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I'm missing An Officer And A Gentleman for this! So I countersunk the fitting: Olive fits in the chamfered end a treat: A bit of Jet Blue Plus to lube things up. I'd need to take the burr off created by the countersinking so the pipe goes in further: Imho it works. Didn't go OTT with tightening the nut but it definitely squeezes the olive into the pipe. I'd risk it: (No I don't have a life ?)

At least we all know who to call when GRP roofing needs doing in your area. Seems they did it in nice, easy to manage, sections. Idiots try to do too much, too quickly. And your main contractor will hopefully learn from this. There is nothing wrong with GRP when done properly. I should last decades.

^^ @Onoff gets bodgit of the week award.

I reckon you'll need a mixer with adjustable centres like this: https://www.notjusttaps.co.uk/versatile-manual-shower-valve-adjustable-centres.html

Has this been designed by a structural engineer, who’s insurance is covering it if it moves, i think you are going about this the wrong way you need a groundworks company to sheet pile, dig out and prepare for slab all in one package, fully insured, in house structural engineer. Looking at your other posts you could be in for a painful experience trying to use a bloke with a digger on a site where you are supporting two neighbours properties. Are you sure 3m sticking out of the ground will hold back the load, sheet piles bend quite considerably, you normally have an internal beam fixing them together and maybe some props.

Here's a couple of better pictures before we leave the site for the day. It's touch dry too (with some flies stuck on it) and thank god it hasn't rained.

Apple's with Apple's? Sticking a guy in a machine and saying dig there is very different from a company doing a package to produce a desired result.

Sure. Here is a worked example using the tile we plan to use on all our ground floor. 1) Find, or be recommended an expensive product. Example: https://domusgroup.com/products/limestone. (around £98+VAT/m2) 2) Find a photo of the product and copy it's URL. Example: https://domusgroup.com/system/inspirations/images/b56/cc9/8f-/large/Limestone_DCLM_01_Honed_(2).jpg?1533201970 3) Go to Google Image Search https://www.google.com/imghp, click on the camera and past in the URL from step 2. 4) Skip over the Domus and pinterest search results and you'll discover the manufactuer is Cotto D'Este. https://www.cottodeste.com/collection/limestone (If you don't get any results, try again with other images) 5) Now seach for "Cotto D'Este Limestone" suppliers. 6) If you want to find an italian supplier, change you region settings in google search to give you results from italy (chrome will automatically translate anything, so no need to worry about language) 7) You now have lots of leads - https://tile.expert/en-gb/tile/cotto-deste/limestone - https://www.tilelook.com/en-GB/users/cotto-d-este/tiles/limestone-lime-stone-clay-30x60-honed - https://www.italian-bathrooms.co.uk/ - https://brandedtiles.co.uk/brands/cotto-deste/ - https://shop.orsolini.it/prodotti/pavimento-rivestimento-in-gres-porcellanato-effetto-pietra-limestone-clay_372693 - I even found it at 18 EUR, but i think they might be seconds and not have all finnishes. (https://www.edilsiani.com/negozio/pavimenti-e-rivestimenti/rivestimenti/limestone-clay-cotto-d-este-blazed/) 8 ) Find cheapest and negociate based on quantity. I'm on step 7, but a fair price seems to be £45+VAT. ?. Of course the same method applies for other suppliers/brands.. Be interested to know if anyone has used https://tile.expert/en-gb/ ?

Following on from the last entry we had our final inspection and were on the cusp of getting our completion certificate. A few final documents were uploaded and a certificate was received from building control. We had built a house. A few final jobs were completed following the last blog entry. I order 20 tonnes of gravel from a quarry on Skye and then barrowed it down the access and spread it around the house. I also had enough to put some at the top of the access as well and fill a couple of bulk bags. The last job for the joiner was fitting the downpipes. We used the cast iron effect ones as these provide a bit more of a decorative look compared to the standard glossy pipes. We seeded the ground at the start of lockdown and now after a summer of growing the grass is coming on nicely. The grass seed cost very little money. It cost us around £15 to do all around the house. We are pleased with how the house fits into its surroundings. Our pallet wood shelter was finished and I’m currently building up the wood stocks. I am also storing fresh cut wood for the future years. These old CUPA slates crates are useful for this. As we are now heading into colder times of the year, we have had an opportunity to have a few burns from the stove. I’m really pleased with how well it is performing. The stove is bang in the middle of house surrounded by thick concrete block with a lime render. It heats the entire house and the increase in room temperature can be felt twelve hours or so after the last log goes on. I wouldn’t however recommend fitting a stove in a self-build unless you put some serious planning into how you will actually use it. Even a small stove could easily over power the heating need for a living room. Solar gains produce our base heating, keeping the temperatures to around 20c and the daily electricity usage at 10kw. We don’t have any underflooring heating or radiators. If we reach a long cold spot and need a quick boost, I plan to wheel out an oil electric heater or use the towel heaters. . What’s next. I need to crunch the final numbers. I also need to put a final layer on the access road but might put this off until the winter. Thanks for reading.

Excited is not the word! Secured an Internorm front door ex-display with fingerprint sensor, all instruction manual etc absolutely dirt cheap and I'm so bl**dy excited. Do you all like it? Inside it has a mirror inside. Just need to get a new barrel/lock which I'm hoping I can get whoever supplies our Internorm windows to throw in as part of my negotiation.

Sure you’re not watching something by Clint Eastwood running a countersink into the end of a fitting ...??!!! I’m with @Nickfromwales on this, dremel with a carbide burr and cut the edge out of the hole where the pipe is.

Gotcha. Use a high speed diamond bit to enlarge the holes. Macrist bit is damn good, as porcelain is tough as old boots. example. Use a water spray bottle to keep the drill bit soaking wet at all times. Two person job ideally. Use that to enlarge and then see if the pipes will move at all. 2.5mm on each pipe should be possible. The weight of the shower is supported by the drill holes that you then make to fit the brass plates back to the wall with screws. Fitted loads of these without issue so no probs there.

Nick's is bang on and I think speaking from experience. If you have a couple of spare tiles and you can still get into the back of the wall then bite the bullet and have another go. I think Nick is trying to guide you. If you don't get these fittings lined up right then you'll end up with a leak in a few months . There is not as much play in the fittings (cranked etc) as you would like to think. It's ok to make a mistake from time to time.

Thats great Gus, yeah its not all about the haggle. Nothing in the building game is cheap, and often when you pay cheap you get cheap. Im all for a good balance and a great start with people on a job. I have worked with some younger lads who just burn out or dont have the heart in work, and some older lads who seem to love their work, and as you say....offer up experiences from their own previous portfolio. Its great when you find a good contractor because they are front of mind when the next job starts! I have used the same people time and time again.

To add to.. and to thank everyone for all the good posts. I you can't drive a machine yourself then another option if you are selfbuilding is possibly to look for a driver /machine owner.. or if you are hiring in from a larger machine contractor (machine + operator) is to explain what you are doing and that you want an operator that has worked on a few self builds, extensions etc. Maybe don't haggle down to the last penny at the beginning. Seems odd but this it's also a people thing. What you maybe really want is an operative that is a bit older...the younger ones can drive fast..but they crash.. older drivers (ask saga) are a bit slower swinging the bucket around but they easily compensate by bringing experience. A good experienced operator is worth their weight in gold.. well not quite..but often much more than a few pounds and hour plus the fuel. Often if you get to know them and make an effort to get on then you'll find that they say things like.. "Are you sure you want to dig there? .. Do you really want to double / treble.. quadrupal handle this soil, why not put it over there?" (..all of a sudden they have saved you money) . They often also say.. I was on another site and this went wrong, and so on, "maybe you want to have a look at doing it this way". I have worked with operatives that love giving a hand, they will jump out the machine and muck in if you are struggling on a pour say and so on. The next thing they say is , oh! I know someone who can help with your next stage. If you are not on site all the time they will also help / keep an eye on the young / less experienced folk for you. If you have a machine on site the operative will often offload material, stack it all right and say to the other contractors things like.. " you should cover that before the client" gets back and so on. This can really start to work in a rural location as the same driver will often end be in the same village / as a neighbour. But even in the town there are a lot of operatives that are descent folk. All you need to do is get off on the right foot.

On the back of Covid quite a few companies have seen a sudden increase of work after the lull. It's meant in some cases them having to sub out and by contrast not sometimes being able to get their favoured (read good) subbies in the first place.

That last photo looks like the way dad used to detail the side of the 6 (!) mainly inaccessible valleys he sealed on t)e roof of the listed house they restored, as a full and final answer to snow backing up and leaks coming in. He would put ply under the tiles up to 0.8m both sides, then GRP over the top and across the valley. Looks good.

My mate did our ground works for £45 /hour for him in a 16tonne machine. He charges £35/hr for his 5tonne. The house clearance and ground works, stoning and muck away and drainage came in at £15k. I demolished the house myself.

Try insuring a £125k machine with no operator ticket and see what your insurance price is ... That £1k will be an assumed all risks hire and have a ticketed operator. Add another £300 for delivery and collection too. Doubt you will have change from £5k min all in before you put a driver in the cab. On your demo are you asking for everything taken away ..? Any soft strip and reclaim or are you just letting them hit the building cold ..? All makes a difference.

Diggers don’t work very well if you don’t put diesel in them, factor that in to your cost.

Yes I think you are right re the flashing. Local lads and definitely specialists. I'm so glad we insisted on it being taken off. Thank you to everyone who gave me advice, it gave me the confidence to challenge it and insist on it being redone.

So glad you got this sorted out, it must be such a weight off your mind, well done. Regarding @epsilonGreedy comment on flashing the GRP would be run up the slope under the tiles an amount so roofing felt and tiles rest on it. No need for further flashing IMO. i used to live fairly close to tern hill where these guys come from. Nice part of the world.

Phew, nightmare over. You might recall I questioned how they could introduce the gradient given the original minimal drop from the tiled roof to the flat roof. Looking at the photos they seem to have cut back the lower row of tiles to accommodate the new gradient. Hopefully someone who knows more about roofs can comment on any extra flashing detail now required at the new tightly coupled pitched/flat roof junction.

Looks better. Just goes to show that people that know what they are doing can do a decent job.

We were recommended Domus; fairly big London based setup that markets to architects and interior designers. Prices are in the £95-100/m2 range for a very good quality 14mm limestone effect tile in 1200x600mm. Bit of googling later and becomes obvious that all Domus do is resell Italian tiles under their own brand for a profit. Google image search is great for working out who the actual manufacturer of products marketed in the U.K. actually is! Now I know the original brand, I'm able to find other resellers both here and in Europe and find the best price. Not ordered anything yet, but down to closer to £40-50 already, before requesting any discounts.

It’s the water temperature not room temperature you need to be concerned about so just turn the blender down and as you say increase by 2-3 degrees a day from 20 up to 38/40 or whatever it’s designed to run at.

You ideally want to keep any wood of the shed 6" above the surrounding ground. Treat the Hell out of the bearers. The age old and tbh accepted premise is that a raindrop bounces 6" up in the air. You can mitigate the lack of 6" to some extent by painting the bottom timbers of the shed with a black bitumen paint. Can look quite good tbh. Deffo dpc strips above and below the bearers.

I would put the DPC under the bearers as well.

Looking at this objectively and also financially (given I don’t know where you are in the U.K.) then this looks a very expensive solution to a problem you don’t need to have. UFH in older houses with poor insulation generally doesn’t work well - rate of heat lost vs heat input in solid walls will mean the UFH will struggle to keep up. You say you run the CH now for 7-8 months - UFH won’t fix that unless you fix the source of heat loss. As others have recommended you need to increase the levels of insulation in the new areas past building regs. New ground floors should be a minimum of 130mm of PIR or 250mm of EPS. Walls should be increased to 150mm full fill cavity or lined with 50mm PIR or PIR backed plasterboard. Attic ceilings should be 150mm of PIR preferably 100mm between and 50mm over rafters. All joints should be taped and you should also ensure any flat ceiling areas in the new build are 400mm fibre insulation. In terms of existing walls, then consider internal insulation now whilst the walls are bare - 50mm PIR battened back to the existing walls with 25mm infil between will allow you to completely skin the inside of the house with a single layer of insulation with no gaps. The batten layer allows you to have a service void where needed and also fix ordinary plasterboard so is cheaper than using insulated plasterboard. Without removing the joists or doing a lot of additional work you are not going to remove the noise transmission 100%, and tbh that is something you need to work out if you really need. I would assume the joists are all at 24” or 600mm centres, so first job is to get those beefed up to stop bouncing or the floor acting like a drum. Again, assuming they are 8x2 joists get the the builder to put noggins every 1200mm with 6x2 flush to the surface of the current joists and then D4 glue and screw new 22mm Egger or Caberdeck to the joists. This will stop the floor moving but also leave a void for 50mm of acoustic rockwool insulation above the ceiling that will reduce your sound transmission between floors. Finally as I said before I would ditch the UFH in the first and second floor and go for designer rads or similar. You can still have zone control using rad valves but you will save massive amounts on the products you’ve specified. Your current Cellecta/Ply sandwich is about £30 or so per square metre excluding the two lots of labour to lay the individual layers, shop around and decent P5 Egger or Caber is £6-7. That £23 pays for over 4 sqm of 50mm PIR for your walls so you are cost neutral before we factor in anything like the costs of the UFH itself which given your builders prices I think is very expensive...!! I would seriously consider back to the drawing board and do a fabric first approach and then look at what you are trying to achieve as I can’t see how some of the products you’re using will give you any benefit in either short or long term.

Access ceiling from above, reposition joist, move light back to original hole...

Buy a roll of damp proof course from toolstation screwfix, couple of staples into top of bearers before they put the floor down.

I've recently put an order in with Nordvest windows who don't seem to come up much on this forum. I found their approach to specifying and detailing the window order to be helpful and reassuring, plus they gave input into preferred design of the windows compared to our original standard all 'side hung' request. We've thus ended up with a mixture of top hung fully reversible, tilt and turn, side hung etc. depending on the room and its use. They were also one of only two suppliers where we didn't need to compromise on the window designs and door sizes. My impression is that Nordvest provide a lot of design flexibility in their products. They are all timber only 3g windows with whole window U-values around the 1 mark so not your ultra high performance Passivhaus 3g units but that would have been overkill for our purposes and it saved us a good amount of money compared to the 0.7-0.9 U-value type units. Colour wise, we've chosen a lighter grey RAL 7040 which matches the steel coated roof. I went to most of the usual suspects including Green Building Store, Norrsken, Nordan, Rationel, etc. plus some local companies and outliers like Spar Windows and Jeld-wen. I've ordered them on a supply only basis. Interestingly for me those companies that did provide installation quotes only included the labour, typically four men x a few days, but with many of our units over 100kg, one over 200kg and being fitted on the first floor together with a large steep earth banking in front of the house, there was no way they could do it without additional machinery, which was of course was not mentioned. I've been given a delivery date of week commencing 7th December so will be able to update soon, I hope ?

We have used Cuprinol Garden Shades to paint various woodwork in the garden. It goes on really smoothly and easily and seems to last well. Lots of colours to choose from. https://www.cuprinol.co.uk/products/garden_shades.jsp

It's an Internorm front door but we actually got it from eBay from an Internorm distributor (not the one we used for our windows). We had a Solidor one in out last house and it was still in when we sold it 10 years later. The one for our house now was also ex showroom, customer failed order and was £180 so if it lasts for a few years I'll be happy. Quality seems better than Solidor but I'm not sure exactly what make it is (not fitted yet).

It's a mechanical problem then. the basis of all electric showers is the heating power remains constant and you adjust the temperatue by adjusting the water flow rate. Running briefly hot then going cold is usually a sign of too little flow, it overheats and shuts off the heater. Some showers have a little toothed belt to connect between the knob and the actual flow control, check that has not snapped. Can you post a picture of the mechanical bits around the temperature knob?

Already built the boat... need to do some groundworks on the river bank to create a ramp so we can store the boat in the void under the house (void is not supposed to use for storage but if there is any chance of flooding I would moor it to the house.... No idea yet on ramp up, neighbours have brick steps or rmetal stairs. I was wondering about a jetfloor type thing, my neighbour's flood assessment says he will have 300mm free above 100 year flood + climate change, we might be a tad lower and so I definitely don't want any timber on the bottom. There is a Potton house in Staines which looks very nice, they have a much longer plot Have watched the floating GD multiple times. We have land access although a bit tight for a crane. There are a lot of nice new builds on Towpath in Shepperton if you are in the area

I used these guys for mine. Not sure if they have a base on the mainland or the delivery costs though. https://www.mcmonaglestone.com/professional/stone-cladding-and-building-stone It is real stone. During the very long research phase I went and seen a few builds that had used the concrete dyed option and you could see that the walls that got hit by the sun the most had already started to fade.

I think the cement based ones look less hassle than the gypsum / anhydrite ones. No messing if you want to tile or stick down floor finish.

It was Brokeback Mountain......just brought a tear to my eye when I realised why his back broke........

Buy a proper roof ladder. And don't chuck you old dish in the neighbours garden.

How often have you over-filled yours ? Is so easy to end up with a boot full of red.

Yes, of course I can Russ. But my common sense isn't that common.

I'm sure the Sun has a GOTCHA! headline ready to roll. I do sometimes wonder if that section of the media wants a rerun of WW2 for old times sake, closely followed by the 1966 World Cup and then the Falklands.

Isn’t that what we have those lovely new type 45 destroyers for ..??