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An acquaintance of mine contracted mesothelioma from washing her dock worker husband's overalls. He is absolutely fine! My husband has plaque on his lungs which can, eventually, lead to meso. It may be that, genetically, he is not predisposed to it. The plaque, however, does come with its own problems and he gets out of breathe easily. There will be many, many people walking around with plaque on their lungs. His was only discovered when he contracted pneumonia and had his chest x rayed. He was a heating engineer on building sites where they would renovate old properties and cut out asbestos all the time to later sweep it up and dump it in skips. He is in line for compensation but, as my friend put it, there are no pockets in shrouds.

As long as the 150mm layer is properly sealed with foam and tape and if necessary a vcl then you won’t loose any performance, if there are ANY air gaps in the 150mm layer then cold air will flow through between the two layers of insulation and then you would only have 32.5mm insulated plasterboard as working insulation…….. so many houses have this problem where cold air bypasses the insulation and blows around in the service void behind the plaster board.

A ancient haunted burial ground is more my luck. I think it's the views.

I hope with regards the neighbours that you don't end up where i have a few times. I have previously done renovations and extensions to property i have owned. I have ended up in the end not wanting to stay in the house due to the soured relationship with neighbours. So when i have finished them, i have ended up just selling them on. It's funny, i am currently looking at a house in what i would call, not a run down area, but a bit old, a bit tired area. If i get it, i recon i can make £50k on the re-sale after refurb. Better still, i recon i will get permission to put an extra house to the side. If i did, it's another £100k + in the bank. The area just has normal people, the type who might do there own car servicing on the drive, rather than getting the main dealer to collect and service it (If you know what i mean.) I have started to realise in life that the nicest people i meet, are people who are just trying to get by, and get on with life. The most unpleasent people i know are the people with money. I saw a tv programme a few years ago about some really poor street in Southend. Everybody were on the breadline. They all looked out for each other, they all kept an eye on each others kids, and if One of them was hungry, somebody in the street would sort them out with a meal. I said to my wife "What a great place to live" They seemed to have values that so many people no longer have.

Yew takes along time to grow...

Might take a while as you'd have to have enough like minded people to stand for election and elections are every few years. Sadly most PCs are inhabited by exactly the kind of people on that Zoom call that went viral - that's the norm, not anything reasonable But back to planning, the current legislation allows for Neighbourhood Plans - basically a refinement of the LPA Local Plan at Parish level (or areas bigger than that). There's a chance of course that these will disappear when the current mob drive through their planning changes but at the moment a Parish can have a Neighbourhood Plan and when an application is being dealt with, the LPA has to take into account what is written in the Parish NP. So if flat roofs were not liked by the PC and it was in their NP, then the LPA shouldn't really give permission. NPs are not easy to write - it took us nearly 3 years to get ours adopted. Ours was done in parallel to the LPA Local Plan and should have fed into that in terms of preference for allocation of development sites - of course the LPA went their own way and allocated a large site which we wanted designated as local green space (effectively Green Belt in planning terms). We're now going to be saddled with one of those executive ghettos with expensive tiny twee houses instead of the gradual building on a series of smaller infill plots. Self build was one of the concepts built into the plan - although it's almost impossible to get it dealt with properly. However we built into the plan that for every site to be developed the PC should create a design brief - this allowed us to challenge the developer of the big site to change a number of things, including having more 1/2/3 bungalows and more affordable housing (although affordability is a joke). The design brief concept could have allowed us to create a design brief for a plot that had a certain %age of self build. I'm not on the PC and couldn't get them to demand this of the large developer though. A lot of land around the village is owned by the church - much like a lot of villages I guess. We managed to build into the plan a Rural Exception Scheme - these are great for affordable housing as they are developed by housing associations, the LPA has to keep a register of local people interested in a house on the scheme and there are various options for renting and part purchasing - and the housing remains in perpetuity for local people. You need to have a lot of time on your hands to get involved in this though, so I'd still advise looking for housing that will in all likelihood be coming on the market in the next few years and making sure you are ready if and when one comes up. Simon

As per manufacturer spec. Often 2 fixings per tile for vertical.

There was a study of inhabitants of a small cluster of villages in Turkey that had natural exposure to erionite that can also cause mesothelioma. Nearly 50% of deaths were caused by mesothelioma which is shockingly high. Some families had a very high number of deaths and their immediate neighbours had none at all leading to the suspicion that genetics were involved. They are still researching this and trying to tailor treatments based on a person’s genetic make up. Genetics likely play a part in the development of most cancers. It is thought that a single breath may be all that it takes to cause mesothelioma later in life if you are genetically susceptible to it. There have been accounts of teachers who caught it though pinning children’s pictures on the wall and thus releasing a tiny number of fibres, medics who caught it just through working in a building with asbestos present, wives and children who got it via casual contact with a worker’s clothing on return from work. In one family that I know of the 3 children used to greet their father when he returned from work. He later died of mesothelioma and a few decades later all 3 children died of it too despite never having worked with asbestos.

M10 bolts are fine for connecting the timber to the beam. If you use the universal / adjustable hangers you can face fix or wrap over to set the joists at the level you want. https://www.strongtie.co.uk/products/detail/joist-hanger-with-adjustable-height-strap/769

Ahh yes No 18 … 8mm diameter

I would use 18 mil bolts 600 apart Mark out where your joists are going to make sure the hangers don’t clash You can lift the hangers or even add a timber wall plate to the top

I can list ours out as I have a spreadsheet. at the time you're like "it's only £1k let's just pay it". but £1k here and another £1k there etc and it soon adds up! we had planning fees, architects fees, ecologist fees, utilities, warranty, insurance, structural engineers, civil engineers, mortgage survey and fees, timber frame deposit, M&E deposits, building control fees, windows and doors deposit, surveyors and plant that I bought (to save money!). that all made a massive dent in our budget and we hadn't even broken ground so you start thinking I've spent a huge amount of money and have absolutely nothing to show for it apart from a few drawings! obviously, that's not entirely true as everything was then in place to get started but it's a psychological hurdle to overcome. At least now we have our basement almost finished so we have something to show for the money we've spent.

We should start a new topic on this, I often wonder how much money is spent on a plot when you consider that there may be several people interested in buying it. When I was selling a place I had a vendor that went quiet for several weeks, so decided to sell privately (sacked estate agent). The new vendor quickly arranged for the survey to be done. The surveyor said "I have this places booked in for a fortnights time as well". So that would have been an extra £500 or so, for the same report. So my estate agent never told the original vendor that the place was off the market, wonder if he charged the guy a fee.

I normally bolt a timber inside the bean Then nail joist hangers to the timber

Didn't do much tonight, lost my homemade Starrett adapter so had to drive to my mates to get the one I made him. He couldn't find it but did find another obscure bit of steel I gave him years back which has a 1/2" UNF 20tpi thread...that'll do. All will be revealed!

My Dad worked as a apprentice in the dockyard and he said they used to have big bales of the different types and used to have snowball fights with it he is 84 now.

You were outside when this happened. If you are like me and you see dust / smoke etc, you hold your breath and walk away. I even do this when walking down the street and a smoker is walking the other way.

There is thought to be a genetic link to those who contract mesothelioma, aka asbestos cancer. It can run in families with 2 or 3 generations suffering from it. It’s pretty rare however which is why ‘many diy’ers’ don’t drop dead from it. It can take decades to show but casual contact is indeed all it takes for those who are susceptible to it. So bottom line is that you’d be extremely unlucky to get mesothelioma from casual contact but sadly it does happen as I know from personal experience when my husband got it.

??if he struggled to work it at 120 he'd have been in big trouble had he got it at 80 like he wanted.... I'm sure your just glad to have it poured, congrats ?

I just love the internet sometimes... Google found... https://www.folkestone-hythe.gov.uk/article/798/Is-pre-application-advice-made-public- Article continues listing exceptions. So essentially it is possible to find out if anyone has had pre-application advice on a plot you are interested in. That might be faster than asking for pre-application advice yourself so worth doing both.

This is this case for sure. You must look closely at who writes some of these articles. If I was an ACM removal specialist I know what would be in my website blog! Every story has 2 sides. Everything out there is rigged to lead people down one train of thought. I called out 3 ACM business to quote me to remove my garage roof, I got a great quote, £300 - I had the cash in my wallet to go for it, but didn't trust them not to rip it up, spray broken sheets all over my garden, maybe grind the heads off bolts. At that money they were also surely going to dump it. Next guys were £1200 - I told them that was steep, how much were they factoring for ACM disposal to which he said £800 - I told him he was being ripped off because I had 3 quotes for disposal, 1 from a place I had to take it myself wrapped up £160 - and £350 for a small ACM skip and the worst quote was about £700. He didn't like that I knew the costs. 3rd was a joke at nearly £3K. Mention ACM's and people get greedy. I can think of more dangerous and hazardous jobs that cost less.

When we applied for PP back in 2005 there was more than one "file" on a site. In our case there were at least three. There was the online data, a public paper file you could ask to see, and the planners own files which were a grey area. First time I went to the planning office I was able to see the public paper file just by asking to see it. Receptionist just went and got it and I was able to use their photocopier. Second time I tried to see a public paper file it was a pain. Visitors were no longer allowed into the planning office and I had to make an appointment to see it in the "visitors centre" where there were no facilities. Still it was interesting because there was stuff in the file that wasn't on the online database. Mostly letters to/from the previous owner. Later when we needed to hire a planning consultant it turned out he had been involved with the plot before. He had a letter from the planners that was very helpful to us and wasn't in either of the public files. When I showed it to the planning officer he asked where I had got it from and then went to get his boss. They rolled over pretty soon after that. How much of this "selective publication" still goes on I don't know .

I could not afford to buy oak so salvaged it from a big oak tree that fell down on my road, got a mate to slab the trunks and I turned the bigger branches into roof ties, my dad is a dab hand with an axe so the finish was very authentic.

Slab laid, 120 slump, though the gw was complaining it was going off too quickly

Don't think councils can make pre-app advice public as I think it would be against GDPR regs. I've never seen a pre-app advice on an LPA planning site. If you do ask for one and then go for outline or full, then the fact that pre-app advice was sought should be mentioned on the delegated report that goes (or should go) alongside the decision notice. Some of the info from the pre-app advice can then be made public in the report. Simon

No no no no, don't use spray foam on roofs. A lot of spray foam companies should be shut down for fraud. You should be able to find a roofer or general builder to install pitched roof insulation, the required detail can be given by Kingspan or similar, or by an architectural technician.

An accountant will have no idea who you are, what you have been doing etc. So they will want you to pull all your receipts together, explain what they are for, how you paid etc. so basically you will do all the work needed for the reclaim and pay them to do the addition and form filling.

@Iceverge, I think that you would need some form of heat supplementation in the winter months even in S Eire. If you lose X kWh in a day and input the X kWh somehow into the house then the overall temperature will remain in balance. The internal R values are so much lower than the external that if it is typically of the order of 20 kWh or so then the inter-room variations should be acceptable. The trade off is whether you use straight resistive heating a CoP of 1 at an investment of 10s-100s € or some form of heat-pumped heating at a CoP of say 4 and an investment of 1000s € plus on-going maintenance costs / hassle. As I have said here and on other posts, I find it difficult to make the case for latter in our house. A simple bi-block A2A unit at 9000 BTU / 3kW costs around 500€ and is pretty simple to install and gives you that CoP of 4. The only problem is that they are bloody noisy so I wouldn't want one running in a room that I was occupying. UFH is only one valid approach and was feasible in our case because it was a low cost option to include it in our slab pour. The main advantage for us of doing this over direct air heating is the large thermal inertia of going via the slab means that if we heat during 0-7am, say, then the air temperature doesn't actually peak until around 11 am and the ripple over the day is only around 1°C. As to the control of this, I use an RPi which controls some SSRs. In essence the approach is simple and you really only need 2 inputs: the predicted average external temperature , E, over the next 24hrs and the average internal temperature over the last, T. I compute the total heating demand of the form aE + b + k(T - Ttarget) once a day, and that determines how long I am going to need the supplementation. I do the bulk overnight in the E7 and top up a slice hourly thereafter, but only if the current temperature is below Ttarget. I use NodeRED for this, but any scriptable implementation will do. I did a bit of perfboard building to mount connectors for my SSR output and input thermometers, but you don't need to do this, as you can get WiFi or USB attached power switches and thermometers off-the-shelf these days.

This thread is like watching paint dry.........

The hole saw contraption is to enlarge an existing hole is guess, probably to let the ufh pipes pass.....

The suspense is unbearable

You just can't leave it can you.... ???