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As you can see in the video this week they built up the shuttering in layers; first the outside, then the steel in the middle of the sandwich and finally the internal shutter. Also along the bottom they cleaned out the kicker and laid in a waterbar / waterstop (that brown bar in one of the photos) in a pre-formed channel, this forms a seal and prevents any water coming through the joint between the walls and the floor. They bolt the two halves of the shuttering together with steel threaded bars inside a foam sleeve so that they can get the right thickness and hold the shuttering against the weight of wet concrete. The steel bars come out when they strike the shuttering and they waterproof the holes. As you can see they didn't pour all the walls in one go but built alternating sections and will do the infill next, I think this is partly down to cost of shuttering hire, and partly down to the sheer weight of concrete. The steel shuttering is really solid and well braced so there is no risk of collapse or burst and wet concrete spilling out everywhere like you sometimes see on GD's. It was a bit of a wet week but they pushed on because the waterproof concrete and pump was booked for Friday, and they had extra manpower on site as my contractors brought in a couple of guys from the shuttering hire company who really do know how to put up shuttering fast! Sometimes it pays to get in the experts who do just one job really well. I had an interesting discussion that groundworks like this is often seen as a pure manual labour job rather than a skilled trade like sparks, brickies or chippies. In fact, at the level our guys work at, it is really a highly skilled trade and they are working to really fine detail and tolerance, plus you only ever get one shot at poured concrete! We have nothing but admiration for them - they are doing an amazing job in some pretty dreadful weather. Next week they will take down the shuttering so we can really see the exact size and scale of the walls which will be great. Then they will rebuild the shuttering to make the remaining retaining walls and expect to pour these in about 10 days and this will be the last of the poured waterproof concrete - it will be great to get that done before it gets really cold as the waterproof needs at least 2 deg. Progress on the other elements is crawling along; MBC seem to be taking an age to produce drawings, and Internorm should have the survey complete next week (so about 4 weeks) and are now saying 12 - 15 weeks for delivery - so March-ish. We could say that delays getting MBC drawings make this easier - MBC have not given an estimate of when we will have a frame on site but I am expecting its now into February-ish. And this will give the groundworkers plenty of time to complete the substructure if the weather turns really bad. After 5 years of delays with PP you tend to get a bit blasé about the odd few weeks and we have never had a rigid timescale but it is a bit frustrating how long some of these things take, and how little control you have! Almost certainly their relaxed attitude to timescales will not extend to payment terms! See https://www.dropbox.com/sh/th9f6e3cel5dm1q/AAAfsWdAH184J75bCNUUtzVra?dl=0 for the weekly videos. The weather for the pour of the walls was dry and sunny, but very high humidity give it that ghostly misty look - will try to get the next pour a bit clearer - I think the presence of a concrete pump upsets the camera somehow!

Took last week off work to clear the bottom of the garden ,With the aid of my Son who was obliged to take annual leave (shame he couldn't take it when it wasn't piddling down )we cleared just over 9 ton of scrap metal .Very satisfying to tick one of the jobs to do off the list .We may need to put the rake over the lawn ?.

Yes it’s expensive but I have had one running for years, very quiet, simple and never broke down yet.

Tiles Especially porcelain are harder waring than wood I would say that as a tiling contractor Ive put quite a bit of would flooring down While it looks great You do need to look after it I’ve put 150m2 of Italian Timber planks in ours Very little difference in cost to oak But won’t look any different in 20 plus years

Here's a revelation for anyone that has flue issues. When we fitted our Wood Burner, we could only achieve a flue length of just over 3 metres, which is woefully short. We battled for years with it being incredibly difficult to light and would frequently smoke the room out. Then we bought one of these cowls, which totally transformed it. I know it looks a bit funky and weird, but it's worth every penny. It works like a dream, spinning on a nice little bearing, tracking the wind and drawing air through it's ingenious design. Ours is now matt black so as not to draw attention to it, also the reflective chrome coating was playing havoc with the neighbours when it was sunny. This is where we got ours... https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/DRAGON-Self-adjusting-Chimney-Cowl-for-insertion-6-7-8-10-stainless-steel/151951881289?hash=item236109b449:m:mkckuj9atLKv4qtYNTby9QA

We have Amtico spacia (slate) in a newly refurbished bathroom thinking it to be a good alternative to tiles. I can see surface scratches in it already and we don’t use this bathroom. Really disappointed. Put solid oak flooring in the living room and diner over ten years ago. Looks nice but I have signs of water damage and board movement where a plot pot was leaking. Heel marks and scuffs from stuff under shoes can be seen and bleaching from the sun where rugs are down looks horrible. In reality, I am not going to sand the flooring. So for us and our experiences we will be trying engineered and laminate flooring. Our estate agent said most buyers wouldn’t even notice the flooring as real oak. For what we paid in oak could have paid for a few new laminate floors. Some of samples of modern laminate we have are really good.

Oh dead oh dear. so..... Peter is a little accident prone...... He was on a Local authority tree felling course. This was before we were married, so very very young. In the way of the world as it was then, lunch was down the pub and he had a drink (never a big drinker, it always went to his head). That afternoon, the chainsaw slipped and went straight down onto the top of his knee - luckily it wasn’t particularly deep. He arrived at A&E and was promptly seen by my sister who was was on duty as a nurse - she sewed him up and phoned our parents to come and collect him. The Local authority banned drinking before work and at lunch for those operating machinery soon after. Several years later we were doing a large extension on our house. I was out collecting the windows and Peter was up a ladder, with an angle grinder, cutting into the brickwork for the new joist hangers. He blames it on being left handed but the grinder hit something hard in the wall and kicked back, swinging round on the handle. The grinder hit him in the chest on what would have been his bra line for his moobs (they didn’t exist then but certainly do now!) . I arrived home to find a very shaken looking brickie who had taken Peter to hospital in his pristine Jag. He was a little surprised at my “oh well, never mind” attitude. It is one I have learnt to develop over the years to stop panic setting in. Huge scar but just needed stitching again. Many years after that we had an allotment. It was a hot day, he was cutting the grass with his petrol mower. The mower needed re-filling but he’d forgotten he had a little fire going to burn some raspberry canes. Fumes, fire, a spark from the canes and WHOOSH. His arm is engulfed in flames. The only water available was from a well with an old fashioned hand pump. He used that to put his arm out. Put everything away and put the fire out, drove back home and asked me to take him to A&E. They wrapped the arm in cling film (who knew that was the best first aid treatment) and sent us to the the nearest specialist burns hospital (Kensington and Chelsea) on a Saturday afternoon! Luckily there was no home game that day as the hospital hires out some of the car park to Chelsea fans! We had a family BBQ planned for that evening, it still went ahead. So not only extremely accident prone, he has the luck of the devil as well, and of course no sense, no feeling!!!!!! He regularly asks for a nail gun for Christmas with an excited little glint in his eyes. It’s not happening. Our daughter is just as accident prone! I live in fear. Do I win?

Always great when a bonkers plan actually works ! Best of luck.

An update from the original poster here. Following my request on 15 November, and with just a little prompting, my local planning department has today confirmed that my planning fee will be refunded (via the Planning Portal). Thanks again everyone for your advice! What happened was that after I had received planning approval (I spoke at the planning meeting and witnessed the unanimous vote in favour) but before receiving the formal letter from the head of the planning department, my planning officer emailed as follows: Following your collective advice, I of course politely declined to confirm any such thing. And as soon as I received the decision letter, I emailed asking for my fee to be refunded.

Yea I've noticed a similar thing in my bathroom. I've don't have a tanking membrane but instead I have a fabric looking uncoupling membrane with marble tiles and it takes an age for the heat to come through. We used LVT in the bedrooms and the heat comes through within 15/20 mins. instead of the hour it takes for the bathroom floor to get warm. I assumed it may have just been down to the density of the tiles but still seems oddly long to me. It is however a upstairs bathroom but with no insulation underneath as there will be (although not at this present moment in time) a heated room below.

Welcome. There are several here with passive houses, and at least one has found that heating with MVHR works OK , @PeterStarck. We have a Genvex MVHR that can heat or cool, but we've chosen to not use it for heating, as we prefer the feel of UFH embedded in the concrete passive slab foundation. I did try using the Genvex for heating, and it works well, in terms of providing enough heat, but we did find the air to be a bit dry, something that seemed to give me a bit of a stuffy nose. We now use the UFH for both heating and cooling, from a small ASHP, and only use the Genvex MVHR in cooling mode. It's OK for cooling, but not that powerful. The unit we have is the GE Premium 1L, which has a heating/cooling capacity of around 1.5 kW. The reality is that solar gain, even though mitigated as best we could, with solar reflective film on the outside of the glazing and deep roof overhangs, can significantly exceed the cooling capacity of the MVHR, plus, in order to deliver the rated power the MVHR has to be in boost mode, just to shift enough air around. We ended up installing an air-to-air heat pump upstairs to provide additional cooling. We have no heating upstairs, and the roof construction is reasonably well insulated (just under 0.1 W/m².K), with a long decrement delay, yet enough heat was rising up from below in hot weather to make the bedrooms a bit too warm. Heating is really a non-issue we've found, cooling is far and away the area that's caused most concern, and led to changes to the house after construction. Our house needs at most about 1.6 kW of heating when it's -10°C outside to maintain it at 21°C, but probably needs two or three times that level of cooling in spring and autumn, when the low angle of the sun allows it to penetrate more deeply into the house. The best solution would have been to fit external shutters, as these work well, but the planners (or rather the Conservation Officer) weren't keen on us having them. If we'd had the budget, I'd also have looked at fitting Sage glass, as that seems to work very well to reduce solar gain.

If you want to get to know your own project then I would start with graph paper an a pencil. Seriously. I use SweetHome3d, but it is not really good for garden layouts etc imo in that things like construction lines etc are awkward.

I like SketchUp but, yes, it does require some learning as its use of the control, shift and mouse buttons is err… unique. It's well worth watching a few YouTube tutorials on the basics to avoid some frustration. I've two blog posts on tricks with using it, the second of which contains some links which might be helpful: https://edavies.me.uk/2012/12/sketchup-component-layers/ https://edavies.me.uk/2014/01/sketchup-components-and-groups/

Welcome to THE forum for self builders and like minded individuals. Sketchup is the best for the job you are looking at and can probably take you all the way, so give that a go.

Forgot to seal a top access shower trap/waste. First use it was raining on my computer in the room below. Near death experience... I embedded some 10mm threaded rod in the concrete slab for my shed to make it easier to bolt down later. Some days later I fell backwards and one ended up a few inches to one side of my head. Nearly impaled. I spent the next 10 mins cutting up some 40mm pipe to put over them.