beside the outside tap - no need to run an extension cable outside when I can just connect the power washer to the outdoor socket and the water feed is in the exact same place.
Things like Christmas trees, light etc....where will they go and where do we want power for them? I have power above my kitchen cabinets which is controlled by a lightswitch so when its christmas, you walk into the living room and switch the main lights and the Christmas lights come on from the same wall socket.
We didn't leave any stone unturned when it came to how we want to live in the house - whether it be from an AV point of view or a 'useful' point of view, the house was designed from the ground up to suit our family (and subsequent family if we ever sell it)
Poor wifi in the garage? Not a problem - there is a sealed tube that runs from the lounge, under the patio, into the garage and has HDMI and cat 6 which will connect it to the broadband switcher which feeds from the router and goes all around the house
But anyway, thats all for later. It might take me a while going through all the steps and I'll update as and when I've got time, but here are the floor plans to get the ball rolling
(pics in next post)
was8v said:
What was the cost sq/m for that spec and doing it so quickly?
Going to be doing it myself very soon. However I don't need to be so fast as the plot is in the family and we have a house....
I wasn't going to mention price for a little while into the thread and was going to let people have a guess first Going to be doing it myself very soon. However I don't need to be so fast as the plot is in the family and we have a house....
For example - part of the planning was a rough render on the outside which is in keeping with neighbouring houses. I'm not a fan of this type of render to be honest but on the otherhand, its very cost effective. This frees up money to spend on the interior so while the kerb appeal isn't exactly my preference, the interior has some nice luxury touches.
But I'll come to all the soon enough hopefully!
Definitely intereted in this thread.
I want to build a house at some point, probably in 4-5 years time if I get the chance. I need to find some land first of all, of course, and some money.
but the prospect of it all being completed in 12 weeks is VERY appealing as a build choice, as that could make all the difference if we got to the position of selling our house and not then having to live in someone else's pockets long term!
I want to build a house at some point, probably in 4-5 years time if I get the chance. I need to find some land first of all, of course, and some money.
but the prospect of it all being completed in 12 weeks is VERY appealing as a build choice, as that could make all the difference if we got to the position of selling our house and not then having to live in someone else's pockets long term!
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