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OH = Other Half. She means hubby is a broke man walking who does not know it yet . Or alternatively thinks he is broke for the wrong reason ; she may have mentioned something of benefit to OH in passing but carefully avoid stating a definite link so he will just assume it was him. The only rule against mentioning prices is case specific and to do with household harmony. Mention away. That bottom piccie ... are you a friend of Jeremy Clarkson?

They drive Saabs, if only they knew it is a Vauxhall in a special frock. They get their poloneck jumpers from Steve Jobs' bins, and glasses from SpecSavers. Pencils from Poundland and sketch books from The Works. Then add a few hundred percent markup.

The old Ebuild forum was a very busy place when I joined in 2008, probably around double the number of members we have here at that time. It was well-established as pretty much the dominant self-build and renovation forum back then. I'd guess that there were a lot more members involved in renovation work than complete self-builds, though, and a fair number involved in work on older buildings, some of which needed specialist techniques to repair/restore. Things changed pretty dramatically over the years, though. After the hiatus caused by the software update that took the forum offline for a time, the emphasis gradually shifted more towards self-build, and more towards building low energy houses, I think. It certainly seemed like that from my perspective. This forum started off as a close replica of the final iteration of Ebuild, with many of the old Ebuild members, so sort of carried on in much the same way. The main difference is that BuildHub is non-commercial, and doesn't allow advertising, because the views of the founders is that advice is likely to be less biased if there are no commercial interests at stake.

I think granite is great if you want something in blacks or greys. Polished granite can be a pain but a lot of people overlook textured black granite which looks superb and is low maintenance. If you want 'colours', then quartz is a great alternative. Great price /value blend. Dekton is a good product but expensive. But I feel aspects are missold. Its extremely brittle and chips very easily with chips being very difficult to repair. I dont like the fact that a lot of their colours arent through coloured so edges and cutouts are a different colour to worktops. Drainer grooves also bring out a different colour so arent recommended. Mitred built up edges are impossible to do without very large bevels provided the colour difference is accepted. In summary not my favourite product. Corian - as said before. My least favourite worktop. Wood - great. very environmentally friendly. If you can put up with the maintenance there is no reason to not have it. Laminate - Hugely underrated and falling out of favour for lack of snob value but unbeatable for the price. On balance, Quartz is where the market is right now.

I love that that is questioned before semi-housetrained.

Depends ...!! Visqueen or DPM under and a then a slip membrane over the top of the EPS/PIR to stop the concrete getting under it and floating it up is usual.

I joined ebuild in about 2013 or 2014 as we were starting on our second self build. I have a history of forums shutting down on me. Our first self build started in 2004 and then there was a buildstore forum that I used, but that shut down and disappeared overnight part way through our build with no warning that it was going to or no explanation of why. Thankfully the way this forum is managed there is no single point of "control" and being managed by a number of people should ensure it continues.

And once it has done that, then there is definitely no pee in it.

Fiidifmttnfnf

I've just dealt with an application that has created a lot of objections. Having spent half the afternoon reading them, most are just a rant, without any valid supporting evidence. The daft thing is that there are some key points that would be valid things to object about, if only the objectors had the wit to use them. In that case I doubt they will be a problem. Sit tight for the time being and see what pans out. I know it's a bit stressful; I well remember checking the planning website several times a day during the consultation period for our application, just hoping that we wouldn't get enough objections to trigger it being called in.

I think they do now. If you recall I thought it might work like this and queried it at a TLC branch (Medway). They admitted they didn't know but that it was a good question. They then proceeded to get all the parts out and we tried it on the bench. The guy who did it was calling the other staff over saying "Come and look at this!". Sure they've updated their bumpf since.

No sorry don't know. What I'll do though is give one of my spare Quinetic switches to a mate who's bought a Qunetic "copy" and get him to try it with his receiver.

Our Appeal officer came onto my housing estate plot where people had complained about the "eyesore", and said "where are these houses - can't see them" and went away to think about something else. On objections, I have made several objections at PP or Appeal level that have worked, and lost a couple.

The objection to the garage is one of the more comical objections that I have read, people need to get a life. The house is further away than the one you are knocking down and the windows facing the boundary are not habitable rooms. I cannot see any issue at all. Also I think the windows are at right angles to each other although it is hard to tell. Why do they underline that the house is larger. What is the relevance? This is the kind of nonsense we got. What is the relevance of being overlooked by the other neighbour, that is nothing to do with you. The planners will likely ignore the objection. Arguably their house is way too near the boundary and causing the issue. I believe the 20m type rules do not apply when the existing property is breaking the rules. So in Edinburgh there is a 9m distance for habitable rooms to a boundary and 18m total. But I believe if the other house is less than 9 m from the boundary then that is their problem not yours. Basically people want to build right up to the edge of their plot then think it effectively gives them ownership of part of yours.

I often think that some (most) people who object to planning applications don't do themselves any favours by raising issues that aren't planning considerations. Reading lots of them, I often get the impression that most feel the need to raise as many points as possible, even if 99% of them are just going to be ignored by the planning officer. If someone wants to make an effective objection they would be far more likely to have their objection looked at seriously if they took the time to see what aspects of planning policy and guidance an application might contravene, and focus wholly on those points, quoting the relevant documents to reinforce their case.

So each post only has to carry ¼ of a tonne. A 6*6 post will be more then enough to carry that weight and much much more. The compressive strength of timber is very high. Do you plan to notch the supports so your beams rest on the timber or are you using bolts to take the weight???

My neighbour objected to our drive (amongst other things) and said headlights would shine into his house, the appeal officer stated the obvious, his house was over 100mtrs from my drive entrance, guess what, I won our appeal.

He's got a wooden leg, a seriously broken nose, every tooth in his head is false and suffers from the worst dose of haletosis I've ever seen. His wig is usually on back to front and he dresses like Greg or Terry on the Simpsons. Apart from that he's a good bloke.

Remember that facing distances are between HABITABLE rooms .. not kitchen, bathroom, store, corridor etc. And they are also adjusted for rooms at angles or offset. I think you should be fine, but there will be a detailed rule somewhere.

[...] The only thing I would add to what J has said is to change is to may be - as changed above. Why? It depends on whether -locally- there are strict criteria to follow - or whether the decision depends on the judgement of the Officer concerned. I suspect the latter is the case. Your application looks to me to be perfectly acceptable. Stick to your guns.

Don't make any concessions to the planners until they mention what their concerns are. No point in obscure glazing if you don't need it. Bear in mind that you may need escape windows in the bedrooms, so an obscured and fixed shut planning condition may not suit.

Shed loads more procrastination before this is over.....

Yes, planning officers are adept at just ignoring anything that isn't a valid planning consideration. Parish councillors get to be pretty good at it too, except we have to often go face to face with parishioners who think they have the right to control what their neighbours do. Most are fairly unreasonable expectations, in my experience, not that I can ever tell them that... Might be an idea to clarify your agreement to having obscured glass in the windows overlooking the adjacent house, if you're OK with that. Probably worth checking the thread here where someone had a problem with getting low U value obscured glass 3G windows first, though. We have one obscured glass 3G window and it's the same U value as the others, but at least one manufacturer has said that they cannot offer a Ug of better than 1.2 W/m².K (I think) if the centre pane is obscured.

Should be fine, then. Also worth checking to see if there is a distance between facing windows specified in your local planning policy and guidance. I know ours is 20m, as it came up during our consultation (a neighbour was concerned about overlooking their garden, but overlooking a garden isn't usually a planning consideration)

Unless the neighbour objection is supported by planning policy and guidance it will almost certainly just be ignored. The only real issue with neighbour objections is that there maybe an automatic trigger level after a certain number have been received that then gets the application called in to the planning committee. Here I think that level is eight objections during the consultation period. FWIW, we started off with 14 objections to the previous application when we submitted ours, and all were read out at the PC planning stage. Made not a jot of difference, and our application was approved. As a councillor I get to read loads of objections to planning applications, and have yet to see any application where a neighbour objection has had any effect. Edited to add: Not seen the link when I started writing the above - the overlooking could be an issue - depends on the exact layout and perhaps what the local policy is on the distance between facing windows (here it's 20m, IIRC, less than that needs something like obscured glazing). Reading the objection, the only valid point is the privacy one. The possible nuisance from the garage is almost certainly not a significant planning issue, and anyway, pretty much all cars have to be low emissions now.

I bet he’s a good looking bloke as well.

I did an analysis piece on this recently on another thread. If you want to dig out membership etc around 2005-2008, all you need is to look up the home page at archive.org. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- That's a very good question to ask. Let me try to add a little data that I can see from the outside (I am not a Moderator or Admin). I need to emphasise that quality of engagement and direction of travel of numbers is perhaps more important than actual "total"; the total number of members includes a lot who have "passed through", which represents people who have reached a stage in their dream / project where they consider they need to enroll to ask questions, rather than passively read or lurk. Or perhaps it means people who can answer questions, or want to promote their businesses or fish for links. Like a medieval castle, I understand there are murder holes just inside the portcullis, from where @Nickfromwales dispenses boiling oil on spammers. So for the current community we need something more like "who has posted in the last 12 or 24 months?" (people ask a bit about plots then go away, then come back and ask about Planning, then come back a year later when they have Planning etc). So the 3000 member number is "who has been interested enough to join now or in the past", Within which we have "who has stuck around", or "who has posted and been thanked". The "Leaderboard -> Reputation" options tell you that 45 people have been "reacted to" more than 200 times, and that 48 people have more than 670 posts. The "Users Online" menu option will tell you that the number of "guests" ie non-members "online" (which usually means requested a page from the site in the last 30 minutes) is about 4-8 times the number of logged in members (usually), though some of those may be members too lazy to log in or on the wrong device, or being incognito. The "new join rate" is perhaps more indicative of the rate of impact, when compared eg to the number of self-builds per annum in the UK - though probably a significant majority of dreamers never get to build. Self-builds in the UK are of the order of 10,000-25,000 I think, and have grown perhaps 20-30% in the last couple of years. Somebody else can probably take a guestimate at "how many people are considering self-build more than idly in passing"; my guesstimate would be 100k-250k. So I estimate that you can say we are reaching maybe 10,000-20,000 individuals per year relatively seriously, and an unknown larger number casually. On the "new joiner" metric we are now roughly where EBuild.co.uk were towards the end, though that had its heydey in 2005-2008 roughly. Ebuild members. June 2014: 12996 (https://web.archive.org/web/20140625091853/http://www.ebuild.co.uk/) December 2014: 13504 https://web.archive.org/web/20141222205444/http://www.ebuild.co.uk/ August 2015: 14356 https://web.archive.org/web/20150809080853/http://www.ebuild.co.uk/ Ebuild existed from about the year 2000 so the long run average once established was about 1000 per year, perhaps declining as a rate at the end. Someone needs to look up 2005-2008 to check what I expect to be the peak rate of new joiners. A snapshot of how many "crawls" the Internet Archive-bot did of the site is perhaps a good proxy for "how prominent it was" and "how interested the internet was in Ebuild". (Buildhub has hardly been crawled at all by the Internet Archive, so I wonder if we keep them out for performance reasons. Or perhaps we are all boring in our old age.) Just musings. I haven't gone to the trouble of running the site through any serious monitoring services - imo not necessary as it is clearly a very healthy, thriving community, and that is what matters most. Ferdinand

Yes if you either have a concrete block wall for it to land onto, or use steels to support the top

I'll make sure to do an annual review next January, when I have 12 months worth of data. Just to illustrate how fickle the weather can be, we are now generating around 1.9 kW, with a total for the day so far of 2 kWh, so it looks like today's going to be a bit better than yesterday.

This is a key thing when thinking about PV into electric or heat batteries: what's the distribution of sunlight over short runs of days. E.g., if two consecutive days are dull, what's the probability that the third day will be dull also. My impression, not backed up by any statistics, is that consecutive days tend to be correlated (if it's dull one day it's likely to be dull the next) but over about 3 or 4 days it tends to be anti-corrolated: if it's dull today it's more likely to be bright the day after next, and vice-versa of course. So if you're wanting to use PV to cover a lot of your energy use (for DHW, say) then it's worth having about three days of storage.

I went to the same school as Tony Martin. He was considered odd, but he was from Norfolk.

I suppose the ideal is a shipping container where the door locks behind them and then you can introduce a couple of rotties. You've all got diggers, just have the graves ready dug and the jet wash handy!

I bought an Electra Elecheib induction hob from Comet as they were going bust in 2012. That well known make designed in Israel and made in Turkey! ? Started at £399...reduced to £199 and then found a 15% off code. So £169.15 all in. Schott Ceran glass etc. Figured for the money we'd take a chance. Fanbloodytastic it's been too! Hasn't missed a beat. Pause button, power boost, excellent simmer function. Roll on Christmas dinner No.8. If anything I'd like slightly bigger rings but hey ho. Tbh a pan with a lid tight on is basically a little pressure cooker irrespective of the heat source. As good as a simmer function is, if the pan isn't losing heat faster than it's coming into it, then boil over is inevitable. The auto switch off on the induction is a boon. Rarely happens tbh, just crack the lid a tad. The rep just didn't want to criticise your cooking technique! ?

A friend is having her kitchen done shortly and has purchased thin solid laminate from Worktop Express. Beautiful and harwearing with a very contemporary look due to the thinness of it.

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Yes - I was refering to the case when there is no registered owner with the LR as was/is the case with the footpath next to our build. If there is a registered owner that is not you a new strategy will be needed.

There are a few websites here and abroad that offer ready plans to buy like http://xplans.co.uk/. better sites with more options available. Or you nicely ask on here someone that has a house you like. You might get the full package for free.

Divided, well sort of. To the right of the entrance hall is the front to back Kitchen / diner. What most people refer to now as the "Family room" Kitchen to the front, and a sort of living space to the back with a sofa and a tv. To the left of the entrance hall, the rear 2/3 is the snug living room. The front 1/3 is the utility / wc. Both the two living areas mentioned open onto the entrance hall with partially glazed double doors, so they can be open as one big space, or closed off as 2 separate rooms. We emphasised that by having the same oak floor run through both living rooms and the rear part of the entrance hall in one run. the front part ot the entrance hall and utility is slate flooring. Floorplans attached to explain it better (there have been some minor tweaks since the floor plans were drawn, e.g airing cupboard moved into small bedroom 3 to make main bathroom bigger. BW005_-_GF_Plan.pdfBW007 - FF Plan.pdf

Close to our layout. We have the entrance hall in the centre, with stairs, kitchen diner to the right, with utility room (with back door) behind that, and WC off the utility. To the left we have the living room, with a smaller study off that, with French windows leading out to the garden. Bedrooms and bathrooms are to either side upstairs, leading off a landing that runs across part of the entrance hall.

I think you're right, I can't find anything that relates to cleaning access, either. Is this a valley between two roof sections? If so, then it might be an idea to look at how the roof sections are sealed where they meet the gutter, to make it easier to clean them out with a hose or water jet. It may be that 30mm is enough of a gap for cleaning with a hose. I gave our old house a tidy up before we put it on the market, that included taking out the gutter hedgehogs and giving the gutters a good clean. As I had the hose out, and as I'm basically lazy (and I don't like going up ladders much) I found that a spray head on the end of the hose did a pretty good job. I could stick it in at one end and just push the hose along the whole length of a gutter, with the spray head set to a fairly fine cone. Only thing I had to watch was not to turn the tap up to much, as there was a risk of forcing water up under the eaves.

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Section 2E of Approved Doc A also has guidance on the minimum depth (eg how deep the bottom of the foundation should be) in section 2E4 and the thickness in 2E2. In practice you dig down to the depth recommended in 2E4 and fill it up with concrete to a depth that is a convenient multiple of brick or block courses below the required DPC/FFL level (Checking that the resulting thickness is greater than needed to meet 2E2). That way you don't need to cut blocks to make thinner courses. Some people use more concrete and fewer courses of blocks than needed to meet 2E2. This is sometimes called fully filled foundations but that doesn't mean they are always filled right to the very top just close. It can make sense especially if building in winter/wet weather as your trenches are less likely to fill with water or collapse. You still want to be a convenient multiple below DPC. I think the NHBC also require there to be a cavitiy 225 mm deep below DPC. So that may also limit how high you fill your trench.

I believe it is the actual ground bearing capacity of the sand/stone that is required. You have the point loads imposed on the sand/stone - the load that the sand/stone can actually bear will then determine the size of the padstone required?