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Being left alone, love it. But, seriously, im really not that worried about when, inevitably, the day arrives niether of us cant drive. Thats what taxis are for. Theres no buses here, nor ever will be, because its utterly illogical to do so. The nearest town (ok, britains smallest town) is 4 miles away, so not going to break the bank. Well assuming you dont want to go out everyday. Ive recently done a 10 day stint without ever leaving the propery. Didnt even realise at the time. A quote i heard somewhere was building a home and a life you dont need to escape from. Trying hard on that front.

They do. Because it keeps them in a job. Whole swathes of government are employed just to keep inventing rules. The difficulty (and cost of course) is what ultimately brought my self build dream to a juddering halt. Hats of to those who fight there way through it all.

All the panels are up now. Just re-tubing where some got damaged. The installed panels covered with 99% reflective blankets to limit them heating up without any glycol in. Doing the interconnect pipes too in 15mm copper. Boss white and flax string on these joints. Even some 3D printing along the way. A hand hole saw to clear the expanding foam pocket where the tubes push in: Then a reforming tool for the bent, aluminium heatsinks:

So only getting round to this now. I’m going to use an underlay with built in vapour barrier, it’s called Barrier plus and tape the joints. Should I run this tight up to the sole plate? Do I need to worry about trapping moisture and rotting timber frame? thanks Nick

https://abi.bcis.co.uk There’s a free rebuild calculator. You have to register but it allows 3 calculations every 12 months.

I know there have been a few of these but I thought I would add our VAT reclaim journey to the mix. We moved in on 23rd February 2026. We received our BC completion certificate yesterday (18th june) following a painless final inspection. I reviewed our spreadsheet of project VAT invoices today: By comparing it with the spend spreadsheet I'd kept to manage the budget, I found an additional £1800 of VAT I could reclaim - not sure how I missed those before. Some of the paper invoice copies I had, proved to be no such thing - rather, sales orders or pro-forma invoices. A few calls and emails managed to secure real VAT invoices. 161 invoices in total, totallying £20.9k VAT to claim Plenty of company names on invoices didn't match the official HMRC company names for specific VAT registration numbers. For instance: Screwfix is really Kingfisher and Toolstation is really Travis Perkins (with the same VAT reg no.). I am not sure how much of an issue that is but I corrected them anyway. We had maintained a spreadsheet in the HMRC template format so populating their template was a simple cut and paste. I used the online HRMC form to submit the claim, guided by Google Gemini. I know AI gets a bad rap but I really like Gemini. I guess we'll see if my trust is misplaced. Some points about the online submission. There seem to be some trick questions, e.g: When did you occupy the property? Gemini advises making sure it ties in with what the Council know because HMRC can check (really?) But in our case that means three invoices since 23rd February could be discounted. I changed the spreadsheet description for these entries to make it clear we had to do this work to pass BC. We'll see whether HMRC allow those. How many kitchens or utility rooms do you have? In our case 1 of each. Gemini advise entering 1 kitchen, 1 utility room but you can only put in a number, so I entered 1 (as in 1 kitchen or 1 utility room. The risk in entering a number >1 is that HMRC assume it's a multi-residency project and will reject. I received an email confirmation of my submission straight away, will keep you posted on progress or issues.

I'm assuming across the bottom of their driveway, outside of their boundary.

If bare walls, who gives a hoot about seeing a bit of PIR around the perimiter?

Not sure how Open can have any right to dig up the neighbours drive without his express permission. Would have thought to do so would be criminal trespass and damage.

@Alan Ambrose Another retrofit smart window sensor I happened across here... https://shop.siegenia.com/siegenia/en/Smarte-Systeme/Smart-Home/Smarter-Sensor/SENSOR-SET-RAL7005-GRAU-K1/p/ZUFS1000-0J9010 Interestingly they also do smart window handles that can be automatically locked and monitored and also tell you if the window is open or not... https://shop.siegenia.com/siegenia/en/p/ZHSM0020-002011

Why insulate the slab, are you heating the garage ?

I prefer to see that. These people used neither laser nor tripods ( I like to call them triffids) for the ground floor and just a stick to measure minimum thickness. Hence it simply followed the lumps and shapes above the pir layer. We wrongly assumed they understood levels. On the first floor, as shown, they had to use the laser as they had messed up the underlayer: we have a 5mm acoustic mat and they chose to lap the edges in some places. The downside of letting people work unsupervised at the weekend. So we pointed this out but that raising it all to the highest point would compromise our door frame heights. Hence it's not all one level, but to several zones. They aren't used to being checked on and managed I feel.

A blast from the past @Onoff, but I'm interested if this resulted in anything you regret or if you'd recommend it. I'm fitting a window this weekend and I'd thought about filling a chamber with foam so did a quick search and lo and behold, this post was found.

They often set the levels with several small tripods and work to them. That way they don't need the laser level and staff/receiver while they are pouring.

They could have solved this with education - if everybody thought about the environment, their fuel bills, comfort etc - all those things would happen naturally. In essence you either have the ideological state apparatus or the repressive state apparatus you can avoid either with the other.

Oh yes!. Well as you know you get good days and bad days! Mines been epic. Massive speed increases. Local llm "whats the capital of france?" working. Current affairs " whats the news?" gives headlines and options verbally if you want more detail. Will add history so you can have a conversation. Gained a further 82ms saving on STT (I know, I know !). Honestly now its so fast to respond to even complex stuff I'm well impressed. Started on timers like Alexa (a SWMBO requirement!). TBH if I coded this by hand that's weeks of work for sure. But of course I never look at the code! G n T time now!

Bastard! 😉 I'm having a shit day today. Realised it had left a glaring security hole in the Auth model. Decided to fix it, but instead has broken the (expletive deleted)ing app. It fixed part of the problem and then tried to tell me the rest wasn't important until I told it that I could grab an id and post it into the browser in a string and it would expose the entire records for a user, even when not logged it! What was supposed to be a couple of hours at most has ended up taking all bloody day and I'm still trying to explain to it what's going wrong and it still misunderstands me! Thank (expletive deleted) I'm on a dev server.

Chat has been SO good today I might give it a promotion - nothing to do with me spending 90 quid......

I have been saying for decades that for every rule we have that says we must6 do something, we have another rule that says we cannot do it.

Saved another 250ms ... yeah I know. I'll stop now! sad.

For anyone who hasn't seen it, pumped screed is incredibly fluid and that's why we have to seal all possible escape routes. The reality is that, although it looks almost like water, this material is mostly cementitious and gritty. Nearly all the water is absorbed in chemical reaction and it is solid-ish within an hour. But any gap can be disastrous. This went well. A few dribbles of water emerged through plasterboard below but that's OK. 20260618_142707_1.mp4

Agree with all of that. My issues with the planning process also extend to the fact that almost every part of it is designed to put you off. If you're doing a new build - it has to be in line with the local architecture which is usually dated stock from the 30s, 50s, 80s etc. Massively more energy efficient, have insulation, triple glazing, get loads of surveys done incl noise, arboricultural, ecological, light, bat etc. Pay through the nose to have your electricity and gas to a temporary spot and then pay again to have it moved back again. Have to provide a spreadsheet which lists what taps/fittings you're using in each room and their flow rates. The mind boggles! It's almost as if people sit in a room and think of ways they can exert their control over each part of the build process and stick on a load of regulations - which drives prices up and self builders out. I fail to see the real connection between politicians claiming we need to build more houses, but then the regulations being designed in a way that stops people from doing that exact same thing.

My analysis is a bit different - planning is a part of it but the bigger part is developers interests and councils not being allowed to build council housing. The former is a problem because they want to keep prices high and maximise profit so they have no interest in mass production as it rises the supply side and so reduces prices. The councils not building for social rent, I get that housing associations are supposed to do this but funding constraints meam means that they are actually just developers, is a problem because it forces private rental and that removes housing stock from purchasers and so pushes up prices - which just closes the loop again. So sorting planning needs much more out of the box thinking alongside it.

My post was confusing. I have an insulated garage floor slab, but I wasn’t planning on plaster-boarding or fixing skirting board. Rather than having a 25mm slice of PIR showing, I could either omit the upstand, but that sort of defeats the point of insulating the slab.

No floor covering