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Got my letter today. I have been banded F which is a pleasant surprise as I was expecting G. Every little helps as they say. Not going to appeal my banding LOL

Mine is now half way through being fitted. It is brilliant. They are fully rigid and come complete with doors etc, really well packed with cardboard corners, folded so that the corners have extra protection. The carcase, drawers etc are the same colour as the doors (or you can have contrast if you wanted). All the doors have protected film on them I've got 6 base units, 3 tall units and one wall unit for just over £2,000 and laminate worktops (they do granite etc as well). Soft close doors and drawers. My fitter is well impressed with it and says it is much better than the last one (Howden's) he fitted. They are made to order in their own factory. The DIY refers to design and install, I think.

As a kid we would happily use dry cow pats as frisbees, sometimes they were only dry on the outside! :) We would make camps from sticks and logs covered in leaf mould and ferns. Every year we'd collect frogspawn, collect conkers etc. Apples, walnuts, greengages, blackberries were eaten straight off the bush/tree without washing our hands. Open fires were used to cook apples. spuds and sausages etc after stripping a bit of silver birch bark off to get it going. Cats and dogs were our playmates / pillows in some cases. Not a bottle of hand sanitizer in sight! I looked like a xylophone standing on end I was that skinny. The bug count I was exposed to must have been huge. Mum had a bottle of bleach and some Dettol but the most the worktops got was probably a wipe with a rinsed out dishcloth. Vim & Ajax were the only "cleaners" I remember.

Great work; Mr McCloud needed to be at his creative best to manufacture drama in this one.

Let's be honest some people rather than move themselves / their kids to a healthier place would seek and have the resources, to control their current environment which to an extent is what I guess they've done. It's a tad boy in the bubble. Creat a micro climate in a sea if filth type thing. We've a number of members here who've seen massive improvements in their health conditions doing the self same thing. On the other hand SWMBO & I were discussing the obsession with over cleaning and sterile houses the other day along with the lack of exposure to "good bugs" in kid's and indeed adult's lives nowadays. Our two have grown up outside playing in mud, sand pits, the pond etc and are pretty robust and both as skinny as rakes. Close exposure to family pets too I'm sure helps build a healthy immune system. We both were like them and even more outdoors orientated but a lifetime of junk food and antibiotics I reckon has somewhat depleted our gut flora. Aka we're a pair of near chubsters! Was considering having one of those gut bacteria count tests done... Our house must be super healthy if the number of spiders are an indicator. I find they make great natural dust traps!

The view

Hi Everyone, Just as we are finishing off my house, just a few things to do mainly landscaping, I am contemplating doing it all over again. My parents moved to an apartment 6 months ago and it is lovely, but they just don't like living close to other people. Meanwhile there is a piece of land for sale at the other end of the street to mine. I am considering making an offer for it and building them a house. Hopefully I could learn from mistakes that have been made on mine. Stay tuned, I will know if I get it next week.

@jack wholeheartedly agree on eating. I have always eaten organically with meat with known provenance, gardened organically and grown what i can myself so I know its chemical free. I have been following a low carb keto/paleo type diet since acquiring T2 diabetes.....it is a huge help in controlling blood sugar and if all else was as it should be I am sure I would be bursting with good energy on this woe (way of eating). I also don’t drink alcohol and have not done so for more than 20 years (but I assure you I am not the sober bore at parties LOL). Its a good way to eat I will stay with it forever now unless some other gremlin rears its head and rules it out.

Fingers crossed for you.

Believe me if I can find him I will probably thump him!

Just when you thought it was all over. You must be the most resilient of people, Lizzie, I think I would have killed someone by now.

Indeed - there seems to be an ever increasing amount of evidence now that our gut flora is responsible for way more than just processing our food. There's some fascinatingly promising research going on right now in that field.

No sh!t! SWMBO & I, only half jokingly, suggested to the two skinny as rakes kids, that they might like to "donate" so Mum & Dad could recolonise our depleted gut bacteria. I'm going to sound like a conspiracist nutter but I really believe modern "life" knocks the sh!t out of us, pun intended. Even if we're eating healthily, what we're putting in is so sanitised it's making us all out of balance.

@curlewhouse yes think OH would have been happier with the higher banding, we have never lived in an F before LOL Me I'm happy!

Well done Take about a result I bet your really pleased Lizzie

I think the simplest way to do it is for everything to be in your parents' names so that they have the security of knowing that their home is really their own but you pay the bills. Once everything is done, tot up the costs and make note of it as an unsecured loan against their estate, with an agreed interest rate, repayable on second death. The security thing can be a big deal for anyone, but especially older people who no longer have the capacity to earn well if something goes wrong. It also protects them should you die first. My brothers a I put a similar arrangement in place for our mum some years back but instead of having an interest rate, the amount to be repaid was expressed as a percentage of the property value as mum put a fair bit of her own money into the property.

Actually I had mentioned to the lawyer I don't know if I should buy it or my parents should be buying. I would just be organising it. Hadn't thought of the VAT issue., Using a main contractor and with a lot less bespoke stuff than in my house most stuff will be zero rated, but it is definitely worth thinking about. I guess I am in a different situation to most people, I can afford to retire and earn way more than I spend. In that situation I think I may as well make other people's lives better so frequently pay for things for family members and friends. I enjoy it and they do too. I even paid for my wife's friend's divorce lawyer when her husband hid all their money and she was at risking of losing her kids. I prefer direct action, to giving to unaccountable charities. My parents are 71 and 72. Their health is fine and I'd like to hope they will be around for a few years yet. They could afford to buy the land and build the house, although they probably couldn't lay their hands on the cash next week to finance the plot. But they wouldn't know where to start to organise getting a house built. If I can make their life easier then I think its the right thing to do, I am sure most people would want to do the same if they could.

I think this is mostly bang out of order. Fair enough to suggest they built a cob house out of unicorn phlegm and fairy belly button fluff instead but to criticise their parenting and life choices? When all they’re trying to do is the best for their family in line with what would be considered mainstream best advice? For a start, if you required frequent medical care and potentially urgent medical treatment, the last place you’d choose to live is the countryside, 40 miles from the nearest hospital only to find the immunologist (or whomever) was shit.

Obviously they will be building it @AliG ..... not just for VAT reclaim purposes ..... ?

I did feel a bit uneasy with tonights episode. If the children has such extreme allergies and asthma surely it would be better to live out of the city. The children can't be inside the house all the time.

I'd go for an all-RCBO CU and run the outside circuit on a dedicated circuit. I can't get my head around the logic in having a standard 17th Ed CU, with just two RCDs. The additional cost of an all RCBO CU over a standard 17th Ed one is pretty small when compared with the whole cost of the electrical installation. I fitted a 12 way CU for our 2 bedroom house, plus another 4 way all RCBO CU for the external services (garage, treatment plant, car charge point and water pump and treatment system). In the overall scheme of things it may have cost me around £100 more than a standard 17th Ed CU for the whole lot, but it's a great deal more convenient to have every circuit on a dedicated RCBO.

@lizzie it was about time you had a bit of good news!

My wife has just had a valspar match on a piece of 'picture' wallpaper - it's a lego pattern for our Son's room and he also wanted a green wall. Given we didn't want two greens in the room, the match seemed like the only option, and has come out perfectly. It's not a colour in their database, so it is now called 'Toby Green' in Reading B&Q ?

he operates as a limited company, we will probably waste a court fee just for the hell of it but chances of getting any money out of it is slim. Far better use of my time is to make sure I tell everyone loudly what he has done and he never gets another job!

Same... they were good in the shop, said what I wanted, mixed it up no issues but the resulting colour was just not the same. We've done a lot of the rooms in Valspar - brought a F&B tester pot, good few coats on a nice bit of card then take it in to store to get it colour matched. Always comes out pretty darn close to the original.

Why do you have 2 kitchens? I like Edinburgh as cities go. I'm not a city person in general, but there are some lovely leafy areas pretty near to town and then not long after that you are in countryside. I certainly prefer it to London.

I think that's pretty accurate. I will downsize once I retire but I love the larger rooms in my current living space but I don't want or need 4 or 5 bedrooms, the problem being that if it's on 2 levels there is generally the same amount of space upstairs as down so that tends to convert into extra bedrooms. I guess the way round it is to look at a bungalow or something like @vivienz is building with less space upstairs.

Good luck!

I've done a lot of reading on low carb, ketogenic and even carnivorous diets over the past few years. There's a lot of evidence - well, anecdotes - about people who have cured or drastically reduced the symptoms of immune-system related conditions like eczema, arthritis and colitis by making drastic changes to their diet. Not science, but for anecdotes, see https://meatheals.com. From memory there's a tag list that lets you filter by condition. A bit extreme, for sure, but the guy who runs it is 50, can deadlift a quarter of a ton, holds the world record for rowing 500m for his age group, and 90+% of his diet for the last 5 years has been beef. I'm increasingly of the opinion that diet science has been hijacked by zealots with an agenda. Dig into the recent Lancet article on meat and cancer, for example, and you'll find that it's literally laughable. They can get away with this because there are serious difficulties in doing proper research on diet. Partly it's the difficulty in doing double blind studies when it comes to food, but there's also inertia, special interest groups (farmers, animal rights activists), ethics (difficulty in testing unconventional diets), compliance (who wants to eat what they're told to eat for months or years?). It's little wonder it takes decades for food science to advance.

The world is full of armchair critics who seem to love wallowing in doom and gloom and only ever focusing on the negative, I avoid these people like the plague. Don’t let them into your head , never mind your garden !

My only comment is £10K for the mvhr. A casual viewer would discount that when desigining a house as an expensive luxury. Mine cost well under £2K Interesting the "solution" to a low VOC sofa, was buy an old one, so some previous owner has "suffered" it's ill effects.

Prof Tim Spector's experiment where he fed his son nothing but fast food for 10 days is interesting. On the surface a varied menu...but the results! https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/qz.com/402918/i-made-my-son-eat-nothing-but-mcdonalds-for-ten-days-to-prove-what-fast-food-does-to-your-gut/amp/

well if 27k is too much, perhaps this is better value, unfortunately now sold. we'll probably be buying from here. check out original price. https://www.usedkitchenexchange.co.uk/shop/sold/very-very-large-smallbone-of-devises-used-kitchen-wolf-sub-zero-miele-gaggenau-kitchen-appliances/

@Jude1234 Thanks Looking even better now as the long worktop is on. Tomorrow it's the island and the last tall unit

Looking good @Hecateh

I've just realised that "DIY Kitchens" is an actual company and you've not actually built your own kitchen!!! Dare I ask how many base units you bought and cost?

Right, a new day (and I got my tractor going ?) I just got a call from Carrier and they are going to contact their factory In France and check availability and price for this GMC board, they tried to tell me I needed to pay for an engineer visit to diagnose the fault but I talked them out of that saying I had been given professional advise elsewhere. It will take a couple of days to get a reply. I will post it. I think I have decided to programme the UFH using the command unit in the cloakroom but keep the Wunda room stat in the hallway just to display the temp (not going to tell er indoors, she will play with the temp etc but it won’t change what I have done ?) plus the fact it will hide a hole in the wall.

Timber frame is lighting fast. Turnkey ( from slab to rainproof shell ) is relatively stress free in comparison to you organising individual trades. Also one person for liability and warranty then too. No brainer AFAIC.

I first make good the 3 reveal edges (top & sides) with pb trim and feather it in with filler like Easyfill 20. You have to fill all your screw holes sometime too. This after fitting the sill. Then I'd think about putting tiles on using plastic trim and a corner piece. Something like this:

My friend and I were just talking about this the other day, when we were young and indeed our children you very rarely heard of all these allergies, also obesity was very rare in children too but then again we and our children were out playing whenever we could, I can remember rolling down hills which had been newly cut for hay , playing at burns (streams) dabbling in the water and generally getting mucky ,it was a fantastic childhood, not sitting in front of a screen!

I don't think anyone is knocking them for trying to do the best for their family, just questioning how they've gone about it. As someone whose build was all about creating the right environment for my wife and her chronic lung and allergy conditions (not to mention multiple other serious health conditions), and as I said over on the other thread, obsessing about low voc materials is irrelevant if you then create so many dust traps.

After you've not passed on the comments, please do let us know what your hypothetical friend does not do.

What a lovely son you are.

I think the lady is a yummy mummy Sad that all her kids had all sorts of allergy’s We wondered what would happen when the kids left the house or went out into the garden Wouldn't moving out of London and commuting in be better for their children He had a nationwide fitness training business and she an art gallery I wouldn’t think either would have to be there for 7am each morning

There are some fantastic new drugs hitting the market for asthma as well as atopic dermatitis(eczema) which is related. Historical treatments work on the symptoms of asthma, these actually cure it by acting on the proteins that cause it. These should be imminently available to help the children. One of them, Dupixent, has just been approved in the UK for AD, asthma should follow next year. This Grand Designs is giving me ideas for a possible new project. BTW I had never had asthma or allergies in my life, but have lived in Central London Monday to Friday for work for the past 15 years. I stayed with the in laws who had a bulldog around 7 or 8 years ago and almost ended up in hospital with asthma from the allergy, the doctor thought I had pneumonia. I do worry about the effects of the air quality. The window ledges my apartment are covered in grey dust.

I thought it was the best of the new season. The couple were maxed out with their separate business, hospital visits, 3 young children and researching non toxic building materials. Were there any bricks in their build? Next week will bring me down to earth, Swmbo says she will be to scared to watch.

Not sure what to make of all that. Obsessing about low voc materials seems irrelevant when there are dust traps everywhere you looked.

Give Paul a ring at On Target Scaffold. Helpful and you can have it for as long as you need it.

Yes we have just used tape and no membrane. Not really what the architect advised but her solution was overkill. We could put some more insulation between the ceiling and the roof panels but we are quite relaxed about listening to the rain. Our walls are unusual in that we had a largely existing rendered block wall which we were not allowed to extend beyond so we built a second inner skin of insulated blocks and did a full fill of knauf earthwool to provide the necessary u value. The earthwool was very nice to use and much better than the old style spun glass.

Lets assume a few things 5x6m footprint 2.7m height above ground standard footings at 600mm flat roof For a 3 sided box in brick only, that’s 48sqm of brickwork, 16m footings, 30sqm floor at 150mm with no insulation or reinforcing. 30sqm flat deck, laid to single fall, 200x50 joists at 400mm centres 18mm OSB2 deck with 2 ply felt hot torched. Standard white steel garage doors and a standard personnel door, strip lights and 4 sockets all run from existing power. You should be able to get that outside of the M25 for £10k plus VAT which makes it around £350/sqm