Leaderboard

Catalytic clean single Neff oven with a "slide and hide" door for £377 - hardly more than basic Neff ovens. This may interest particularly @Crofter, who has been looking for appliances suitable for an upmarket holiday rental, just as I am for the Little Brown Bungalow. Currys have a pyrolitic clean single Neff oven with a "slide and hide" door (apparently that is posh to people who are impressed by posh, and good for narrow kitchens and lifting heavy roasts, but bad for people who serve out on the door) which is flagged as £260 off the £679.99 rrp, plus there is a further 10% discount code, and free delivery. Here is the oven: http://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/household-appliances/cooking/ovens/neff-b44s32n5gb-slide-hide-electric-oven-stainless-steel-10143345-pdt.html The price is barely more than non-pyrolitic normal door NEFFs, and comes down to £377 with the discount code BUILT10A for another 10% off. I have ordered one. There are various ebay offers at arounf £400, and John Lewis at £449. If the Voucher expires you can get 5% Topcashback for the next few days, but they do not stack. Ferdinand

Electric gates and control by phone is where it's at ........ 7:30am mortar delivery sorted from bed ...

We did something similar. Bought a bungalow in a nice area (literally the worst house on the street), largely surrounded by much more substantial houses. We got an offset mortgage and put money into the offset account to reduce the interest to zero. We then drew down against the offset account as we demolished and rebuilt. We probably breached our contract by demolishing without the mortgage company's permission, but hey, they now have a mortgage against a much more valuable property! Our design and planning took well over a year, then it took a few months to get organised and move out into rented, followed by a year from demolition to moving in. I agree that if you rent you should do so as nearby as possible. Ideally, you want to make an appearance on site every day, and ideally at the start and end of the day.

Easy - just go North !! South of London the prices are silly...! You can get a plot near Grantham / Newark to build on for around £275k, that house would "fit" well in a semi rural plot and £375k build gives you £100k for contingencies and an East Coast season ticket for 20 years...

Tile Tac Direct in Castlewellan seem very competitive - http://tiletacdirect.co.uk I know a couple of people who have used them and were happy with the price, service & quality.

Make your life easy... https://www.plumbnation.co.uk/site/hep2o-male-adaptors/?gclid=CjwKEAjwxurIBRDnt7P7rODiq0USJADwjt5Dzd74qVsfugO8BwtyxI7Qkj7_rsSfRlHQ-6nGj87-sRoCLULw_wcB Hep2O HX29 in various sizes, screws straight into the brassware and makes it push fit.

The fact that it is a Georgian style house will make little difference to the cost. Indeed it can be a relatively simple shape so cheaper to build. The more complicated a shape of house you have the more it will cost, think lots of corners and different roof pitches or large areas of glass and curved walls. So £1500 a square metre should be fine. The other big swing factors are the cost of architects and a main contractor. These will add considerably versus managing the project yourself and building something less bespoke. But you should still be able to come in at around £1500 per square metre. There are various hidden costs in planning such as ground surveys, bats, local council fees etc depending on the plot that could conceivably run into 5 figures also. The real issue will be what will a plot cost to buy. As a rule of thumb, I feel that people on the site are finding that they are building houses for roughly what they are worth. Developers spend less building houses due to lower spec and economies of scale. This effectively creates their profit margin and allows you to buy a plot for the same or more than a developer might pay. If a similar 250sq metre house in the area you are interested in costs £750 or less then there is a good chance you can buy a piece of land and build one for the same or a modestly lower price. The harder land is to come by, though the tighter the margins get. Think of it this way - Developer House price 750,000 Profit margin (15-20%) £130000 Build cost (1200/sq m) £300000 Land value £320000 Self builder House value £750000 Profit margin 0 Build cost 375000 Land value 375000 So you should be able to outbid a developer to buy a plot and come in within your budget if that is the cost of a similar house. You might even save some money, although my experience is that developers are willing to bid to lower margins due to the difficulty in finding land to build on. One issue you might have is a developer will often try to squeeze as much as possible out of a site, so if the site can fit a 6 bedroom house or 6 flats it will be worth more to them than you. It won't be easy finding a plot that is just right in the SE within easy commute to London. Generally speaking if a site is well advertised and has not sold it is probably quite highly priced. Certainly in Edinburgh recently I believe individual house plots have gone from uneconomic prices and they are getting a premium because people want to build their own house and their are few nice sites available. I know of two sites that have been sold for similarly sized houses to what you propose for around £400-450k with final house values at £800k they look pretty pricey to me. I would say that SE prices outside London are generally still higher than Edinburgh although it varies enormously by area, some are way more expensive than others.

I got my tiles from this guy, got all my bathroom stuff from as well, http://www.bfibathroomsforireland.com Give him a ring and see if he has anything that suits your spec but for that size of a quality tile I think you will struggle to get it for £30 sqm. I got my 60*60 light grey gloss porcelain tiles from him and they need cleaned all the time!!!

As it is only a 65mm lintel (are you happy it is man enough?) you can just use engineering bricks for the ends. As per @ProDave acros and planks.

By the time you cut through the small amount of blockwork above the door, allowing for the lintel, there's not going to be much left of it to hold the floor joists above from strongboys. I would be inclined to prop it with planks and standard acro's under the ceiling very close to the wall on both sides. Perhaps as well as the strongboys?

Just use the small size wago's as good as anything. It's not like you will want to unplug it often is it? If trying to remove that, the tip is a really hot soldering iron as you have to heat the mass of the board and the plated through hole. Heat the solder that's there and one leg at a time pull the component out. Only then use a solder sucker or solder wick to clean the hole out. If it's lead free solder, a little drop of 60/40 applied will make it flow a lot better. If you can't desolder it without messing up the board, just snip the wires as close to the board as you can. Solder the new wires onto the board and there should still be enough on the sensor to solder onto.

You would the need a SiP manufacturing press costing some 10s of thousands (guess), and the place to put it, and the people to run it. SiPs work because they are bonded together under pressure. Steel, glass, and rubber is cheaper than a car, but then you have to pay for the factory :-). If you dig around on eg ebay there are some small businesses making SiPs, though. One I looked at was farm-based. Ferdinand

Check Ironmongery Direct as they do a lot of sliding door gear in big sizes. https://www.ironmongerydirect.co.uk/product/kl-g-straight-sliding-door-gear-70-100kg-straight-sliding-track-3000mm-262348

No I'm just so tight I make @Nickfromwales look generous ..!! I hate buying "custom" parts at a premium price when you can make simple ones work - hose bits are cheap and have swivels built in already so why create yourself hassle and extra cost ..?

I have a basement as part of our new build, it is 11.5m x 10.5m and constructed as an 'open box' i.e no lid. Passive timber frame house sits on top, basement is passive also (fancy way of saying it sits on a foundation of EPS and walls are clad in EPS, meeting the outer leaf and insulated section of the timber frame. Three large 10m steels span the ground floor, (one on a post) with a web of smaller steel joists taking point loads from above and web joists in-between. We could have had a solid walls in the basement but wanted flexibility in the layout. Some quick comments on your plan. In my experience. the cost of a basement is dependent on a number of features. Getting planning is by far the easiest bit 1) most fundamentally - ground conditions. Tricky conditions such as made ground, hard rock, chalk (solution features) high water table etc will drive up excavation costs and construction costs. We have chalk under gravel (Thames valley river bed) so needed a very substantial slab (300mm) with lots of reinforcement. The only way you are going to know what the required basement spec is, is to have proper ground investigation (cores to 4m and probes to 10m) at 2-3 points in your footprint. You then need to have a SE work out the required structure, concrete, steel etc. You may get an early view on what's likely under your feet by searching for nearby historical boreholes to get a feel, but you'll ultimately need to do your own investigation as conditions can rapidly vary. Water table will dictate your degree of waterproofing. For us, water table was low at 6m so we were able to use warrantied waterproof concrete on its own. Our friends built near the Thames and needed external tanking and wp concrete (they used the Glatthar system, good but not cheap). Some opt for the internal membrane, sump & pump. Principal here is that you build a leaky box, allow the water to safely collect in a sump and continuously pump out. Very common on retrofit basements in London. Budget £5k for the investigation. If your LA adds requirements for contamination surveys etc then expect to pay a bit more. SE will vary, we paid £5K but got quite a bit of additional work in there too (services design etc..). BC will then want to ensure you have means of escape and/or fire suppression so external stairs or a sprinkler system will need to be in the design. Will you have wet services down there? If so, you'll need to pump wet waste up to the main foul level. How are the internals being lit? We used UPVC windows and GRP light wells from MEA - they've been very effective and the concrete team only needed to leave the aperture (sufficiently reinforced obviously per SE design). Party wall is critical also, we were lucky in that we escaped any notification due to the 45o rule. We were within 6m of one neighbour and 8m of another. Have you done any of this investigation & design yet? Pretty impossible to cost the job without it in my opinion. 2) Design - a simple rectangular box is cheapest, thinner the raft & walls the cheaper (subject to SE spec). Penetrations will add cost as they complicate the formwork and require more prep before the pour. 3) Access - a very tight site can be expensive to excavate, muck away and to get steel and concrete onto. You need min 1m working space, with appropriately battered back walls around the basement. If your ground is very soft or loose, you may need to sheet pile (very expensive). Our excavation (not much bigger than yours) required 73 20t trucks to cart away the spoil. Machine was loading them directly so it only took 3 days - we were lucky to have good access so this was not too painful. We also pumped concrete for the slab and used shuttered runs for the walls (pump hire is expensive) direct from the mixer. 4) Build method. ICF is a fine choice, especially if you're using an external or internal waterproofing method. If you're reliant on just WP concrete then you need an excellent pour with no honeycombing and this is impossible to confirm with ICF so traditional formwork is a better option. You can DIY your waterproofing but it will not be warrantied. We used a SIKA system which had admix in the concrete and the water bar between day joins - the SIKA rep came to site to inspect the work before pours and the team photographed everything as they went. So we now have a 20 year guarantee on the integrity, upon which the building warranty is dependent. Cost for our 120m2 basement (including demo of the existing and services) was £120k in Berkshire - probably £90-100k purely for the basement itself if you strip out the other parts of the package. We used a reputable local groundwork who brings in a proved team that did the steel, formwork and pouring - goes without saying that it's pretty skilled work. Good value for money in my opinion given the extra space that we acquired. Basements do not need to be scary but there is a lot of prep that you need to do before you can really understand and mitigate the costs. Fair to say that Tony (of Tony's house) did his own basement DIY at a fraction of my cost (he is an experienced builder of 30+ years) and I went to see it - very nice it is too. Probably plenty more to share on our experience if you have more questions!