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I'm quite pleased with that. Going to play with the Rubi cutter now! Falls good: Was aiming for 13-26mm and it's about 18mm. Level not short enough here really but it falls:

I got a quote this morning of £7000 just to do the steel for our cantilevered stairs. I replied saying thank you. Company then immediately replied asking if the price was of any use so i replied with the following: Grant, Yours is the first quote so far, however with speaking to a couple of people that have had similar steel fitted for a cantilevered stair it seams very expensive. I had priced the steel previously, think it was around £1200-£1500 for materials, so wouldn't have expected the labour to be £5500-£5800 for 2 - 3 days of fabrication effort. Regards Stuart Strangely I haven't heard back from Grant.

Or plastering? The majority will say get an expert in!

Our guttering finished today. Really pleased with it. Now waiting for some rain to test it out & hopefully wash off the baked on pigeon poo on the roof.

I hope so.....its a biggish claim and there are all those homeless shoes and handbags out there just waiting for me to recycle a bit of vat LOL

I will do, and I hope you get the same person dealing with yours who dealt with mine . Hopefully you'll have the cash ready for Christmas!

@Christine Walker that is a shame as our roofer did exactly that. He sorted them into heavy & medium at his yard and then transported them in crates to the site. He was an exceptional roofer and his band of 3 men worked tirelessly through the heat and installed them across the entire roof together with the lead work in 8 working days.

Porcelanosa...see photo of bag. My tiles in pics....middel pic living room beige grout down since last November 2nd fix still going on when they were laid, full complement of builders spilt tea etc all over the place, .first pic is my wetroom shower floor silver grey grout laid in Feb and in daily use for 3 months.....last one is of the tiles outside my front door exposed to all the elements been down 3 months. Beige grout same as living room.

Here's a question all in it's own... What colour grout on the floor? SWMBO had always thought white thinking grey will look dirty. She has just asked if anybody on the forum has any thoughts on the subject. Wonders never cease!

Here's some inspiration from my current state, looks lovely even without paint on it (please no one point out any flaws)

No! That's a ladies drill for ladies! It has 25Nm of torque which is FA for what he's doing. Completely different tool to the impact driver in my link which quotes 180Nm. Thats proper wrist breaking torque. Your Aldi one...well I'd attach to my old chap just for fun!

don't you need adhesive under those tiles?

My VAT claim has been posted to HMRC today.......keep your fingers crossed for me!

Game on. The setting out for the piles is happening on Friday afternoon, 20th July. The piling contractor will also be getting everything to the site that day so that they can start bright and early on Monday morning. The piling is likely to take most of that week; I will be around at various times, but certainly Monday and Thursday, with a couple of hours here and there. If anyone would like to come along, PM me and we can arrange suitable times.

Hey all, I am new here so just saying hello. I am currently looking at a plot in southern Scotland with the hope of building a passive type house sometime in the near future. I have a few specific questions about the plot I have found which I will try to post in the correct place later. Cheers

More heads /sills. Garden and squatters

I read somewhere else that HMRC has just taken on 2 more people due to the backlog so if that's true maybe @lizzie may not wait as long.

Maybe I was just lucky.

Also have to think about neighbours. There may be available parking off site but are they willing to use it. Mine didn't want me building - always wanted to go out - or in - when deliveries were being made. Phoning the council every week about obstructions etc etc. Not insurmountable but very unpleasant and some may be even worse than mine

Once it's there it doesn't take long. Think mine was paid out after a month.

cheers everyone. @Dreadnaughtthis bit of the wood is a prime candidate for a bit of 'rewilding'. It'll just be left to do its own thing and we'll concentrate on areas with better soils. I think there were some beavers in the area few years ago. One of the old farmers (now deceased) who lived on the other side of the Glen had the distinction of being the last person to trap a big cat I think! @joe90 we're going for a bit more modern timber frame - we don't have the skills or the know how to do that and meet building regs (though it can clearly be done).

Welcome @Square Feet I can’t advise on the access but I am from southern Scotland too.

@Redoctober your slates look great, you must have had a good roofer, we were all set to use heavy 3 but didn’t realise they needed sorting into different thickness and when I asked the builders if the roofer would sort them he said no so it’s mini stonewold that will be going on

Welcome @Square Feet should I assume you are old school and prefer imperial to metric? Had the chat last night with my 18 year old about the difference and she was sooo dismissive of imperial having never been taught any of it. At 51 I can do both...and yes that is a boast?

Evening, welcome!

Welcome ! We have a few north of the border so ask away ..!

Try and get recommendations and check out everyone you propose to use. Mistakes are costly. We were far too trusting, it cost us a lot of time, money and stress.

I always worry about white going grey in places and looking dirty and patchy , at least grey all over is less likely to show a little “dirt”. As the tiles look grey how about charcoal so the grout lines stand out?

My honest advice is go to a caravan dealer and look at the stock they have for sale. We are fortunate there are 2 such dealers close by up here. This will let you look at a lot of 'vans from the old £1000 barely habitable wrecks to some quite nice younger vans. and make a choice what suits you. The one we bought, we chose because it had an unusual layout with the living and kitchen area in the middle and a bedroom at each end. Not only did that seem a better layout for our site to live in during the build, it also has more potential for later use as work / storage space. (we are keeping outs as a garden outbuilding so it is not going anywhere) The advantage of buying from a dealer is usually transport is included. If you buy privately you will have to arrange and pay for transport, and not all the dealers up here will transport 'vans they have not sold. Ours was only single glazed. Yes double glazing would have been better, but you are never going to get particularly good DG units in a static, expect a very thin gap between the panes. Don't rely on bottled gas heating. In the first month of living in ours, the inbuilt gas fire had emptied a 47Kg cylinder at a refill cost here of £80. We stopped using it then and before the winter fitted a wood burning stove, that hardly went out between November and the end of March. Top tips. Support it well, ours sits on 12 piles of concrete blocks. Panel in the gap between the bottom of the 'van and the ground. Insulate under the floor. Strap it down to some stakes so it stays put in a gale. Lag all the pipes. Check the lagging from time to time, we had one freeze up due to mice stripping a 12" section of pipe insulation. These things are poorly insulated. However having said that we had no problems with condensation, unlike the very old one we had last time, so the more recent ones are not quite as bad so perhaps buying a more recent one is a better idea than an old wreck.

but that's the thing with an impact- your wrist doesn't feel the torque...

We had a similarly odd experience when getting quotes from SEs to design our retaining wall. The chap we used charged us something like £300 plus VAT, IIRC, but another local firm came back with a quote for something like £1500, plus VAT, plus £200 for any site visits required. When I turned down their quote, by writing them a polite email thanking them for the quote and telling them that we had accepted a quote from another firm, they rang me practically demanding to know how much the other firm's quote was. I told them it wouldn't be fair to tell them, and then got subjected to what can only be called a rant for having chosen to use a firm that, in their words, had to be cutting corners to beat their price. This worried me a bit, until I gave the drawings and spec from the SE to our ground works contractor. He said he knew the SE well and we'd have no problems at all with his design, as he'd worked with him on lots of jobs and if we'd asked him to include getting the SE's design in his quote he would have been the SE he'd have chosen anyway.

Some just price loads of work and wait 'until one bites'. I hope you didn't ask the other guy for the £2 change ??

any pictures of what you mean? Don't they all cover the cut ends?

https://m.ebay.co.uk/itm/3-Piece-Diamond-Knife-Tools-Sharpening-Stone-Set-Fine-Extra-Fine-Coarse-Grade/311816827397?epid=1642502886&hash=item4899bb3205%3Ag%3ASKoAAOSwU-pXvxHh&_sacat=46576&_nkw=diamond+sharpening+stones&_from=R40&rt=nc&_trksid=p2380057.m4084.l2632.R2.TR12.TRC2.A0.H0.Xdiamond+shar.TRS0

You tried asking anywhere for DIY gas advice?

Not in my book it’s not whats the £1.10 labour is that per block, if that’s the case I’m going to dust of my trowel ive got 660 blocks in my footings and will be expecting it to take under a day with 2 of us.

Trust me Nick ...i am glad i found this place and have already told dozens of selfbuilders/DIY-ers about it! And from what I can see its not "places" ..its just HERE ! ??

If it's your house skim it. Or tape it and when the sun comes up pull all the blinds down till the sun sets again as you will see every join.

Apologies OnOff I’m sure your first attempt looks better than some of the so called pros work

I also disagree, taped and filled PB is office style on a good day. You try sanding back on a PB wall and you hit paper. You knock a PB wall and you hit paper. You BREATHE next to a PB wall and..... With skim you get a layer which is infinitely harder wearing, can be filled and sanding without instantly lifting fibres, and can absorb all the undulations that boarding, taping and filling simply cannot ever do. Ive been around both long enough to give an informative perspective. Plaster if you want a home, tape if it's an office. When the sun hits a taped wall you can even spot where the studs are.

If I were you I'd go for timber frame . Itll be the first house built for free .

I clad my house with cedar. I used grade no. 2 clear and better which had no knots. These pictures are of the north side of the house with a gap of around five years between them. We bought the cladding from the local timber yard who machined it to my specifications.

Or look here Bench Mark database

You are joking right!!! I got my letter last Sat saying that the claim would be paid out (no idea when) some 20 weeks and 4 days since submitting the paperwork.

We had an utter nightmare with the scaffolders and years of litigation to deal with afterwards. Just thank God our insurance covered it all.