The on going paper trail....

Im starting to pray at this stage that we will have the site handed over for next week. At the moment the deeds are with the land owners solicitor, i spoke to the land owner last thursday and he assured me that he would be signing them today. I reckon it will probably take two to three days from today for the deeds to be issued to my solicitor.
My solicitor has requistioned a cheque from the bank in order to pay for the site, met with the bank today to sign deed of assignment and hand over the life assurance policy documents. They also wanted proof of our balance of funds, letter from my engineer and a breakdown of the construction costs (the cost plan on google pages). They said they will post it this evening to their head office and should have news in two to three days regarding the cheque!
There is so much unforseen work to this stage! Ill be glad to have it handed over i can relax then!!!!!

Plans of house my brother's impressions

Self build house insurance & Mortgage protection

Had no idea of this initially, and with http://www.askaboutmoney.com/, http://www.boards.ie/ got some great advice; these sites are invaluable to one and all, to find out experiences and discuss matters with people going through the same procss as yourself.

Mortgage Protection
For the mortgage protection insurance i consulted the following link http://www.askaboutmoney.com/showthread.php?t=23074
From peoples advise here; i went and priced a few of the companys mentioned, eventually went with LA Brokers very friendly and great customer service. www.LABrokers.ie. The mortgage company requires you to take out this protection and will not issue initial payment until this is in place, be wary of the mortgage company trying to sell you their policy as your are not obliged to take it and will most likley get better value elsewhere. 35Year mortgage on €308,000 cost €268.02 per annum with a first year discount of €174.21. My mortgage company were quoting me more than double the yearly payout.

Self Build Insurance
For the self build house insurance i consulted askaboutmoney and boards.ie again very useful info there also http://www.selfbuildinireland.com/article.php?start=0&articleId=10 i priced three companys one of which was the wright group on the above link, also priced FBD and campion insurance there was very little difference in price with any of them, and it generally works out at €1.00 /sqft. This covers public and employers liability and storm and theft damage make sure to read each policy to see who has the best offers to suit you. In general you will need this insurance to cover you for the period of the build, even if your contractors have their own insurance. Once again the mortgage company will require this to be in place prior to work starting on site, in some cases they do not require the insurance policy until after you have drawn down the site value!

Building Programme / Schedule

Guys,

Have put together a building schedule for the works it may or may not be of use i will be using it to track against my actuals to see how it goes. Who would have guessed that the initial planning stages would have taken so long!!! Will also be putting up a tracker for budget v's actual costs and will update them every few weeks to keep them live.
Have posted up the budget tracker too have not protected this file so it should be of help to people; the budget costs come directly from the cost plan previously loaded on the googlepages site.

http://jollyman2.googlepages.com/home

Deeds, deeds and more deeds

I prematurely posted earlier in the month saying that we were ready to start, and as i am starting to learn nothing seems to run smoothly or on time. I hope this is not an omen for the rest of the build!! (1 year and 6 months since we initially decided to purchase the site!!!!!)

At the moment, contracts are signed and the deeds are with the landowner awaiting signature for the last two weeks. I have the mortgage ready to go to pay the balance on the site €108,000. The mortgage company are unwilling to let me draw down any more than this amount so i will have to fund the initial stage to the floors out of our pocket. Even though the site is valued at €250,000 the mortgage company will only let me drawdown 90% of the site purchase value for now. They have told me once the floors are in i can claim 90% of the site valuation value and 100% of the construction costs to that stage of which they dont require back up for, once its signed off by my engineer.

I will be setting up accounts with concrete supplier builders merchants i will also have to pay my Man for the excavation and the fencing company before i get the mortgage money across.

What to and what not to include....

So why do we have to consider this:

Basically we want to reduce our CO2 emissions, and the government have targeted houses as one of the main problem areas associated with this. As a result they have introduced the changes to part L of the building regulations.
http://www.lcea.ie/Ber.asp
These have to be met by all new house builds

Heating Method

Have thought long and hard about this one, not really into the technical aspects of all the systems. It probably is the wrong point of view to have, but i have lived in our home house for the last seven years the minimum spec of aeroboard, and no insualation in the roof until this year, we have never been cold solid fuel heating cooker. I know its not all about heat and; economy (price and supply of oil) and a greener environment comes into this equation. Have read up about the geothermal, the underfloor heating woodpellet and solar. I am still not convinced about the savings with any of these methods. They say it takes seven years to get your money back as opposed to oil and other fossil fuels.

I think we are going to go with a well insulated building (floors, walls, roofs & Windows) and oil heating, condensing boiler. We might incorporate some solar panels for water heating purposes, and are looking at the possibility of using Heat Recovery ventilation.

This link proved very informative http://www.sei.ie/index.asp?locID=722&docID=-1

Method of Construction

Initial design stages, but you can change your build type after recieving planning as long as you dont alter the asthetics of the build. For us it was always going to be the standard 100mm cavity construction, as we felt this is where we would get the best value from our build as my father is a block layer by trade. We could have went with timber frame, SIPS, ICF and so on. Some of the readers of this may think (possibly including myself) that i am sacraficing my home on the pretense of the final build being cheap! Maybe i am reading too much about all these different forms of construction and i feel inadequte that we are only building a bog standard 4" block 100mm cavity wall with no fancy heating system and no use made of natural resources!

Some good refernce material on the following links:

http://www.dlpks.ie/downloads/PartLBrochure.pdf

http://www.rockwool.ie/graphics/RW-GB-implementation/brochures/Part_L_2006_Interim_Guide.pdf

http://www.sei.ie/app_ber.asp

http://www.environ.ie/en/Publications/DevelopmentandHousing/BuildingStandards/FileDownLoad,1652,en.pdf
As for other items that need a bit of thought at this stage we have the kitchen drawn out and planned to allow for services island unit in the middle of the floor and it incorporates a sink, they priced the kitchen also €32K incl appliances.

In brief the items to consider at this stage are,

• The build type Timber Frame/ICF/TimberFrame etc
• Type of insulation
• Type of windows
• Type of heating method
• Type of/use of energy supply
• Services in the house Electrics/plumbing

Concrete & Block Pricing To finished floor level

Have uploaded pricing schedules for the blocks and concrete pricing can be found here:-

http://jollyman2.googlepages.com/home

Worth the while to shop around.

Concrete to foundations 39M3 @ €77 /M3 =€2,541

Concrete to finished floor 36M3 @ €77 /M3 =€2,772

Kingspan Insulation to floors 242.5M2 @ € 12.60/M2 =€3,055.5

Radon Barrier 242.5M2 @ €1.70 /M2 =€412.25

A393 to Fdn 81M2 @ €7.5 M2 =€607.50

4" Blocks to wall 2256 No @€.52cent per block (Supply Price) €1,329.12

Total Material Cost €10,717.37

As my dad is a blocklayer that will be coming free, and we will be doing the rest of labour ourselves also, my partner's cousin is the plumber so hopefully he will do us a favour also.

My lowdown, on the mortgage, land sign over solicitors Rigmarole

I Dont know if this is the same experience as most but this has been a long drawn out process, and as said in an earlier post we have had a couple of issues. For the mortage process and the documents required refer to post "Self build mortgages".

When we started to go about buying the site, we paid a deposit to the auctionner 10% of the site value, after this we enlisted the services of a solicitor to deal with the transactions. We went about getting mortgage approval in principle we went with EBS as they seemed to have a good package on offer for selfbuilders. We also enlisted the services on an engineer that held professional indemnity insurance this was to sign off the various stages of the build to allow us to draw down the mortgage.

EBS sent a valuer to value our site to progress the mortgage application and we recieved approval in principal for the value which we sought. http://online.ebs.ie/internet/pdffiles/public/selfbuildhomeloan4.pdf

When the inital contracts were issued my solicitor informed me that there may in the future be the potential for argument over a right of way to land, he progressed to alter the contract and send back to the landowner's solictor. As you can imagine this was a lengthy drawn out process.

We also had to get mortgage protection insurance at this stage to fulfill the requirements of EBS, they also require Site Insurance before paying money on the works on the site.

Have been informed today by EBS that they are just awaiting the deeds of the land before issuing the money, so im waiting on the landowner to sign, and hopefully we will be all sorted.

Pricing the build process: materials & Windows

It's probably a force of habit with me and because of my profession i am probably gone over the top with this aspect; have been preparing for this for a while and there is substancial savings to be made if you are prepared to put in the time and effort, but remember never sacrafice on quality over cost, (this will be your home) this is where a clear and concise scope will help.

On the link i have several pricing schedules which i sent out to local companies, for the concrete pricing i sent the schedule to healys, John A Woods, Roadstone (Subsidary), Readymix and a local supplier this gives you a great help in deciding, over cost and quality of each company.

For the windows i sent tenders to 14 different companies i know a bit drastic, but it was a clear scope and i had prices returning from €66k to €12k and many more in the middle, i will post on them again closer to the time.

I drew up a list for pricing by local builders providers "material List" i sent this to two local hardware stores and to two nationwide suppliers in the region this allows you to get value for money from both if you can and is an excercise well worth doing, make sure to ask them for a builders discount.

All pricing schedules can be found on the link below:-

http://jollyman2.googlepages.com/home

The first Step...

Well it's been a long time coming, but i can now finally start on site have priced the local machine drivers earlier in the year and again two weeks ago, there seems to be more of an availabilty and a willingness to negotiate on price got the driver and machine from €2,000 to €1,500. Will probably take three days to move front ditch, strip the site and dig the foundations will also get him to stone the temporary driveway. €50 an hour there or there abouts for a man and a machine!

I have also priced all the local concrete suppliers, blocks, sand, stone and mesh. Make sure to shop around as we are saving over €2k to this stage, by doing the work ourselves my father is a builder we are saving over €14k from a local builders quotes to bring the house and garage to finished floor level.

I have a budget in for €12k was priced at €26k by a local builder. The joys of going direct labour.

Costings Budget Tracking

http://jollyman2.googlepages.com/home


For all the readers of the blog there are two handy links of costings i have made; and a Bill of quantities (BOQ) for the house, this will give you a good idea of the use of a Quantity Surveyor on a project like this. In order to have some financial certainty as to where your project is going it is necessary to work to some sort of budget, many self builders just throw there money into the project only to realise that they have run out before completeion. By setting a realistic budget it allows you to alter the spec and the finishes of the house, and if you are starting to run over budget you can perharps cut down on the spec of the €30K fitted kitchen providing the other half agress!!!!
The BOQ is basically every item of the build that is to be carried out, the more detailed the spec the more sure of the price back you will recieve. You can break the BOQ into the seperate work sections, ie to the seperate stage payments of the self build mortgage or the seperate work element, to floors, external walls, plastering and so on.
By doing this it allows you budget against the various elements and try if you can to bring each section in on budget or even better under!
I will update this external link every so often with my running budget v's estimate hopefully this will be of help.

The House Plans (Copyright)

http://jollyman2.googlepages.com/home

My brother the architects initial sketches on the above link! Attachements A&B

Ready to start finally! Stamp Duty

It has been a while since my last post, and now im glad to say we are finally able to start have been held up with solicitors and a right of way to the land but now all that has been sorted.

Hopefully i will have the tracks machine in Saturday week, to strip the front ditch(condition of planning) and level the site, must get my brother (the architect) to mark out the site and get our foundations poured will be a great mile stone to have achieved.

Stamp Duty

Rates of stamp duty on land/housing sites without residential buildings
Up to 10,000 euro
Exempt
10,001 euro - 20,000 euro
1%
20,001 euro - 30,000 euro
2%
30,001 euro - 40,000 euro
3%
40,001 euro - 70,000 euro
4%
70,001 euro - 80,000 euro
5%
80,001 euro - 100,000 euro
6%
100,001 euro - 120,000 euro
7%
120,001 euro - 150,000 euro
8%
Over 150,000 euro
9%

Next Costs stamp duty 7% €8,400!!!!!