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Errrr... £10.65 from my BM..! EPS is roughly 40% of the cost of PUR, and you need around 2.5 times as much. The benefit on PUR is less dig out, EPS makes for a better fully insulated slab

If you're going to be using it a lot, the Festool is well worth the money. I've done more sanding with a 150mm rotary than any sane person should and I've killed four Bosch and a Makita and tried most of the other brands. I eventually bought a Rotex 150mm for a worrying sum, it turned out to be a bargain - powerful, refined and very effective) especially with good extraction. A day of sanding is almost (but not) a pleasure and I never had the numb vibro-hand I had with ALL other sanders. Plus the Festool warranty is excellent: 3 years (not that you're likely to need it) during which time they'll fix your tool and get in back to you in short order. Mine developed a bad connection (turned out to be the power lead), it was collected and returned to me in twenty minutes by a butler who arrived by jetpack. My Rotex outlived every other 150 RO and was as good as new after three years of very, very hard use. Sadly it died in a swimming accident.

I hope somebody on the forum might be able to help me. We have a trapezium window on our bedroom (approx 1.5m at widest point) and are considering creating a balcony that we access through the opening, however, it's a trapezium shape so it makes things a bit (lot) more complicated. The options we have considered (and discounted): Inward opening door - not enough space for door to swing Outward opening door hanging from angled side of opening - probably puts too much strain on hinges (but happy to be corrected on that?) Outward opening door hanging from straight side of opening - will require more space on the balcony to allow the door to swing out. Creating a narrow rectangular door within the trapezoid - will spoil the look of the window with the extra vertical lines Sliding pocket doors - this is a possibility but we would have to create a pocket and does anybody know a company who makes them in custom shapes? A custom Roof Terrace door (like the one made by Velux) - does anybody know a company who would be likely to make something like that? Or, the ideal world solution that we have no idea whether it exists or not: A door that pushes out then slides on runners fixed along the front of the house - has anybody ever seen something like this? Any help or alternative solutions gratefully received.

A pet favourite...wallpaper one bathroom wall with Maps of Skye.

Get an arborist to give you their opinion on the state of the trees and then suggest that they are taken down at your cost is probably the only way to sort. Wont be cheap but tbh unless one falls onto her house it sounds like no-one will do anything. If the others are in the gardens next door there is nothing you can do but make suggestions ...

I couldn't find a drawing that showed it well, so pictures and a description is better. It's a cut roof framed on site, hung from a bog Kurto ridge beam, using 195 by 45mm timbers for the rafters. That then got clad with 100mm wood fibre board acting as a sarking board (a BR requirement in Scotland) and then a non tenting breathable membrane, counter battens then tile battens then tiles. Later It was insulated from the inside using Frametherm 35 fitted from below, then a layer of OSB Finally it will get covered in airtight membrane, battens to form a service void, then plasterboard. That's what I am working on at the moment. Originally I was going to use blown in insulation, until I found out the cost. I then worked out Earthwool Frametherm 35 had the same insulation U value, was less than half the price, and was a DIY job rather than having to get someone in to blow in the insulation, so I could do it at my own pace bit by bit. Regarding timber floors. What is it you don't like. Mine are 300mm JJI I beams with 300mm of Frametherm 35 in them. They will have UFH before the final flooring. My builder did his best to convince me to have a sold floor but it would have been a lot of material to import and pay for to build up the ground, and it would have forced me to make decisions on the exact layout of some rooms to lay in the drainage at that stage, again I preferred to leave those decisions until I was ready, something you have the luxury of being able to do with a timber floor.

I cannot see an easy way. There is no reason why she should do it as any pruning will make her situation worse. The only option I can see is complete removal and provide her with a hedge or fence which blocks the view. Ferdinand

Fit a Willis immersion in a branch off the ASHP flow to the Sunamp Stack. That gives you a 3Kw electrical input for little additional cost, that could be hooked up to a future PV installation if you wished. Not sure how the primary pump is arranged, if it's within the Daikin then you may need to add a second pump that's only inline with the Willis branch, fit the Willis in a branch from the flow pipe, with an NRV in the main leg between the branch with the Willis and pump in. That gives you redundancy if the ASHP fails and the ability to use excess PV.

In general all evergreen trees/shrubs won't grow back from old wood, the exception being yew as @JSHarris has found. Surely neighbours tree roots growing under your land which prevent building work or cause it to be more expensive should be considered trespass?

Right so that's a nice looking copper beech that needs a bit of a trim (lower two branches would lift the canopy nicely) , a youngish Silver Birch than has some growing to do .... ... and the tallest Leylandi hedge I've seen ..!! Whoever pruned those should be ashamed - you cannot prune them like that ..! They are a hedge though as the proximity of the trunks shows they were planted as such. What would worry me is the root mass - it will be a large intertwined mess that is probably only 12-18" deep but they have over balanced the trees. What is also concerning is they appear to have removed one side which will over balance the whole lot towards the other house - the group of 4 on the right is leaning and one is showing signs of failure now. Depending on your location, that is probably £7-900 of work to remove those but they need doing before they fall - they can't even be topped as there is noting left below 20ft....

There is always conventional strip foundations and an insulated timber floor, like we have. Re insulation types and decrement delay. We have a timber vaulted warm roof covered in 100mm wood fibre board, and then 200mm of Earthwoll between the rafters. I have been working today right up in the top of the vaulted roof on the mezanine floor. The sun has been shining on it all day. It was not overheating up there at all, and my IR thermometer could not detect any difference in the internal temperature of the part of the roof compared to any other part of the structure. In fact the only solar gain I could detect was the considerable warming of the floor where the sun was shining on it through the windows.

I agree, 100%, with bells on. The idiots that design appliances need to spend a month going around spending time with new owners, to find out what they really want, and how so many struggle with really poor human machine interfaces (HMIs). When designing the cockpit for the Future Lynx (now the Lynx Wildcat) we had endless problems with geeks wanting to put loads of tiny buttons in, and I had four Lynx pilots an observer and an engineer who spent most of their time putting the geeks back in their box, by showing them how impractical it was to use such daft interfaces in an aircraft that was actively manoeuvring to avoid threats. Believe it or not, at one stage they wanted a trackball in the centre console to move the screen cursors, in an aircraft where having both hands on the controls at all times is pretty much essential. With kitchen appliances, we shouldn't need to spend an hour reading the manual to fin out how to turn it on, set the required temperature, time or whatever, that should be intuitive. There's a lot to be said for plain old-fashioned knobs. My car has a plethora of steering wheel controls, but it's far, far quicker, easier and more intuitive to reach over and turn the volume control than it is to fumble pressing buttons a dozen times.................... Finally, how many programmes does a washing machine really need? I reckon it's three, maybe four, not twenty............

We had to get overhead lines removed on our last and our current site. We dealt with SSE on both occasions. They were fairly prompt in quoting for the work (which excluded track work on site) but their pricing structure is confused to say the least. Our final bill for our last house was £2K lower than they had initially quoted after we had gone through the process of looking for less expensive alternatives. I was fairly fortunate in that I knew the chap who managed the particular team that was scheduled to do my job so he slotted our site in at a time to suit us. On our current site, there was again a fair bit of back and forth with SSE agreeing on the work required, and dare I say there seemed to be a fair amount of elasticity in the price. Actually getting them on site was a bit challenging but that I think was more down to the fact the contractor they used to do their on site stuff was booked up. All I can say is its not cheap. I think we were £7K to put cable between two poles put underground (new HV cable, new pole and stay, new joint to HV cable in roadside) and get a domestic connection in 2005. Our current site was nearly £10K to put HV cable underground between two poles (two new poles and stays, plus a new transformer for my own and my neighbours site) Edited to add: Just had a look at the quote for our site: "The proposal is to reposition the existing HV line. Dismantle HV pole 4 and 3 span between the pole 2 and 4. Replace pole 2 with a terminal pole and stay. Replace Pole 4 with a terminal pole and stay in the corner of the field as agreed with the customer and reconnect the HV line. Erect a new 50KVA transformer. Then lay 160m of underground HV cable. Take an overhead pole connection and lay mains cable to a pot end. Customer will come back for new supplies when they are ready. Customer to excavate and reinstate all track at no cost to SSEPD except the first 10m at the poles, to provide a ducted route to the meter point and to provide and install a fire retardant meter board." Total cost £9817 I had an additional domestic connection charge of just over £1K on top of this.

The best bet is to get the DNO out on site and explain what you want to do, and that you'll do all the trenching and duct laying (if they want it) for them, so all they need to quote for is the new cable plus the connections. We found the local chap that came out to the site to have a look was very helpful, it was the incompetence of his management that caused all the hassle with delays (a familiar tale here - the guys at the sharp end are usually pretty good for all the services, they are let down by their back office support, or rather lack of it........).

Just been through this trying to donate some perfectly good furniture to a local charity. They won't take it without the fire labels. Like most people, we'd taken these things off when we bought the stuff, as they are a nuisance, being tied with bits of string. By good fortune, all our newly delivered dining room chairs had fire labels tied on, so it was easy to just swap them over................

The 8mm on a roll is flexible insulation to allow the slab to expand and contact. It's not really for thermal preformance. I put in 40mm insulation and then the flexible roll. That matches my service cavity so you don't see it as I've a polished slab and didn't want it seen. Put in whatever fits for you.