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Heard this on the news on way home from work last night: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-39668889 I have made a chart of the domestic fuel mix from GridWatch (http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/download.php) I tripped out the interconnects, Oil generation, OCG, Pumped and Other, as they were either so tiny or not really relevant to domestic generation (who knows what the Dutch are really burning). Easy enough to look those figures up if you want to as they are part of the download. Now the really interesting thing is the solar production. It can now peak at nuclear levels, though the yield over a day is a lot lower. Due to the high pressure over the UK at the moment we have had pretty clear skies, and wind production is down. Gas still makes up the lion's share of our generation, not ideal environmentally and politically, but so much better than coal. What did occur to me is that if we can continue down this low carbon route, and there is no reason why we cannot do so for the next decade (there are technical limitations eventually), we may need to rethink our house building from an emissions viewpoint (that DER, TER stuff). There is still a good argument to reduce usage because of cost (Gas is about £40/MWh, Nuclear about £95/MWh, Solar and Wind about £150/MWh), but it shows that with a serious reduction in usage the price need not be prohibitive (maybe a 25% rise in overall electricity costs, I would need to look at figures a bit more on that to get a truer picture). Now the 'Spot the Coal line' chart.

What are you trying to achieve? We fitted ours so we could comfortably look out and take in the view when seated. In our case the bottom of the window is 800mm off the floor.

I am sure there are many ways of cracking the problem, but the scenario I have outlined in cheap, simple and tax efficient. Perhaps if you were called "Trump" you might want to buy a limited company with accumulated tax losses and use them to offset against limited companies with taxable profits.

The issue is one of capital and shareholding. A self builder would have to buy shares in the company to get the capital into the company to purchase the goods. In doing that you then become a shareholder, and the company would own the asset that is now the new house. ... To get the asset out you would need to sell this somehow and welcome to the world of capital gains and corporation tax, along with the spectre of stamp duty ..! Just swapping it for shares is a non starter and I'm no accountant but there is no easy way to get the asset back ...! The only potential option is to "loan" the company the money and then buy your own house back off the company, at which point it repays the loan but that relies on you having the money to loan in the first place ..!

Thanks - I'll maybe give them a go. I'm going to do a trial one in the next week or two as we start taping and filling. Whenever I mention to anyone I'll be fitting the doors,t hey almost always draw breath and raise their eyebrows...then again, the same people think I'm 'brave' fitting the kitchem despiet knowing we've build the whole house. lol.

Maybe a small head torx screw...? http://www.toolstation.com/shop/p53848?gclid=CjwKEAjw_uvHBRDUkumF0tLFp3cSJACA

Thanks all, will call BCO on Monday and pick his brains, will report back for anyone else who may be interested. Meanwhile I have found these - http://www.diytimberpacks.com/pre-primed-wood-30-minute-fire-door-liner-square-stop.php?cat=33 which means the Howdens fire linings I have bought at £60 a piece will be going straight back!

Interestingly, I've found that having an energy display that shows whether we're importing or exporting, and by how much, is all that's really needed to change behaviour a fair bit. Mine's a very simple home-made affair: but is plenty good enough to give as much info as you need. I tend to use it at the moment to decide when to charge the car (I could make this automatic, and probably will one day), but equally it's a good enough indicator as to whether to turn on the washing machine, etc. There's no real need for anything more complex, I think. If it were more complex then the chances are it would be more confusing for some.

Yes, we did this on a few door linings as we couldn't get enough of the pre-routed versions. Don't see how you'd surface mount the strip - they are quite chunky, about 4-5mm thick and 15mm wide. They're also only in white or brown so would not look that good in a door.

Can't the business just provide you with building services? That way the business never needs to own the land/house. There might be an issue with things like the warranty because I know the NHBC have different policies for self builders and businesses.

Incidentally, I don't understand the rationale for putting the strip in the liner and not the door. But focusing on this core issue, we're talking about a single family dwelling here with a third floor -- just like the millions of homes in this country with loft conversions -- and not a multiple occupancy flat or public building. The regulators have given up on having automatic door closing hinges as the statistics showed that too many house occupiers were simply propping doors open semi-permanently, and this is worse. IMO, this decision is quite incompatible with the requirement to fit strip linings, as doors will often be ajar and you want to have confidence that you can close them easily as an immediate action. Doors in an MVHR-fitted house already have a ventilation gap at the bottom; the each room has at least one MVHR duct, so the room sealing is already compromised. IMO, a well fitted lining + door will give the required 30 min protection, and you can have confidence that you can close the door. You don't have this confidence with a strip liner fitted. I see this view as a pragmatic balance of risks to reach a realistic optimum, and not recklessness. My BCO hasn't asked for intumescent strips. but I will be fitting my doors accurately and I have backfilled the gaps between the liners and the timber frame with fire-rated foam.

Thanks Peter. So, the problem seems to be that you swap the advantage of being able to get the VAT back earlier for the possible penalty of having to pay capital gains tax and stamp duty. The latter I can recall being discussed before when this came up. The last option, of lending the business the money initially, then getting the house back as repayment at the end, seems possible. Most of the cost of our build was met from savings, so I could probably have arranged things this way had I known about it. Nice thought, but I'm a little too financially risk averse to try something like this! @Ferdinand Thanks very much for the comprehensive explanation. I think I may need to read it a few times to get things clear, though! Sorry for dragging things off-topic, but it seemed a very useful thing to explore, as I've not seen such a full and complete breakdown of the pros and cons of creating a business in order to build your own home before. As mentioned above, it's a topic that has come up from time to time, and has always been dismissed, I believe, hence my comment earlier in this thread where I mentioned that I thought it was too expensive an option. I was wrong, it may not be too expensive at all, but it does seem to require some detailed knowledge as to how to make such an arrangement tax and duty efficient.

Do these help ..?? http://www.doordeals.co.uk/products/door-frames-and-mouldings/internal-door-frames/internal-softwood-30-minute-fire-door-casing-(1).aspx

Right then. Is this just about done wrt H+S or is there more....?

One thing I have learned from my work on site over the last few weeks. You cannot create a building in the same way you would create a car. The modern car is created with parts arriving from all over the world using a couple of simple maxims - every part is make to a specification with tolerances, the cumulative effects of all the errors is so designed as to ensure the machine still works correctly. Such an approach enables assembly and the full interchange of parts, an idea first developed by the small arms industry to ensure that you could make a rifle without a skilled fitter. Put simply the building industry is still full of fitters and yours truly is coming slowly, well not so slowly, to the conclusion that fitting is the name of the game. I guess I could have worked it out when I realised I would need a pair of nail guns, nailing is not engineering is it! I machined every component of the garden room to +/- 0.5mm and -/+ 0.1 degree on angles. Spent days creating an environment that would allow me to do it. The slab is level to +/- 2mm and square +/- 0.5mm and I tool the slab errors out levelling the sole plate. I took the components, studs, trusses and lintels out and and just assembled them in the virtual positional scaffolding created in the space above the slab with lasers, now replaced with string. Can I get the roof square (+/-2mm) - can I heck. If I can't I will have to cut the OSB sheathing to make it fit. Why is square illuding me? Cos wood changes shape in unpredictable ways, including engineered timber and even self levelling lasers are only good enough to get things within a couple of mm over 10 or so meters. My brother says get a good tape rule, a plumb bob, a battery powered circular saw and give up measuring with lasers, perhaps he is right. Still I have progress I guess. Ho Hum.

Thanks again, and sorry to sound a bit dim, but I'm struggling to get my head around this a bit. So, a self builder cannot be a VAT registered sole trader, which rules out one option. Is there is another mechanism by which a self builder can be a business and so recover the VAT early? Even recovering VAT every quarter would be a very significant cash flow benefit; for example, many of our VAT reclaim invoices were incurred in the early stages of the build, where we used non-VAT registered businesses to do things like fix the exterior timber cladding, do the first and second fix electrical installation, do the plaster boarding and plastering, lay the stone flooring, doing the painting and decorating etc. For all these (plus the plumbing, heating and ventilation work I did myself) we had to buy all the materials for the trades involved, so that I could claim the VAT back after completion. At a guess this was over half the total VAT claim, probably in the first six months of the build. Being able to get that VAT back early could easily have knocked a year off our build time, which would have also saved is a fair bit in overheads on keeping two houses going at the same time. Sorry for all the questions, but in the past I'd just assumed that becoming a business for the purpose of optimising the VAT position for a self builder was a non-starter, and am now kicking myself a bit for not having looked at it in more depth.

The VAT registered sole trader cannot also be the self builder without a lot of other problems. A VAT registered sole trader must charge vat on invoices to other customers unless it is for a new build which is zero rated. This is why most tradesman are self employed but not vat registered. I was vat registered because I could recover input vat and all of my customers were vat registered and they could recover the output vat I charged them. If you complete monthly vat returns you increase admin time/cost, I would have thought quarterly returns are more sensible on a cost/benefit basis but can be used if cashflow is very restricted. Similarly accounting for vat on invoices received is called completing the vat return on an 'accruals basis' and will help immensely, i.e. you can get the vat back either after paying the supplier BUT also before you pay the supplier if the invoices are dated (Invoice Tax Point) before the vat return end date; effectively an interest free loan for a short time. I think a self builder can also use this but I am not sure. Efficient businesses wait until the last possible date to complete their vat return to ensure they receive as many supplier's invoices as possible that are dated up to the vat return end date.

"the VAT registration threshold" is irrelevant, you can voluntarily apply to be vat registered, similarly you can choose to account for vat based on invoices received (not necessarily paid) or invoices paid; the former can give a very much better cashflow and is the most common method of recovering input vat for businesses, it can also help self employed people. I have never been a self builder, nor have I been an accountant or auditor of a builder, so my knowledge about this sector is Limited (pun intended). Any individual, but not the self builder, can set up as a vat registered, self employed person, it is VERY easy. But if they decided after building one property at a loss, there is nothing stopping them closing down that business, no tax should be payable. A person with a personal tax allowance that is not fully offset against income gives further scope, i.e. some one who is normally a non tax payer. A self employed person can recover more vat (only a minor advantage) than a self builder but more importantly they can recover vat earlier, a significant cashflow improvement and can be recovered in a less onerous way, i.e. A self employed vat return is much easier to complete than the self builder's vat return. I believe a builder has significant advantages over a self builder; this proposal merely levels the playing field slightly. I have previously suggested to Admin that parliament needs lobbying about this unfair treatment of self builders.

As I replied earlier, I really don't recall all the ins and outs of the previous debates about setting up a business solely in order to build a principal private residence, so I'm not sure how to answer, and not surprised that I'm mistaken at all! @Temp knows more about this than I do, by far, and hope he may be able to shed some light on the pros and cons. @warby, Perhaps you could help us understand why there is an advantage in setting up a business in order to build a "principal private residence", in HMRC speak? It would help a lot, as I know the topic has been discussed before, and would also guess that very few self builders seem to choose this route. That may well be "fear of the unknown", in which case your experience could be very helpful. I know that I wouldn't have a clue as to how to go about setting myself up as a business; it's not something I've ever really thought about, to be honest.

I strongly disagree; the cost is not "so high as to make it a pointless exercise.". A self employed person, acting as builder does not need to have an accountant nor do they require any audit charges; a limited company is not required. They do need to maintain accounts but so does a self builder to recover vat after the build is completed. There are major advantages of employing a vat registered self employed builder to build a house for a self builder in that the builder can submit very simple vat returns on a monthly or quarterly returns which has significant cashflow assistance and avoids bank interest charges on overdrafts and credit cards. The self builder would not need to complete the ridiculously complicated vat return, and stupid vat recovery rules because all vat would be recovered by the builder who has less onus to prove the vat claimed is justified. The builder can also recover vat for business petrol and can recover a proportion of their house costs used for a study in their income tax return, a self builder cannot. The builder invoices the self builder with zero vat; the builder and self employed person need to be different people. Provided the builder does not make a profit there is no further taxation payments. Setting up an individual as a self employed person has no setup costs and minimal admin costs; this is what I and millions of others have done. Closing a self employed person's business costs nothing. The self employed builder in this scenario will only have to submit one tax return. A self employed person can close down the business with one letter to HMRC; I know because this is what I did, I was self employed Accountant and Management Consultant.

Progress!!! An Openreach surveyor came out this morning to check out the site. The long and short of it is that they can't go direct to the house above ground from the pole on the opposite side of the road as there are electrical cables in the way. As they can only go under, not over, these electric cables (apparently) and they would then be too low, then the only option is underground (result!). It might take 4-8 weeks to get connected but it looks like I've got what I wanted at zero cost - quite some difference to the £7k they originally wanted So the moral of the story appears to be don't go direct to OR but instead get your house address registered and then get an order in with BT for them to provide you with a line/service