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For everyone who has been asking, I gave Jeremy a call yesterday. The good news is he has recovered from his injury and having to take rather unpleasant medication alongside that. On the Buildhub front, Jeremy was undertaking a lot of the day to day background admin work of the forum prior to his injury. Having been away from it, he has been less inclined to get back involved and has various other interests which occupy his time. His missing blog is simply down to the EU domain being shut down. Unfortunately, that's where his back up was hosted as well so what's here on Buildhub is it, unless he can dig out a hard back up copy (which he thinks he has). That's all there is. Hopefully he will return at some point in the future.

H

Does that mean Boris hasn't yet cooked his goose with his oven ready deal.

Minimum size for a house is 5P, and you add one 1P per room over 3 rooms, so yours is technically a 5P but you may find the smallest unit avaialbale was a 6P unit.

If you want to save money ditch the zinc roof eye watering costs, and lots of alternatives out there. this is mine. If that’s the sort of thing your after. Ignore all the white bits I was hacking a window reveal about.

Mistress can be a pain also ...

We have a Panasonic Aquarea T-Cap. Not sure how different it is to yours, or whether this is any help, but we had this fault and it was the water pump (it had seized). Unit was circa 2.5 years old at the time (4.5 years old now) and Panasonic supplied replacement without even needing to see the faulty one (which suggests it wasn't the first) and paid a fixed fee to our installer to replace.

Such is life . A sequence of errors with the occasional success .

Why does that entire wall look like Sam the Eagle from the Muppets?

Right first time...

I’m with Joe90 on the tuck trowel, different widths available and are excellent.

3mm is better with flooring especially larger tiles, unless you are trying to line up with the wall tiles

I have just been corrected! It is not that it negates the insulation but that wet plaster is better than dot and dab for heat retention.

The flow is the manifold with the actuators on. I've fiddled with some of the valves and open/closed isolators, restarted boiler/pump, turned up and down the flow on the pump.....now we have heat again! thanks for all suggestions

Is that what you are calling your spare bedroom.

I would foam the 1-2cm gap leaving enough depth, around 20mm, to point it up.

Well like us, more. So we are all winners.

Preferential engineering- I recommend lots of things but some are my preference not mandatory. chase installer

yes that is what I have read/understood. However I was told a 3 bed house (which we have) should be counted as 6 person (three double beds!!,) I would read that as 9 person (but I have not read the above doc) but does “single bedroom” mean a Single bed as in fir one person?? Or a one bed annexe?

Update: BG coming on 18th Dec. Rang them on the 7th, day after fitting the hatch. Call centre in South Africa by the sounds of things. Only other date was the 24th or the New Year.

Sizing is as per page 4, section 5 of this document. An oversize unit can be a bad thing as they need a minimum flow to “survive” So a 4 bed would be counted as 6P, and depending on how you count the annex, you could either say it is 5 bed and therefore it is 7P, or if you said it was a self contained unit and also has kitchen etc then it would be counted as 3P on its own so would be a total of 9P.. Clear as mud..??

At the moment my project at work is the IT planning for our new 8,000 sqm factory, with a 2 floor office space. Under normal circumstances I work 3 days per week to allow me time to project manage our own build, but not at the moment. We get the water tight building handed to us on the 8th January, then I've got to organise the 1st, 2nd and final fix of all the IT infrastructure from cables to servers. When I tried to place the order for fibre leased lines I was told, there's no fibre on that road and you must have a PSTN line before you can have fibre. Well, as you can imagine that caused a lot of calls, effort and pushing. Now the PSTN is being installed on the 15th (I hope). I'm also waiting for the ducts from the roadside to the building for the fibre. This has resulted in me having to work full time. Then last Sunday I came back from the morning dog walk to find his foot pouring with blood, loads of it. So, padding and bandage applied and off to the vet. He had ripped out a claw and I just couldn't believe how much blood there was. Anyway the vet patched him up, with vet bills at emergency Sunday rate, but that was also another 1/2 day gone. So, my build has gone totally by the wayside, not so much of an issue whilst I'm in the planning phase, but a concern for the future if I'm needed on-site here, and on-site at the factory and then there are life issues as well. And of course I really must do some shopping for the little event in 2 weeks time. I can't see this situation improving much until everyone has moved into the factory at the end of March and the old factory is cleared out. The good bit is the overtime pay can go straight into the build budget which is pitifully low compared with what it should be. I was hoping not to borrow any money, but with only enough money for about £800 per sqm after very expensive preliminaries that is probably going to change. What I want to do is get water tight and do family room with kitchen, master and ensuite and then move in. If I could do this with our existing budget then we can rent our house out and get an income from that to carry on. We really want to avoid borrowing. Anyway, as it's now almost midnight and I have Gary Barlow just finishing his show in the background I must finish my short budget and get off to bed. Take care.

Hi, it’s refreshing to hear about something different from the norm. @pocster now has a fellow troglodyte on the forum! ... although at least this one is habitable. Ive always loved the idea of having a bunker for a home. I’ve only seen ex-government ones which have either been taken on for commercial uses or for growing weed. Do they come up for sale very often?

This is the reason @joe90 turned down a drink.

Make sure when you redo that tile there is a full bed top and bottom of the holes as they take the weight when you sit on the pan and you can crack tiles if they aren’t loaded correctly.

Has anyone put a number on this? I would punt at £40-50 per sqm for a relatively normal garden on a normal sized plot, as the amount needed in the budget, perhaps excluding boundary treatment.

I am banking on it!, join a local gardening club, offer a clean slate “ what could i grow here” and appear broke ?‍♂️.

Electric fire for heating the bath when he gets in it....

If you go on gardening forums or ask local allotment holders or gardening clubs, you could be given a lot. Certainy happens on the BC Gardeners World forum I am on. Or offer a barter.

If you have a good idea of what you want then you just need an architectural technician to turn your ideas into drawings you can submit for building control, your budget is small, don’t spend what you don’t need to.

A small project with a small budget doesn't necessarily mean the amount of work required is equally as small, sometimes trying to rework details to meet a small budget mean much more input than would be required on a bigger project or one with a bigger budget. I've done a bit of research into how fees have worked on domestic alterations and extensions for the last couple of years and I'd say that 15% is about the average for consultant input (that's generally us and a structural engineer) But when you consider that you're having to hand another 20% of your budget over to hmrc for vat and then you've got local authority fees, scaffolding, site set up etc, you can easily get to having less than half of your budget spent on the actual building work!

Well, it should be beautiful and to some extent it is BUT it is large and filling it with all the plants bought from a garden centre just proved too expensive. It ground to a halt once we had put in huge borders in the front and down one side. We did put the trees in first but found that they cast too much shade and shed too many leaves so we took some down. Had we known more about gardening we may have been able to get cuttings more cheaply from other sources such as on line nurseries.

I agree with this. Nearly all of our native woodlands disappeared.

Now ; for the main bathroom I was planning like @Onoff getting a floor former and tiling it for a walk in shower . But ! after seeing some of these low level nice and smooth shower trays I’m not so sure . for example https://www.bigbathroomshop.co.uk/milano-rasa-graphite-slate-effect-rectangular-shower-tray-choice-of-sizes-76877?gclsrc=aw.ds&&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIv4ut-NaZ5QIVB8jeCh0fWAtdEAQYCiABEgK8uPD_BwE slick ! Assume any fixed glass panels just sit on the tray . Apart from ascetics is one better than the other ? I assume a tray ( any tray ) will keep water directed towards the drain better than a tiled former ??? @Nickfromwales ?? I assume also easier install ??

Can you not just avoid spilling loads of water on the floor? I think that's what most people do.

It didn’t really take me that long ?

I can (wet) dream ?.

Worse job I ever had to do was cleaning out the spa bath filter from the Sheffield YMC. I have no idea what those young men got up to in it. @pocster

Hope they left a draw string. You might need a bit of lube on the cable.

The lecturer at Potton homes self building course.

Alcatraz ?

Anything's better than two achers...