One thing you wish you knew

Cosgram

Hi everyone,

We're building a home in Louth - it's a timber frame house, we have our planning permission and we're finally about to break ground after about 18 months of design, planning and all the rest. We've been looking through these forums for a while now and while we have tons of questions, we'd really like to know - what's the one thing you know now that you wish you knew before you started?

Even though we're early the process, if we could start again we probably wouldn't scrimp on the design phase. We went with a building engineer who could also draw plans, so thought it would save time and money as he could do the design cheaper than an architect and do all our sign offs. While he was a very competent engineer, we found that his design knowledge wasn't great - he drew what we asked him to draw rather than coming up with ideas and we were never really happy with the end design. We switched to an architect in the end and now have a plan we love, but it delayed us by about 8 months.

Hope this is an OK question to ask - we'd just be interested in hearing if you could start all over, what's the one thing you'd do differently. Thanks!

BryanF

Air-tightness prescribed and signed-off in contract terms.

Provisional BER included in tender package and renewable heating requirements signed-off and forming part of contract terms

Compare building spec with passive standards

Calahonda52

So here we are:
By your own admission, you scrimped on the initial phase of the project by getting an engineer who failed to meet your Architectural design requirements.
Yet you say his design knowledge was not great, by this I suspect you mean Architectural design.

Perhaps you might elucidate how you were in a position to determine he was "was a very competent engineer", given that you view the hiring of him as a big fail, by him?

For me, the one thing I would do differently is chose my parents rather than be the product of some random biological conjugation.

Cosgram

Calahonda52 wrote: »

So here we are:
By your own admission, you scrimped on the initial phase of the project by getting an engineer who failed to meet your Architectural design requirements.
Yet you say his design knowledge was not great, by this I suspect you mean Architectural design.

Perhaps you might elucidate how you were in a position to determine he was "was a very competent engineer", given that you view the hiring of him as a big fail, by him?

The only comment I was trying to make was that, for us, we should have gone to an architect to flesh out a design idea first and then engaged with an engineer rather than the other way around, which we did in the end but it delayed the project. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

893bet

Cold bridging. I did pretty good on Airtightness, ventilation, insulation but neglected cold bridging due to poor advice from architect and an early sub contractor.

kieranhr

There's already a 24-page thread on this on Boards.ie. Search for 'Things I wish I had done when building?' above.