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`Just for a moment, lets suppose she were.....? TM: Well Ian , I see the foundations on your house are strong and stable - you must be very pleased... @AnonymousBosch : Yes, Tess, they were designed by an Irish company based in Cork - I had to cross the border many times to visit them - of course it'll be less easy to visit post Brexit... I'll need a visa - and taking my dog with me will be a no no wont it? TM: Oh but you can source those skills in the Uk cant you? @AnonymousBosch Maybe. But tell me this, Tess : look at my house , those ICF blocks are very efficient at keeping me warm - they've been used in Europe since just after the Second World War. Why haven't you encouraged the building sector to insulate - it would save everyone money and the planet at the same time. TM: well Ian, you should know by now that my priority was, always has and always will be saving the Conservative Party , bugger the planet frankly. And anyway David Davies has told me that there's a directorship at JCB waiting for me. It'll be like old times, me Dave and some old Party chums ....

1) It's the wrong way up. 2) By Christ that must be one big cat!

Lies, damn lies and building schedules! Where does the time go! it's been a month since the roof was started a process that should have taken a week...and we're only just ready to put the standing seam roof panels on a month later. More on the standing seam roof in my next blog. At the time of my entry we were trying to find a roofing team to finish the work. The team drafted into build the roof had had to return to Glasgow to meet other commitments requiring our builder to find another team to pick up and complete the work. Much to our surprise we ended up with a choice of two, a local builder who had done work for us in the past and a local roofing company ICF Homes had used in the past. Our builder decided they would call in a favour from a roofer they had used in the past. There was inevitably a few days delay. To add to the entertainment we had two large roof lights 1200 x 2400 each weighing 220kg scheduled for delivery on the 3rd and the roof was not ready for them. Some last minute calls to Roof Maker and we managed to get the windows rescheduled for the 8th. With the roof far from ready we needed to get the area for the roof lights completed. Our builder put in two guys to do the required preparation to take the windows. This probably created as much work as accomplished as they were not chippies or roofers, but with some corrective work from the new roofers it was enough to prepare for the roof lights installation. To get the windows onto the roof we made use of Terry Peach and his show hiab again. The day of the window delivery arrived and true to form it was just about the windiest day we had had in a long while. Wind, cranes and large fragile objects are not a good combination and we thought we would need to call off the installation and try again on a more settled day. In any event we decided to give it a go and the windows were gingerly lifted up to roof height on the sheltered side of the roof and gently eased over the ridge into the gale...with a couple of restraining ropes and guiding hands on the roof they where successfully lowered into place with a sigh of relief from Pat and I . With the windows in place the roofing crew continued to work on our roof. They could only do a couple of days a week due to other commitments and work progressed rather slowly. By the 18th the roof was still not finished, and our roofers departed. Fortunately the remaining work was neither skilled or structural so Pat and I stepped in and completed the boarding, papered and battened the roof. We also boxed in the eaves ready for the spray foam insulation of the roof. The delay in completing the roof also meant we had lost our slot with the spray foam insulation company. They had been rebooked by our builder but just failed to turn up, no phone call, no email, not a good way to operate. In exasperation we agreed with our builder we would get it organised ourselves. Back to our schedule... all our windows from Velfac were due for delivery imminently. In our initial planning we had allowed some contingency time for build delays, but not nearly enough. Our original delivery date, the first week in April was arrived at after discussion with our builder. We realised some while back that it was unrealistic and delayed to mid May which seemed like a safe option, oh how wrong you can be! It's a curious detail with the Velfac design that you have to have your window apertures rendered prior to window installation. Our render work finally started on June 2nd with an anticipated completion date of the 21st. The work got off to a good start and it looked set for an early completion. We opted to go with JUB for our render as they are our ICF supplier . With us being their first build in the UK they have been very good to us providing render materials at cost. In general the ICF block work was clean and true, just perfect for rendering. Of course there were areas that were not good enough to just render and required remedial work. On our first concrete pour the cantilever beam supporting the first floor was not braced correctly. The beam had twisted deflecting the first floor wall 10-15mm. Regrettably it did not got spotted at the time of the pour and the beam was set. To correct the problem the course of blocks added to the beam was adapted to straighten the first floor wall. This worked out reasonably well and the remainder of the wall is straight an true, but it left a step in the ICF wall face that needed to be fixed before rendering could be done. We did this by building up the wall with cut block and shaving it back, a lot of work. We also discovered another wall bow, not anything like as major but still another task to get fixed prior to rendering. With some help from Velfac we had managed to get the delivery delayed a further week, but after that they would be charging us £50 a week for each pallet and we have five pallets. With the budget already groaning we decided to take delivery on the 17th June and to store the windows in the house ready for installation once rendering completed. We have some big windows and getting them into the house without damage is going to take a lot of care. We talked to the company doing the window install and they kindly agreed to split the install and to assist in the window unload. When our scaffold was installed we had a loading bay added on the first floor specifically to get the windows into the house. We also have organised a hiab delivery vehicle. Even so it's bit nerve racking, fingers crossed all will be well. Last but not least we have water and gas utilities connected, just electricity to go.

No rattling with this Wago jb! Should satisfy any neat freaks...

Your boiler room is taking up half the south facing wall. That is a waste. Put the boiler room where the kitchen is show, making it as slim as possible and have the kitchen on the south wall with windows looking out to the garden.

I had 20% knocked off because I live in the ex-industrial wasteland that is the horror of Cornwall.

Hey all A nice simple question ! Once I had got all the ufh pipes in I attached zip ties at strategic points to stick up through the screed . Undoubtedly these zip ties will eventually snap . As it’s a sand / cement screed can I just paint lines with paint ? . I don’t want to put something on the dried screed that will prevent / mess up the tile adhesive . Some photos of pipes !! screeders there today . “ we won’t block the lane mate “ .... ??

About to start on the garden....if the rain ever stops....got some basics done while builders were still here last year now I need to go on and get it finished. Too many ideas rolling round in my head so off I go to BBC Gardeners World Live at NEC today (free tickets) looking to refine my ideas. The weather was atrocious. The wildflower meadow gardens looked an utter mess, the lawns were seas of mud. There was an eco style garden with grassed roof building....it looked horrendous, think it was just turf.......the best show areas were those with artificial grass!! I felt so sorry for all the exhibitors. We diverted into the Good Food Show (also on today) for a dry out and a warm up, got nabbed by slick salesman into watching a video presentation for retirement villages. And there was I thinking we didn't really look our age!

The guy on the video is using a float to rub it up. His looks a bit funny because he has been using it for about 30 years so it's well worn in. The other is just a large finishing trowel. Again it's got a great finish on it as it's been polishing floors for a long time. Your brand new trowel won't get it like that. If you have never worked with concrete liked this before your setting yourself up for a major fall. With wet concrete the time you have to work with it is tiny. One minute it's too wet the next it's too dry. Or its been sent out too wet and your there till 3am before you can touch it. I would price up using a dry screed mix. Much easier to work with than a wet mix. And don't underestimate how much work physically it is. You will need some guys just bringing the concrete in and raking it out while the main guy gets it level. If you think you can rake it out and then level it out you will be clean busted before you start the trowel bit. Most of the guys I know who do screeding have shoulders like Olympic weightlifters.

Thanks for the tip. I was planning to get it up and let it dry/shrink for a week or two (weather permitting..), then spray the treatment on with a 2l pressure sprayer. I might try both.

Just read a post on another forum where a "smart" meter customer had their electricity supply remotely switched off for nine and a half hours by their supplier. The sequence of events was that the customer called the supplier to report that the meter in-house display was showing the wrong tariff, a different tariff to the one he had signed up to. The supplier said they would correct the display over the air. All seemed OK, until a few hours later when the power went off. The supplier called out the DNO, when the power outage was reported, and the DNO reported back that the supply to the meter was OK and that the meter had turned off the supply to the house. It turned out that someone at the supplier had sent the meter the wrong programming data when trying to reset the in-house display to show the correct tariff. What they did was change the meter so that it was programmed as a Pay As You Go credit meter, without telling the customer this is what they had done. When the period of grace allowed without credit ran out the meter disconnected the supply. Getting the supply back on took many 'phone calls and a long delay. No compensation was offered. Everything I've read about remote disconnection has stressed that the suppliers would not use this feature (it's built in to all "smart" meters). This case seems to prove that a supplier can disconnect a supply remotely without any checks, just by someone with a bit of finger trouble. That doesn't fill me with confidence.

Friend had the foresight to work out where the post for his staircase would be and left pipes clear of the area to bolt that. Then there was a change of plan (something to do with BC being unhappy with the escape from a mezzanine area which wasn't a bedroom but which some future occupant might conceivably use as a bedroom, IIRC) so that the stairs had to be changed.. It'd have saved a lot of worry to know where the pipes actually were when it came to drilling where they were only 90% sure they weren't.

@AnonymousBosch thank you :-))

You dont ....

I have both ally tower in the house on wheels, easy to move kwickstage on the outside for full run, heavy to move, pain in the arse to put up and very time consuming they both do two completly different jobs really.

Se post #2. A scaffold tower is a one trick pony. Kwickstage is anything from a simple tower to full blown whole house scaffold. And towers, particularly aluminium ones, will likely cost a lot more than the same amount of Kwikstage.

one reason is because its easy to erect where as scaffolding tubing and clamps etc requires you to have had a meccano set when you were a boy or girl .LOL

One of the neatest ideas I have seen had a ladder to a storage mezzanine which had used the same mechanism as a sash window.

mine's the same

The loft ladder in my workshop is operated by an electric winch. The winch is fitted up near the ridge and is normally used for lifting stuff up there, but I can just release the bolts that lock the ladder, hook the winch to a wire loop that runs around the bottom of the ladder and is connected to the loft hatch, then operate the winch and it folds the ladder then lifts the ladder and the hatch up. The winch cuts off when the wire rope is tight, and the spring keeps the hatch tightly closed.

A tower like that is fine to access one point for a specific job. Kwiksage (or similar systems like cuplock) can be a single tower, or they can scaffold your entire house in one continuous run. That is the attraction, versatility.

Mine is not fixed either just stays under its own weight

Never too late for you to dig it up!

An automated loft ladder...that'd be a step up...

We want pictures!

You haven't been here long, he's got a serious aversion to leaks.

Ours was designed with all pipes in doorways and I asked on here why I could not run pipes through walls to save hot spots, reaction was why not. It saved mtrs of pipe runs, I ran pipes in insulation through the walls and it made it easier to install.

Ours is just on the IKEA adjustable feet. No issues, with the huge weight, it'll never move

With back to back units it isnt going anywhere. Its only when you have a single row of units with a worktop overhang that you need to seriously consider some arrangement to prevent it tipping.

We received quotes from buildstore and Protek. The Protek ones came in much cheaper and they offered a price match so went back to Buildstore and asked if they could price match (they are currently looking into it for both site insurance and warranty) so may be worthwhile doing the same. Our Protek site insurance quote came in at £895.

It will weight approx 400kg, as people say it's not going anywhere.

Ours isn't properly fixed, either, although I did stick some battens to the floor, lined up with the inside edge of the side panels. I stuck the battens down with a bit of silicone, and did the same on the inside face of the side panels where they are tight up against the battens. TBH I don't think anything was needed, as I doubt it would go anywhere if just left free standing.

Ours is not "fixed" it just sits on the cabinet legs. With the weight of it, it is not going anywhere.

Their web site does exhibit some strange numeric behaviour when non typical quantities are fed into the premium calculation routines. I investigated green-field only public liability via the Protek web site using a house size of 1 m2 and build cost of £1 and it quoted a similar premium.

My guide is this YouTube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6fiqAoLSRQ At time 3:05 he is using a bull float with a long handle. At 3:30 eighty minutes after the concrete delivery he begins hand troweling the semi set concrete to get a more consistent level with a square edged trowel. At 4:00 he does something unusual and moves over the setting surface using a pair of thick Styrofoam tiles to continue the first stage leveling. At 4:30 a second similar size hand trowel with rounded corners is used. At 5:20 a larger long (700mm?) narrow hand trowel with an off centre handle is used for large radius smoothing sweeps. Finally 1 hour 40 after the pour at 6:11 he returns to using the rounded edge trowel, the sound track indicates the concrete is getting dry at this stage. I cannot afford all that so taking the advice here I will hire a posh bull float with the remote head pivot feature and buy two hand trowels, one square for the firmer leveling stage and a round edge version for the final dressing/smoothing.

https://mobile.twitter.com/PeteApps/status/1139066783724384256 #nooneingovernmentcouldhaveforeseenthis A normal format article by this writer https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/insight/61834

Sure I went to a winter rave called ‘Thermal Mass’ once.

Personal taste and all that but I've never really wanted cozy. If I had the money I would be aiming for something like this, piano makes it too cluttered though ?

If used to preheat the cold water before it is heated to DHW temperatures, then yes, I'd say any recovered heat is useful.

Easier I think with shower-baths, but I do not see many new self-builders fitting those. Ferdinand

It depends what you actually need the tool for in your link there are two trowels the top one is called a bull float the bottom one is a stick trowel both do very different jobs the bull float is used after tamping or screeding of the concrete, you use it in a very smooth motion in straight lines going across the slab to remove the marks left by the screed. After the concrete has has started to cure you then hit it with a stick trowel to remove the marks left by the bull float. For you size slab you will will want to hire a bull float, and by a hand held concrete finishing trowel, buy a small one as you will find a big one hard work on your wrist. You will need a plank that will span from side to side.

Jeez, that’s expensive, surely not that difficult to knock one up. I would be tempted to make up a long straight edge with 30mm recesses on the ends so it can sit on the wall and tamp the concrete flat, then hire a power float to give a good finish , unfortunately I left my garage floor too long before power floating so I did not get the surface I wanted but my previous garage had a lovely “polished” finish by using a power float.

Nice tilt head bull float is only about £20-30 to hire. Wouldn’t buy one. @epsilonGreedy that is a Belle float with a very nice tilt mechanism built into the head - you twist the pole to make it go either way, depending on push or pull stroke.

Mine was around that figure once I had eliminated the extra insured items that did not apply to my self build.

Met the same chaps in Surrey lats December. https://forum.buildhub.org.uk/topic/8008-modular-loft-installed-in-sections/ I honestly don't see a need to move out, unless for a couple of weeks. https://moduloft.co.uk/faqs/ Your issues will be ensuring attention to detail by the contractor, to stop them rushing, and perhaps cost. Blog entry here and photos of a project in progress. https://forum.buildhub.org.uk/blogs/entry/496-what-about-a-modular-loft/ Ferdinand

You need to look at the site insurance There will be things in there that you don’t need Such as tools and plant insurance for contractors Which bumps the premium up

Its normal. Plan and design for it anyway

Oh dear..... Oh dear oh dear... We all know what you mean but give it a few hours and I'm sure you will find out why you can't just go throwing terms like that around the place Willie nillie. ?

Perhaps I misunderstand but.. Why tension the wires at both ends? If I've understood correctly that's going to be limited by the upward force you are allowed to apply to the end of the "cantilevered" stair treads (before they start bending upwards). You might need to run the wires down to the ground and anchor them there, using a double ended adjuster at tread level. But then how much tension can you put on the top end/handrail? I think you need to get this properly designed. I doubt the strength of the swage is an issue. Google finds... http://www.ybw.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-270417.html http://www.cruisersforum.com/forums/f116/strength-of-cable-terminations-wire-rope-grips-vs-swaged-131788.html

They are designed so the filters are a 2 min job to remove and clean or replace. Even the removal and cleaning of the heat exchanger is an hour at most because you have to dry it off. https://www.bpcventilation.com/ Have a look at these guys and send them your plans for a price. A maintenance contract is definitely some one taking the piss.