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Love a washing up bowl. Had a right nightmare trying to buy a new one other week. Anyway it's a high tech water saving device

imo that is already a drop kerb.

After (a very long feeling) couple of years back and forward we should start building in the new year. It's a 2 storey detached timber frame house, we're getting it built to shell then handed over for 1st fix towards the end of 2020. So my question is if anyone has taken evening courses and if so what they felt they gained/any recommendations? For context this is the 1st house so renting has limited my DIY experience, and whilst I like to think I'm relatively practical I work in IT using databases all day For budget reasons I'd like help with as much as possible in weekends/evenings/holiday but I need to be realistic

Thought this one might be up your street @Onoff Im imagining one box, located inside the loft space. 10 panels coming in (10+ & 10- wires) and then two output wires. Will all be live DC so I think it would need some safety stickers on the front. I agree it is going to require a lot of extra cable length and faff but possibly worth it to be able to isolate individual faulty panels in the future. My loft space is vented so there is no need for extra work around airtightness

maybe more time sharpening chain would help I can certainly notice the difference with my oregon cordless saw ,which has built in sharpening stone --by giving it a wee sharpen every now and then I never have to lean on it just does it It was the built in sharpener that attracted me too it If anyone knows how to make it easy to sharpen chains it will be oregon so far run time with all my heavy brush and 6-12+" trees has been about 40mins for dead dry wood -to an hour for live sycamores + ash for a single 6amp battery I got 2 batteries so by the time I have use both along with humping trees off the road Its time for a break

@Dan Feist great stuff! Where abouts are you in the country? Our construction starts January 7 so no actual figures just yet. Soon! So very soon. (move out in 3 days time.... So soon) Existing is block and brink, new parts will be timber. It's an interesting house being a 60s cross wall construction, we actually demolishing the two external non-load bearing walls to rebuild in place to a higher spec. Not sure anyone has attempted this before (for passive house reasons) Yes, will be certifying. To confirm, there's 4-5 enerphit Plus now (i.e. retrofits)?. I thought there's only one (the Manchester pair of semis) but maybe out of date. I can imagine, like everything else, achieving it on a new build would be much simpler as you can design everything around the microgeneration. We have to deal with the aspect and roof pitch we inherited.

Bang on. We had endless irritation because on our application, the illustration of our house showed the correct colour for new cedar (WRC) - not the faded grey we knew would develop after a few years. We wanted to make the point that our house would fade into the background. As a consequence of the foregrounding of the building (because of the colour, the eye is drawn to it in the illustration) the Planners decided to ask for a reduction in what they called 'Massing' - nett effect - lose two rooms and gain a flat roof. And that is causing endless hassle. Still. Keep detail to a minimum: just enough to get through. Thats an art.

And that's exactly the point. You say Tomaytos, I say tomaaaaatos. How the Hell can @Robert Clark guess which way the Planners want him to pronounce the damn word?

Dave, let me let you into a secret. .... Thats not going to go down well. She wants stone shelves? Give her stone shelves. By Friday. With a smile. Fitted Saturday 9.30. Latest. You have been warned.

honestly, I prefer the look of the old house.

One thing this brings to mind is several of the architects we spoke to locally prefer to make planning applications with black and white / line drawings only, rather than colour "impressions" of the property. Ours went through this route no problem, we're in conservation area (but not AONB). The rationale is that if you put colours on the application then they're more likely to add conditions holding you to them, or get upset if you don't exactly keep to it, but with black and white and only a terse description of materials used it leaves a lot more flexibility in choice. More generally it was implied that unless they really go to town with detailing and photo realistic perspective ray-traced renderings, there's a risk that "cartoon like" block-filled colour illustrations can actually remove a lot of the 'wow factor' that the viewer's mind might have otherwise been willing to fill in for itself when looking at basic B&W elevations & plans, if you see what I mean? I wonder if that's in part what is happening here.

Plus one with above £1000 up to include first fix would be plenty for most We completed our build for less Doing much of the work ourselves To a pretty high spec If you are going down the traditional route rather than Timber frame you will spend significantly less getting to watertight But be sure to get everything itemised When quoted for a roof don’t assume facias soffits etc are in the quote post up your quotes I’m sure others will have plenty to say

I thought you were German? Why are you siding with the English and their irrational obsession with plastic sink bowls?

I see no mention of 'wow' anywhere. @Robert Clark, access the document referred to immediately above (if your area has one) and then follow those guidelines. If there are no guidelines, then ask them what is meant by '....they say any scheme must be of the highest quality ....' As written above, you cannot be expected to follow non-existant guidelines . You appear to have been put in an impossible situation. Put the ball back in their court. The only other thing I can suggest is to do a comprehensive review of what has been recently (2 years or so) been deemed to be acceptable in your area and draw conclusions from that. Might be worth doing anyway....

I sort of agree with the ward member, the new design doesn’t have much wow factor compared with the old house thinking back to when the old one was built it was probably very grand and drew plenty of admiration, whereas the new one looks a bit lacking. I can see from the drawings it could be the way it has been produced, so maybe some new drawings with a different printing process. Apart from increased footprint I cannot see a reason for refusal. Regarding increase in size, have you looked at how big you could make the current house under permitted development ? we did this, we stated that our current place could be increased massively, to be nearly as big as the proposed one, after we bought this to the planners attention it passed.

That;s most probably because the LV overhead network is being changed from the older separate conductor system to ABC, Aerial Bundled Cable, whenever a section needs replacement. ABC is more reliable and cheaper/quicker to install than the old separate conductor system. As an aside, ABC is rather cleverly designed, as the outer sheathing of each of the bundled conductors is moulded with a number ridges to denote the phase, so 1 ridge = L1, 2 ridges = L2 etc. The PEN has lots of ridges, around 12 IIRC. This means that the people working on it can easily identify which conductor is which just by feeling the outside of it.

I would definitely put cat 5 (or higher) alongside every coax, at the very least. I would also duct all those points to make it easy to pull in alternative cables in future. The end of over-the-air TV broadcast is still a wee way off but could conceivably come sooner than expected. There's a lot of pressure on radio frequency spectrum for the rollout of high-speed mobile internet, and if streaming/catchup TV also continues to grow rapidly that's bound eventually to mean they can't justify keeping the spectrum currently used for traditional broadcasting. Aerials and coax will probably hang in there a good while longer, but I certainly wouldn't bet on them outlasting your house.

I have a charcoal coloured schock sink in the utility room. An absolute horror. It is a bugger to keep clean & only looks good when wet. Sooooo wish I had gone for stainless steel. The only choice in the house I regret so far.

Given that you are already using the drive and the curb is already very low why bother?

Ours is similar. I can't really see any benefit it dropping it 30mm or so. Is it just about 'regularising' the access?

I’ve been reading up on UFH zoning in highly insulated houses. I was wondering, If the house is likely to maintain a steady temperature throughout, do I need an expensive branded UFH manifold, thermostatic mixing valve, pump and individual actuated zone valves. Why not simply have a pump supplying a common feed manifold and let the room stat switch the pump off when the desired temperature is reach? No doubt this is too simplistic!

Wunda don’t do an Uber low temp manifold blending set, so you’ll be getting quoted for the thermo-mechanical type which is nigh on useless in a PH. Why they stopped selling the type that is necessary is beyond me, and I’ve petitioned their sales director to sort it......without reply. The ratio of cool / cold vs heated flow are just not available so the valve just strangles itself to death. The one with a thermo-head & probe is what’s required. Link There are a lot of ‘gotchas’ in designing a system for a PH, so read up on Buildhub and save yourself some grief.

Talk to Hilliard Tanner, he’s the go to guy for insulated foundations, he did mine and was reasonably priced. Once I had the design I bought all the insulation, fixed the steel reinforcing and poured the concrete myself. All fairly straightforward. http://www.tsd.ie/

Warm up time is easily managed by setback / advance of heating on / off sets points, so don't get hung up on those. The issue is with folk who are not conversant with these 'technologies' stating Chinese whispers and causing undue worry amongst folk who hang on those 'professional opinions', howsoever generalised ( or even flawed ). If you are building to a good standard ( our UK building regs are utter ? so please don't go by those ) then your home will never actually go 'cold' ergo your 'warm up time' is massively reduced because the heating has far less work to do to get you back to your perceived comfort temps. How far the house drops to between comfort events is easily managed by deciding how 'cold' you're willing to let the house drop to and setting the setback ( aka economy ) temp accordingly. Look at it as "how hot and when" as opposed to "when will the heating switch on or off" where you set comfort and economy temps to be maintained rather than times for the heating to come on / go off. This only needs to be strictly observed for ~4 months of the year in reality, so base your decisions on that If they use proper Pex-Al-Pex pipe then you'll only seriously damage it if you take a hammer to it. My screeders regularly run barrow-fulls of screed over the pipes and then one of them will up-end the barrow on partially visible pipes but still with no ill effect. The stones in the concrete are of absolutely zero concern I assure you ( and I've been here more than once over the last 23 years ). Adding the fibres would be a cheap assurance and will be of no detriment, but they're usually only used in a non-reinforced slab where the mesh isn't present, to avoid cracking. You'll be fine.

The initial butter temperature will make s difference. Oddly, I am sitting in the sun reading Randall Munroe's What If? Write to him and ask, Google xkcd for an email.

None of you will change my mind, NONE OF YOU!!!

I have one that does that ?