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You're going to need a bigger shovel...

I'm opening up a landscaping retreat in my backyard. You can have mates' rates, so I'll only charge you half price. Can't say fairer than that.

I hadn't seen those other comments that you quoted, Nick, but there is also another factor that is important to self-builders - VAT. My experience was that very few electricians around here were registered for VAT, and that means that you would be daft to get them to supply any materials, as you'd not be able to reclaim the VAT, so everything would automatically be 20% more expensive. Add in that trade prices for electrical items from local electrical factors are very often a lot higher than online prices for the same items, and for a self-builder it just doesn't make sense to have a non-VAT registered electrician buy the materials for your build. Also, it doesn't make sense, economically, for a self builder to buy reels of every size of cable, it's often cheaper to buy a reel of the biggest cable needed and then use it where it isn't really required. As an example, I needed a fair length of 6mm², and a short length of 4mm², but opted to use 6mm² in place of the 4mm² just to avoid buying another reel, or an expensive short length, of cable. The supervision of installation methods is a very good point to highlight. My way around that was to work with our electrician as his labourer, so he could ensure that all cables, boxes etc that I helped put in were to the regs and that he was happy to sign off on that basis, having seen everything go in with his own eyes. Edited to add: Sorry, Nick, I was typing as you posted.

Essex for a monetary value of at least 4 figures. ??

Darn sarf that last one would sell for a fortune in the garden centres!

Job done ? .

When you get an asbestos survey, get a good one as your licensed contractor will base their quote on this and if they have missed anything it may be that your contractor has to re-configure the airtight enclosure. Get a shortlist of three licensed removers and ask who they recommend for the survey.

With regards the water, if you know where the meter is then this is all you need as you will probably run a new pipe from the meter into the new house, so no need to actually find the old pipe, just its origin.

Duramat are 12mm thick, £4 each and have a good name. 20% off at the mo too. https://duramat.co.uk Edit: That's £4 for black, realised you want a light colour, white or yellow are £5 each.

I'll have you know it's an art to create problems that don't exist.....and then worry excessively about how to solve them!

This the seller Nick put me on to. Similar to these: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Thermostatic-TRV-Chrome-Corner-Valve-Set-for-Radiators-Towel-Rails-Pair-/231112780127?hash=item35cf65295f:g:X4AAAOSw3YNXbPTq

As a developer, I am responsible for the first 2 years, then the warranty provider gives cover. They also cover if I go out of business in the 2 years. All the warranties are insurance based. They aim to reduce risk as much as possible and not to pay out. If you need to sell, you could get a Professional Consultants Certificate for less than half the cost of a warranty. Also look at independent building control. Often cheaper that LA.

My, what an impressive pecker you have ??

For your pride and joy, the finish is the last thing you'll be looking at for life, so I'd agree, TnF'd just doesn't cut it. I don't care how good a blob of filler is sanded, it's still proud of the board. Skim for me every single time.

I've had much the same with heating. When I was looking around for an ASHP, many suppliers wouldn't supply just the heat pump, but insisted on selling a supply and install service. As I had cable ducts in place for power and control cables, two bits of 22mm pipe sticking out through the wall and a concrete pad for the thing to fix down to, I wasn't too bothered by paying what I thought would be a modest sum for a very simple install. All of the suppliers, without exception, wanted to massively over-size the unit and none would believe the heat loss calcs that showed that the house needed, at most, around 1.6 kW to heat when it was - 10 deg C outside, and that most of the time the heating requirement in winter was perhaps a couple of hundred watts, if that. I can understand this, as 99% of the time trades people will be working on houses that do have massively greater heating requirements, or that don't have things like very airtight/vapour tight external walls. Self-builders tend to be a minority, and many are focussed on building a home that not only meets their needs but that is almost certainly built to a higher performance specification than the majority of new homes today. The Bovis homes problems highlighted in another recent thread are pretty typical of the way the majority of new homes are built, I'm sure.

Please don't worry about it, threads here inevitably end up with a life of their own, and often are more useful and educational or many because of that.

Steptoe, my comments about oversizing come from the experience I have in my existing home - the voltage drops 6V (using an accurate appliance monitor, 8V in the kitchen and 2V at the meter) in the kitchen when the 2.4kW oven (which I assume is a largely resistive load) is on, which suggests about 60W (2.5KW * 6V/ 240V) is being lost between the meter which is in the garage, and the kitchen about 6m away. Unfortunately the cable goes underground so there is little I can do about it. However if you assume your 2.5kW oven is perhaps on for 1 hour a day, then its annual consumption is about 900 kWh/year (probably an over-estimate), which costs £140/year (at 15p/kWh), over a 25 year investment period for the cable that's £3,500 of electricity used by the oven, my 6V drop on 240V is a 2.5% drop, so £90 over 25 years being lost in the cable, which probably represents a worthwhile investment in additional copper if it were not for the difficulty of replacing the underground cable. I suspect there may be some other issues going on in my 40 year old home to cause this sort of drop.... Anyway, if you were starting from scratch and comparing 3 different cable types 1.5mm2, 2.5mm2, 4mm2 of 10m in length for the same oven, with resistances of 12, 7 and 5 mohm/metre, then the voltage drops would be 1.2V/0.75V/0.5V respectively or 0.5%, 0.3%, 0.2% - and the 25 year cost of the losses in these cables would be £14, £8 and £5 respectively, and the cost of the 10m cable would be £3.60, £5 and £8.00 respectively. So the energy loss saving of going from 2.5mm2 cable to 4mm2 cable would be £3, and the additional cost of the cable would be £3, so the breakeven seems to be around the 2.5mm2 to 4.00mm2 range on a 25 year investment horizon. Anyway, I suspect my views are tainted by my experience in my existing home - which was all as far as I know installed professionally. The previous owner had the house built and was not at all practical - so wouldn't have done the electrical work himself, and my impression of him was that he would have hired a recommended 'professional' electrician. Perhaps there is something else going on in my home, but a 6V drop, and 60W cable loss, to me is unacceptable, given a professional installation? There may also be something wrong with my schoolboy maths above - comments please? But if the numbers are correct, and I was installing new cabling I would generally round up the required cable size to the next available size if it were a long term investment?

The way that BSI have protected their copyright and charged a lot of money for any safety-related standard (not just electrical stuff) has always slightly irked me. The consequence is that a lot of the very useful and important information in those standards is not available to the majority of the population, and I think that's not conducive to making people more aware of risks and hazards. One consequence is that information ends up getting disseminated like this, in an exchange on an internet forum, and with the best will in the world that information is likely to have the odd error, or be out of date when someone reads it years later. There's also a very real risk that misinformation can be spread in this way, too. For all my working life I had free access to all BS and EN standards, as a part of my job, but since retiring I've lost that, so had to buy one or two, and they are far from cheap, which highlighted the access problem - I'd never really thought about it before.

Firstly you are in Scotland. There is no such thing as part P here (I get shot in another place for saying that) so if you are COMPETENT you can do it all yourself. Even if it did come under building control, all they want is an EIC which you are supposed to issue anyway regardless. Your best bet is find a local electrician who is willing to let you run the cables and then come and make the connections. you really need to find him before you start. He will give you the run down on what cable to run and more importantly Where to run it (look up "safe zones") If you run the cables first then ask someone to connect them, the answer is more likely to be no. Do you have a supply to the new house yet? This is certainly the sort of job I would do and have done, but a day trip to Skye is a bit too far.