If red cedar is good enough for roof shingles, it should be fine for window frames. The window frames in my old house back in Staffs were made of oak (built 191icon_cool.gif. The cills had weathered and opened along the grain but you'd have thought they were cast in concrete.

We don't know how to do timber frame in this country I'm afraid, usually kits made up in a factory slapped together by semi-skilled wood butchers.

Saw a Huf Haus being erected on Grand Designs, well impressive that was.
Everything fitted perfectly first time.
When they finished they swept the house out completely and then cleaned out their tool boxes and the van ... and when everything was neat and tidy, they went.

That was brilliant, wasn't it?

And they had neat little German waistcoats too.

Had a client a few years ago who built one as a self build project, very nice.

My little daydream is: once I've got me Euromillions, I instruct a lawyer to buy a house that sits on the seafront at Beesands, South Devon. I'm not bothered how much they want for the house, I'll just pay the price. Once that's all sorted, I'll nip over to see Mr Huf and get him to design me a house. Then it's back to Devon to present the plans to demolish the existing [is[/ihitheap and build me Huf. No doubt there'll be a few bungs along the way but it's nowt that good old Euromillions can't handle.

Huf not only build extremely stylish houses, they are also incredibly energy-efficient

I wasn't aware Huf manufactured for self-builds, I thought they controlled the whole process themselves

It was shown again last night so I just had to watch it again.
Embarrassing when they had to wait for the British firm (Non-English-speaking Bosnian driver) to deliver the concrete [ulate[/u.
Good job that was months before the delivery of the actual house.

They had quoted one week for the actual construction, so it was quite funny when they finished so fast (4 days from concrete raft to watertight structure) that Kevin McCloud nearly missed it.

IIRC, he was really sceptical to start with, but was won over by the end.

OK, I had a client who bought a Huf house for himself to live in which was built on a piece of land he bought and we provided the inspection and warranty for it. The policy we flogged him was a 'self build warranty' as Huf are not registered in UK for warranty purposes and the guy had to have one for his mortgage.

Sorry for any confusion.

So a company that could rip the ar[is[/ie out of the vast majority of UK building companies can't get "registered" for warranty purposes?

Sounds sadly about right

Are these Huf jobs expensive? They certainly look it.

Oh yes, £1m+ (plus land) ain't out of the ordinary.

On the flip side, we also have [url=http://www.onecommunityranch.org/low-impact-development/Earth Pods[/url

Where did you see 'can't' in my post, I said 'aren't'. They probably could if they wished. To get a mortgage in this country a warranty is needed from a UK based insurance provider such as NHBC, Premier or similar and most provide a 'self build' warranty, which is actually a bit misleading as anyone 'self building' has to have professional input, either as some form of project management or a full build package. Either way, an inspection regime to satisfy the warranty & building control is necessary no matter how 'genius' the builder is.

Modern take on the stuff archaeologists are digging up and wetting themselves over currently.

Straw bale and cobb houses have been built in these parts for centuries and are still being built today.

Sorry, I suppose the individual nature of a Huf Haus makes it not worth the company's while in obtaining necessary warranties. Whereas the Barratts, David Wilsons et al find it easier with their one-size fits all builds?

The big boys go for what is known as 'type approval' which requires them only to meet local planning for such as exterior brick/stone and roof materials to suit the local vernacular, the internal layouts, structural calculations for roofs etc are all done for the repetitive production. The only thing they cannot do en mass is foundation designs, which are determined locally.

If anyone want individuality, they need to look at local builders, some of whom are vastly superior to the big nationals in quality and usually give more square footage for a similar price.

A lot of the clearance schemes are where the high rise blocks are stricturally unsound and the local demand is for low rise, a bigger concern is organisations making a decision to only build 2 bed+ properties and the impact of the Underoccupancy legislation.

That reminds me of a project I worked on in the late 70's in a high rise block in Hebburn, someone at the council had decided that it would be a very good idea to convert dozens of one and two bed flats into three and four bed "maisonette's" (nice 1970s word) by simply shuffling around some internal walls and then cutting through each floor slab to put some internal stairs in, a single floor flat would become a two storey house inside a block of flats, twelve storeys would give you six layers of maisonettes, one on top of the other, bobs your uncle.

It coincided with a period of very high winds that winter and this particular block of flats would actually move in the wind, if you stood on the top floor and watched the horizon carefully you could actually see it moving - then some of the labourers who were drilling and cutting through the concrete floors started to question the logic behind cutting several big holes in every second floor when it was well known that the floors were part of the structural integrity of the 1950s poured concrete tower blocks, when the building was already shaking with pneumatic hammers, dust and noise levels at levels that wouldn't be tolerated today, and then the wind started to blow hard, you felt a bit vulnerable working on the top floor.

Fantastic views of the Tyne though.

Some of the internal walls were likely to be acting as diaphragm walls as well. If the council there is anything like North Lincs the designers had probably just been moved from street cleaning to avoid laying them off.

It was actually an interesting time to work in the building trade, there were lots of "innovations" being introduced especially in the field of quick and cheap social house building, as I've mentioned before the billions that must have been spent at that time is staggering when you look at what has happened since, unfortunately we now look back and realise that a lot of that "innovation" was money just burned or thrown down the drain or just spent for the sake of getting a task done quicker or cheaper or in mass produced style.

One that springs to mind is what we all affectionately came to know as "donkeys breakfast" partition walls - pre-manufactured panels would be brought to site in standard sizes and literally just nailed into place while the shell of the building was going up, you could divide up a ground floor into rooms in about an hour as long as all the panels went in the right place.

Inside each two inch thick pre-boarded panel were conduits for our cables, pipes for central heating were attached to the surface after installation, inside each two inch thick panel was the donkeys breakfast, basically shredded straw that was packed between the plasterboards and would, the designers promised offer high levels of insulation - very true.

Problems came when measurements were out or if conduits weren't where they should be, if you had to cut a hole anywhere in the panel then tons of shredded straw would pour out of the wall and not stop until the panel was empty and believe me, most of the panels needed cutting into at some point - by the time the sub-trades had finished most houses were knee deep in shredded pieces of straw and most of the internal walls would be empty again.

But it wasn't just the 1970s where crazy techniques had been tried out - a favourite was when rennovating hundreds of flats in areas of Newcastle that had been built at the turn of the 1900's, what looked like normal semi-detached houses would be four flats and the floor between the flats would not be a hollow cavity as you might expect but would be filled with whatever was lying around on the site, usually tons of sand to deaden the noise from upstairs, all held in place by laths and plaster - you can imagine what happens when you cut a hole in a ground floor ceiling in those sort of dwellings.

I used to love my job

You don't reckon they'd be able to knock me summat up for a hundred grand, then?

They do a nice garden shed, but I think it's an add-on to a full house

IIRC, the whopper that was erected on [iGrand Designs[/i was in the region of €450k ... but as the couple buying it were paying in £, as the £ went down they had to find a bit more dosh.