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The SNP promised us they would replace council tax with a local income tax which would have reflected your ability to pay. They cowered away from that and stuck with the council tax, but in the process increased the council tax rate for higher banded properties to "tax the rich". Excuse me for feeling a little betrayed. I am certainly NOT by any measure "rich" Regarding the word "fair" you can usually change the phrase "it's not fair" to "it's not to my advantage" and in 90% of cases it wil have exactly the same meaning.

Over the years I've read various different ideas about the best ways to collect the tax take, from putting everything on income to putting it all on consumption. Tax authorities like property based taxes as property is immobile. Fairness is the most often used phrase when discussing who and how to tax. The difficulty is that the word fairness usually means someone else should pay. A difficult square to circle!

But at 1:50 a 1mm line will be 50mm on site or half a brick width. This is why Land Registry plans are notorious for being inaccurate as the lines are up to 3-400mm at best if they are done in a red pen... CAD scaling is best done at source - put the dimensions on the plan when you do it and then there is no ambiguity. House building is not - and cannot - be millimetre perfect if you are using traditional trades as it's just not practical. If you want that then you have to go to CAM and direct export your design to be machined and constructed in factory controlled conditions. PDF is for documents, for information and for reference. If you're using it to scale for building then you need to seriously consider your accuracy ..!

Our last house was built using the Supawall system - a 140mm injection filled timber frame, with an additional 50mm kingspan fixed to the outer face of the frame (which covered the sole plate), 50mm cavity then block outer leaf. We had to use hellical rather standard wall ties but otherwise no real difference in how the frame / outer leaf interacted.

@Vijay, I use Draftsight, but it can run like a dog if you use it on a typical laptop. AFAIK, it really needs a PC with decent CUDA graphics card to get responsive performance. Also try the VariCAD Viewer. This will open DRW files and you can zip around them, take measurements and print off extracts fast. Be aware that it also the creating package renders the PDF file. This might be using vector graphics but many generate diagrams at a give BPI for the target page size; so if you zoom in then drawing starts to look pixelated. Hopefully your diagrams include a scale rule to validate scaling, but as Sensus says you can't guarantee accuracy as you can with a CAD viewer's measure function.

But adding extra internal insulation will make the frame colder and may lead to condensation issues. That can be a problem with SIPS around the sole plate area. The one thing I got by having mine designed properly was a proper thermal analysis of the whole wall make up : Ignoring the fact it's in German, what you see is there is no condensation risk, and it has a long decrement delay, so changes in outside temperature will only slowly affect inside temperature so the risk of overheating on a hot day is minimised. you really want some similar analysis if you start adding insulation to a standard product. u-wert-berechnung (10).pdf

Hi guys, I will get some pics up shortly, it's not a grand design though. Jack, regarding the next build, I'm just completing a loft extension, then I have to talk the missus round to doing it all again, otherwise this could be the first and last! No doubt I will have a bit of time to convince her as suitable plots seem to be getting scarcer.

hi all, take a look at www.nvelope.com - i work for these guys, extremely busy ! great website , all adjustable systems ,fix any facade/cladding glad to help where i can