I am not at all surprised that you have parted way with your builder. It’s a reflection of the building industry in the UK - building to what we may refer to ‘modern standards’ is just not in their skill set or their culture (quality install of insulation, air tightness and avoiding cold bridging) - hence the poor standard of even the more modern UK housing stock. Housing developers do not enforce quality standards on their contractors and self employed builders are self employed because they want to be their own boss - and generally do not take kindly to having quality standards imposed on them. Sadly builders like Robin Clevitt (You Tube) are a rare, sought after and expensive commodity.
Thanks Norman, I am not sure I called out any of these three areas that you mention but all do apply in our situation. Thankfully for most of it we are at a point where we can take the time to get the right level of fit and finish. To be fair to the builder we made this project more difficult for them as we tried to live in the house for the first stages and as we were doing some of the work we made the scheduling more complex. Our builder was good overall but had clearly not built to the insulation levels we had requested, as an example they started building the cavities too narrow (we specified 150mm with 145mm themoclass) but thankfully I noticed on the first row of bricks. I may cover the issues in more detail in the future as I am sure it could help others catch issues earlier in their projects. Most of our build is pretty true and square but the steels for our patio doors and gable end have a 20mm fall that we are going to have to pack out. My career has been working to much higher levels of precision, perhaps I just expect too much from the building industry?
Keep going dude! You're doing a great job 👍
I am not at all surprised that you have parted way with your builder. It’s a reflection of the building industry in the UK - building to what we may refer to ‘modern standards’ is just not in their skill set or their culture (quality install of insulation, air tightness and avoiding cold bridging) - hence the poor standard of even the more modern UK housing stock. Housing developers do not enforce quality standards on their contractors and self employed builders are self employed because they want to be their own boss - and generally do not take kindly to having quality standards imposed on them.
Sadly builders like Robin Clevitt (You Tube) are a rare, sought after and expensive commodity.
Thanks Norman, I am not sure I called out any of these three areas that you mention but all do apply in our situation. Thankfully for most of it we are at a point where we can take the time to get the right level of fit and finish. To be fair to the builder we made this project more difficult for them as we tried to live in the house for the first stages and as we were doing some of the work we made the scheduling more complex. Our builder was good overall but had clearly not built to the insulation levels we had requested, as an example they started building the cavities too narrow (we specified 150mm with 145mm themoclass) but thankfully I noticed on the first row of bricks. I may cover the issues in more detail in the future as I am sure it could help others catch issues earlier in their projects. Most of our build is pretty true and square but the steels for our patio doors and gable end have a 20mm fall that we are going to have to pack out. My career has been working to much higher levels of precision, perhaps I just expect too much from the building industry?
Wishing you and your family a Very Merry Christmas & and Prosperous New Year. Thank you for the vlogs 👍👏👍
Same to you!
To be fair, you never said which Christmas you would be in by.
That’s very true but our expectation was for this one.
Sounds like you've been let down by the builder?
It’s a long story that I may cover in detail later.