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Scaffold down and windows in...big dose of euphoria....feels like a real milestone. We can now get a sense of the completed project. With the scaffold removed the house now looks far more suited to the plot and we hope our neighbours will be as relieved as we are. The window install went well. Our windows are Velfac and we opted to use an approved installer as it extended the warrantee to six years. It cost a bit more but the standard of install was good with great care being taken. A few grubby hand prints on the render but nothing we could not clean of with soapy water. One aspect of doing your own build that we had not considered, is the fact you start out with something perfect and new. It will slowly age and degrade. It’s akin to the feeling of the first mark on a new car. Pat and I have restored a couple of cars in the past and avoided going the whole hog of a concourse restore as it can spoil your willingness to use and enjoy the car. We just need to keep the same mind set with the build. With a house we can lock, our intention is to let the dust settle. We’ll come back to the project with fresh enthusiasm in October.

S**t the f*****g bed, it’s working.

- you smash your Piggery door in. Here's how..... First, you dig trench for a land drain next to your house because the original company forgot to put in that bit of land drain. Then you discover why they didn't do that bit of the land drain : it needs to be deep enough to pass under the foundation of a (non structural) wall connecting our house to the Piggery. Being a little more devious than I was at the beginning of the build, I wait til my son comes over on holiday. Fit lad..... From Canada. Backwoodsman, Tree Planter, muscles coming out of his wee-wee. 'Ere, sunshine dig this trench for us would ya? Yeah, I'll tidy up the mess you make with the digger, dad. Hmm, cheeky. Trench dug.... "Where's this trench going dad?" Under the foundation which you've just hit. OK, Snarl, hiss 20 minutes later, There y'are. That was quick Just needs a bit of tinkering with...... He'd smashed his way through under the foundation with an iron bar and his bare hands - hit a pile (column of compacted stone) and right enough was through the other side. Know how to lay a land drain, then? Yo, ahm 'ahn it man (oh the affectations of the Young: he left speaking normal Queens English) From a distance I watched the fabric lining going in, the pebbles, the pipe. All was well. You can back-fill it all now. No sooner said than done. Debbie casts an eye at the work done and casually asks - "Why is a couple of inches of an iron bar poking out of the other side of the wall?" The little sod had buried my iron bar in the trench under the foundation. And left just enough visible to remind me that it was there. Took an hour to dig out. He's back in Canada now.

I spoke too soon. One of the salesman has just emailed us a VAT invoice. It just took some shaking of the tree Let's hope that HMRC accept this one.

Has anybody done a cost spreadsheet with the average metre cost of windows i would be interested to know roughly what sort of price per m everyone paid. I am expecting mine to come in at the price of a small private jet. Ta very much.

The good news is that HMRC have settled our claim on all items bar one. The bad news was that this was our single largest item: our fitted kitchen which we bought from Wickes. The claimed total was correct in that we excluded the non-claimable items. The refusal reason wording was "Not a VAT invoice -- Pro--Formas / Quotations / Sales Orders / Order Confirmations / Illegible Invoices / Photocopies / Invoices without company VAT registration numbers are not acceptable invoices". The Issue seems to be that Wickes Document does not have the word "Invoice" on it. It does include everything else: Customer details Seller details Order reference VAT number Order itemisation Pricing details based on Wickes list prices plus discounts, and itemisation of installation services (£0). Confirmation of Payment details. What it doesn't do is to separately itemise VAT and excl VAT subtotals. We've chased the Wickes salesman a couple of time and we getting the run -around. "That's what we issue customers; we don't give any other document". They got no interest in this as this was an order completed a couple of years ago. I've tried the customer service -- no response. And time is ticking towards or 30 day appeal limit. Very frustrating as this is worth £2K to us. We will see what happens, but the main lesson learnt is that you should make sure you get a valid VAT receipt for big ticket items at the time of purchase.

Here's a list of prices compiled from BH public posting https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10mPQ-4HnTuUbiKmQVn3fPPoVkxDMPgRFNvaji4R8USg/edit?usp=sharing Apologies anyone if I've made a mistake on your prices or missed you out. I wasn't hugely systematic. I'm surprised not to see any Green Building Store ones. As @craig says, a simple m2 hides a lot of detail that affects price e.g. ratio of fixed vs opening windows, doors, cills, coated glass, non-rectangular, airtightness level of the model, etc. I suspect the mysterious discount factor also distorts things. @lizzie I'd previously had you at £390/m2 - was that just for alu UPVC and you went for alu timber at £566/m2 in the end? From https://forum.buildhub.org.uk/topic/1820-alu-clad-timber-or-pvc/?do=findComment&comment=26286

Definitely find out exactly who the covenant is with and if there is any reciprocal agreement that you might be able to make some kind of exchange/release of obligation/ new and mutually beneficial agreement with. As you don't want to live in it, it might be worth getting a land agent on board or a developer who will do some kind of no win no fee thing. The major uplift in value is in gaining planning at the moment. You can also visit the planners, independent of the covenant (unless it is with the council!) and put the idea to them. However, it would be best to pay and get proper pre planning advice, as I have found to my cost that the the free informal little chats are not always reliable. You need everything in writing.

Watch this space It has to travel about 1.5m so a bit of silicone spray and we should be ok

Just a slightly wacky thought, but I wonder if it would be possible to set up a dead vertical scaffold pole in the centre, firmly set down into the ground so it can't move, and then have a 10m long arm that pivots from that to provide a reference to help keep the blocks following the curve? Some sort of adjustable stand might be needed to hold the arm at the right level for each course, but I doubt it'd take more time to set something like this up than it would to set up a line several times on a conventional build.

Happened in the Health and Leisure industry. A few suppliers created an organisation basically to keep some suppliers out of the industry. That all changed when Local Authorities had to go to competitive tendering. I don't think the Fitness Industry Association in the UK is about anymore, possibly because it was started by a serial bankrupt and his mistress.

No so, you will easily get standard concrete blocks to go round with no problem and no need to cut the blocks. Given your diameter of 20m, the building circumference is 62.83m, so 279 blocks per course. The difference between the inside and outside of each perp join will be about 2mm and the maximum deviation in render thickness will be about 1mm.

I'm aware of two methods that have been tried, blown-in EPS beads and poured in Leca (fired clay beads). I believe that Leca may be approved for use under a suspended floor, at least a beam and block one where there isn't really any risk of mould growth.

Happy customer of Wunda, their design and parts and when a mistake was made very quick to put it right. The only mod I made was running pipes through internal walls rather than crowding doorways with loads of pipe.

I was born on Somerset I am not in a position to say anything

I am in Cornwall, we do things right here, not like that lot in Devon, ask @joe90about planning in Devon. Devon is just a place one has to travel tough to get to civilisation.

Choice of Pex-Al and Pert-Al at Wunda

Not unusual. From memory the door sizes and garage sizes haven’t changed in decades, and most developers don’t expect you to put a car in the garage - it’s for bikes, junk etc ..! I think the standard size is based around a Ford Prefect or something similar ..??

No, it's not tectonic movement as such, but the slow rebound from having the mass of ice removed from the end of the last ice age. In effect, Scotland is "floating" up very slowly, relative to the South of England.

£250 ouch. i think for that one I would try a jet washer with a nozzle on a pipe long enough that it reached all of it from one spot. Or learn to love lichen, which may not work for you. Ferdinand

you would have no problem with SEPA --salmon cant run up that waterfall

so when you fitting the turbine to it? or even an over shot water wheel LOL

No not our Loch. Waterfall just increases in flow when water levels are higher.

I think also some have a waterless trap with a self-sealing membrane so that might not be 100% conclusive?

If you need an always-on PC, then there are some very low power, passively cooled ones about. We have two of these, one with a Core i7-7500U, one with a Core i7-8550U. Both sit at around 7 W most of the time, less than 1 W on standby, and never more than 15 W. One has 8Gb of RAM, the other 16Gb, and both are fitted with Samsung Evo SSDs. Although the Core i7-8550U is supposedly about twice as fast as the Core i7-7550U I can't say I've seen any difference at all between them. As these machines have turned out to be reliable, low power and have reasonable performance, I've been thinking about buying one of the same companies multiple Gigabit Ethernet port machines as a firewall/router. The company is Hystou, in China, and their basic kit seems very good, although best to get a barebones machine and fit decent RAM, SSD etc. Also their WiFi cards are not great, but I removed these and blanked the antenna holes, as we have no need of WiFi, and removing the WiFi card reduces the power very slightly.

Just put your drain trap on the floor and fill it with water and see if water stays in the bottom after the surplus has run out the waste connection.

The must be a water trap somewhere but you don't need a separate u-bend if there is a water trap in the waste outlet/drain itself. Typically these are formed from concentric tubes that can be removed from above through the square top for cleaning. So have a look inside the waste outlet. If there really isn't one in the waste outlet I wouldn't add a u-bend. Better to find a waste outlet that does have a top access trap.

lawnmower racing,

Out of the box suggestion: You have half an acre of land that's too rough to mow. you want to "do something" with it to stop it becoming scrub for now. Eventually it will be leveled, seeded and made into a lawn. Is that a fair assesment? If so do what I did. Treat it all with Gallup 360 or other glyphosate weed killer with a back pack sprayer. It gives you cleaner weed free ground for when you are ready to level it, costs bugger all to do, and saves you all that effort with the strimmer.

I'm having the same thoughts and have decided to go for UFH upstairs instead of radiators. The costs seem to wash out about the same and as we're having hard flooring throughout I liked the idea of warm floors in bedrooms and bathroom. My understanding is that even if your u values meet regulations you will notice a difference from houses built 10 years ago in terms of heating requirements.

For our upstairs I'm piping from the downstairs manifold to a loop in the FF bathrooms, and prepping the bedrooms by running a loop from a second manifold (running at higher temp) to each room as well as adding a fused spur nearby. If I feel the need for rads the pipes will be in the stud wall ready to draw out and connect, else a small panel heater can hang on the wall. Not ruling out fan coils either. The higher temp manifold will also service towel rails.

We are also traditionally built No MVHR Airtightness is very good We have UFH on the ground floor and small radiators in each of the five bedrooms and three bathrooms We moved in just before Christmas and haven’t needed to use the radiators Only to test prior to moving in We no carpets down through Jan and Feb A lot of heat rises from the ground floor UFH and soon heats the bedrooms up

I think radiators are a fact of life for this situation. Ugly but true. You might have to oversize them a bit, but if it's a new build, there's really no reason to build to a standard that an ashp can't service. Realistically, whilst you might lose a bit of flexibility in room lay out, you're not really losing much space. UHF etc is entirely possible of course, but I looked briefly at the alternatives, and the effort and cost was disproportionate to any benefits.

So the roof of the tower is nearly complete, the slates are in and all we need now is the lead man to do the hips.