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Best leave 25mm if you can - you don't know what the performance of the felt is - probably not a breather membrane in a 1960's build mate. Edit - when I say 'probably' I meant certainly!

Right, I missed that in your introduction. I assume that sound insulation has been fitted, which acts as a pretty good insulator as well in conversions. Airtightness is worth looking into. Th less draughts you get the better. The important thing is that you do not want external air bypassing insulation, that defeats of purpose of insulation. Once you get a place airtight, then it is time to think about ventilation systems to control humidity levels.

Why not just fit a Flexi liner with Spyder spacer things and vermiculite backfill to void. Would be a lot cheaper and should last a long time if you use the best quality/grade stainless. Or if you want to use twin wall then use a larger diameter pot to suit. How on earth are you going to provide brackets and support bracket to support the twin wall?

I lined a chimney recently and used a plate similar to @Gone West posted above, chimney pot and flue cap (to stop rain) but make sure it’s got a wire cage to stop birdies nesting in your chimney, (ask me how I know ?) , oh and make sure it’s stainless steel, others will rust out in months.

Since the basement was finished at the end of June things seem to have been dragging on for ages but we are finally out of the ground and ready for the timber frame. It has taken 13 weeks and we had delays with materials that held things up but when I look back at the photos from the basement being finished to where we are now it is amazing how much has been done and we’re very excited about the timber frame going up next week. When the groundworkers came back post-basement they started by insulating the basement walls externally with 200mm of EPS 100 and then backfilling with clean crushed as per the structural engineers specifications. Then they started digging the foundations for the ‘arms’ of the building as I call them and you’ll see why from some later photos as the main building looks like the body with 2 x arms coming off it. These are a garden room (that links to the kitchen/diner) and the utility room and garage. These are designed as insulated slabs with 300mm EPS underneath which you can see in the photos. Here we see I had to put some Perinsul blocks in, thank you to @ToughButterCup for getting them to me. While that was happening the brickie was also on-site building the internal walls for the basement. We have a 3m ceiling height in the basement so we had to get scaffolding in to build them safely which was another expense I hadn’t planned for (beginners naivety) but something that had to be done. It was around this time that I purchased a DJI Mini-2 drone. It is brilliant and has given us a whole new perspective on the build. Here are a few videos from before the slab pours (please excuse the auto-added cheesy music that DJI added). And some photos of the slab pours. I also put in some VCL between the basement and ground floor as a Tony tray. Once the slabs were poured we move on to the block and beam flooring. This caused the biggest issue with getting materials as the company the groundworkers were using moved their lead times from 15 days to 6 - 8 weeks which would’ve put us stupidly behind schedule. So I sourced some beams from a local builders merchant and paid the beamers to cut them to size on site rather than waiting for the correct sizes to be fabricated and delivered. It was pretty stressful to say the least. But what made it worse is that I decided a while ago to move from precast hollow core slabs to block and beam but no one along the way told me that the beams couldn’t take the load of the walls above like the hollow core could and, by chance, during my conversations with the block and beam company designing it I found out that I had to put supporting steels on top of the basement walls to take those load bearing walls from above ground. Back to the structural engineer to get those designed and then fabricated and installed. And then the beamers tell us that they won’t do the work without a complete fall arrest system across the entire basement 600mm down from the top of the basement walls. Back to the scaffolders to come and put that up at yet another expense (although the safety of the contractors is important to us so I didn’t grumble too much!) and we were finally ready for the block and beam to be installed. So what turned out to be the decision to save a few £k by moving to block and beam has in the end cost me a lot more due to the extra work involved. Oh well, you live and you learn. Anyway, the day came for the beamers to install it and they were a smash and grab outfit but that is, apparently, what all block and beamers are like. They just turn up and smash it out and leave without any due care and attention. To say they were miffed that they couldn’t do that on our build due to the steels on the basement wall is an understatement and comments like ‘if I’d known there were steels I wouldn’t have taken the job’ and ‘I’m losing money of this job’ really filled me with confidence. And if I ever do this again I will probably do the block and beam myself as, although hard work, it’s not complicated and I would’ve done a much better job. Anyway, it was done and they left and we could get on with laying the coursing blocks for the sole plates to sit on. This is where I insisted on precision and I spent a lot of time out there with the brickie assisting with setting out to make sure everything was spot on for the sole plates and checking that the levels throughout were within 5mm - 10mm across the building. It was time consuming but I think the accuracy will pay off in the end. While that was happening and with the timber frame imminent the scaffolders came and put up the required 2 lifts around the entire building and by 5pm the Friday before the frame was due it was all finished and we were ready……or so we thought. The timber frame ended up being delayed by 4 days due to the chippies testing positive for Covid-19 (the first time we have been directly impacted (not including the material shortage etc) by Covid) and during that 4 day delay the contract manager attended site and noticed that the garage (which is 120mm below the main house) had it’s coursing blocks below the main house. After a quick email exchange it was pointed out to me that I’d misread the plans and that those blocks, and the sole plates, need to be at the same level throughout so I needed to raise the coursing blocks by 120mm in the garage by the end of the following day. The groundworkers have moved on and I couldn’t get anyone to do it so I knocked up some pug, borrowed a disc cutter, bought myself a trowel and got laying. I’ve never laid blocks before but I did spend a lot of time watching and helping the brickie so I had a good idea as to what to do. I started after work on Wednesday (sole plates due to be fitted Friday) and finished half of it well after dark and then got up early the next day to finish the rest off. And it worked! Level and straight (ish) and still standing the next day. Phew! And this is where we’re at right now. Timber frame ground floor wall panels are due next Tuesday so we should really start to see things happening rapidly now and within 4 weeks our superstructure will be up. But that will be the subject of my next blog. Here’s a time-lapse video of this part of the build. I had to speed up the footage x10 and each day is about 4s long so things happen at quite a speed but it’s amazing to look back and see what has been done these last 13 weeks. Thanks again for reading and I hope you’re enjoying this journey as much as we are. Until next time…

Has all this time passed since I updated last? Wow. The plasterers were back, and we have now only the two small bedrooms and the entrance hallway left to do. Utility is habitable Ensuite near complete bar some tiles round the window, The other two bathrooms are useable but not quite as complete Cooker hood in, and subsequently a couple of units thrown into the kitchen too, just temporary mind. The hood was a mare to install, it's a heavy old bus and not being able to lift by the glass made it "awkward". Impressive airflow from it however so I'm chuffed on the whole. I'm hoping to test it at Christmas as we would like to have the festive meal down here. But that may or not happen as I'm at the whim of hauliers (yay brexit!) getting my range cooker over here in a timely fashion and in one piece... And yesterday got the slab poured for the forthcoming shed. Now, energy numbers stuff. Sure I've has the ASHP in since Feb or so but it's only in the past six weeks or so that it's been working for it's money. UFH is currently a big single zone with the control stat in the entrance hall at the mo, the rads in the two big bedrooms upstairs together with the towel rails, have their own control. Heating flow is 32C, DHW tank is 48C, and the tank sensor is about 3/5 down the 270l tank According to Jeremy's heat loss calculator monthly heat energy requirement is somewhere between 1250 and 1700kWh depending on the ambient temp. Total metered electric consumption for the past 30days is 600kWh Daily consumption by the ASHP according to the meter I've put on the supply is between 17 and 25kWh, the average appears to be about 22kWh which matches pretty well. So I'm pretty happy with that. COP looks acceptable, but I might be able to improve matters slightly still by altering the flow at the UFH mixer as the delta across the ASHP tends to be a wee bit higher than I want and I can happily slow down the floor response a bit.

Welcome to THE forum for people like us. Your right it is daunting but you can start from the outside in! As in, think about the sort if location you are looking for and then think generally about the style of house you want that might suit the location. This latter choice can be worked out before the location but it seems to me that the house should follow the place. That does not stop you thinking about things like wether it will be a passive house and for location how far you want to be from civilisation / broadband / water / electricity / .... Great to dream though.

The upright timbers forming the dwarf wall are non structural. All the other angled timbers are part of the roof trusses and must not be touched. You could make drawers that slide into each section between the trusses without disturbing those. BUT before you embark upon this, you are talking of incorporating what is presently a cold area, into the room. So you must first move your insulated envelope outwards to ensure the new storage space is now part of the insulated room space.

Others have done bead insulation, injected into cavity, but not sure if this is an option? dMEV is low on the expense side as you will utilise the existing holes in the walls and wiring. But you don't get the advantage of heat recovery. If you see heat recovery as a must the next thing up would be decentralised MVHR, where a unit takes in fresh air and extracts through the same hole, something like this (quite few different makes are available) is very condition based ventilation. https://ecostream.org.uk/products/

take the screw out of the centre of the white knob and move it on the splines ( pull it off the splines), You will need a temp gauge to read the temp, marry the temp to the numbers on the dial. once you have the temp down you may have to adjust the know a spline or two either way to get it more accurate. FLY

The only thing i would add is that normally between 1930's semi's you have a single 9" party wall between the properties. If you have managed to take out a chimney on the party wall, and have managed to not crack the plaster on the other side, then you have done very, very well. I have never managed to do it. Even taking the chimney out by hand. Cutting a steel into a 1930's semi party wall is also very hard to do without causing damage on the other side. Taking out a chimney requires Building control. As does taking out a wall and fitting a steel. (Did you have building control ? ) Obviously, without knowing the layout of your house, what walls you have removed etc, it's hard to tell if you may have cause damage to your neighbours property. It is however possible that you have......Get your structural engineer to go round to your neighbours, and take a look. He or she will soon tell you if any damage may have been caused by you. Good luck with all the work.

hang it from ceiling joists?

if the soil stack is already in the attic can you not simply run it to a tile vent ?

Thanks for posting that. The old saying "every day is a school day" is so true, I had not seen that fitting before and it seems to have solved your issue, so duly filed away in memory for future use. (no guarantee I will be able to recall the memory when I need to though)

Put up shuttering to the correct height and pour a self levelling structural grout, e.g. Larsen multi grout 60.

House is far from finished, but it is habitable so after 2.5yrs of van life we've upped sticks and occupied the house. Very surreal! Been lurking on this forum since 2018 now I think. The standard of my build is a direct function of the 'knowledge repository' that this forum is and the assistance of various members. Thank you one and all. Now for the next 2.5yrs of my build - garage, landscape, drive....the list is endless, should probably start with getting a shower room functioning though??‍♂️?

I think it is even worse as the scientific method and science as described by @SteamyTea is a simplistic and categorical one that doesn't include the complexities and uncertainty of exploring and developing new knowledge and understanding about our world, let alone communicating it. Unfortunately, despite his assertions otherwise, science is a best guess based on current knowledge and understanding, not a truth and certainly not cast in stone (if it were it would amount to religion). To quote an article from the Guardian about the science involved in the Hadron Collider a few years ago: "Welcome to science in the real world: it is messy, inconclusive and subject to revision. As Lord May, former chief scientific adviser to the government once said, science is best represented as "organised scepticism" - and science's results and conclusions have to be included in that scepticism. Science is not the arbiter of truth. All it can do is offer opinions about the answers to certain questions that we ask of nature. And it reserves the right to revise those opinions in the light of future discoveries." So for me this is a reminder to remain sceptical, even in light of the current consensus around anthropogenic climate change, and particularly in light of the suggested means to deal with it. I seem to be one of the few that seriously question current mainstream suggested approaches, thinking that the simplistic focus on carbon emissions is misguided. In my view we need to massively reduce energy and resource use, and regenerate the natural environment. Current focus doesn't actually do this, and in many cases might cause more harm to the environment. Unfortunately what seems to be happening in this thread in particular, but also more generally in the climate debate, is that healthy and necessary scepticism is being misinterpreted and mislabelled as "denial." A term entirely of political and social origin. You're dead right it doesn't embrace, or even permit for that matter, any validity of alternative forms of knowledge, which may actually be more valuable to us in enhancing science. For example, in parallel to your comment about ancient Greek philosophers, I listened to a fascinating programme on Radio 4 this afternoon. I missed the beginning but basically some real, yes real, scientists had read some ancient medical remedy recipes from the Dark Ages and found one that is extremely effective at killing MRSA and other bacteria. It's now being tested for approval and use. They explained that during the Enlightenment, this knowledge had been dismissed as irrelevant, partly down to politics and economics. They said that we now really need to revisit this knowledge and seriously reassess our current view of it. The same thing is happening in various areas of scientific study into the environment, biology and ecology where they're finding ancient knowledge to be far more developed and effective in guiding real world action than knowledge derived from modern science. Obviously there needs to be an amalgamation of all these forms of knowledge, but it does mean that your prototypical western scientist does need to open his/her mind to this.

There are multiple problems with this statement which yields it to be highly dubious and almost as bad as the misinformation it's trying to dispel. It doesn't actually reflect the herding mentality that still exists within science. From a study from 2014 from London School of Economics blog to illustrate: " there are concerns that many published research findings may be incorrect. The true extent of this problem is difficult to know with certainty, but pressure on academics to publish (the “publish or perish” culture) may incentivise the publication of novel, eye-catching findings. However, the very nature of these findings (in other words, that they are surprising or unexpected) means that they are more likely to be incorrect – extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Peer review has been criticised because it sometimes fails by allowing such claims to be published, often when it is clear to many scientists that the claims are extremely unlikely to be true. Is peer review as unsuccessful as is sometimes claimed? And how might it be improved? We explored this question recently in a mathematical model of reviewer and author behaviour... When a paper is published, the manuscript begins to partially influence the conclusions that later scientists reach. As a result, the amount of new information transmitted decreases. In other words, authors begin to “herd” on a specific topic...." If you've ever lived in that world, which is highly political and egostistical in many spheres, your papers can make or break your career and thus herding of mentality is many times a function of not just surviving but getting ahead - you've got to build on existing knowledge whether or not it's correct. Therefore the differentiation suggested by the above statement is pretty questionable as is the one about funding as all areas of research can be funded for a variety of reasons by parties who have a financial, or political interest in the outcome.

Why would she have a survey done ..??? Sounds odd … I’d smile and say that you’ve done nothing near that wall and carry on. And buy her some flowers and say sorry for the inconvenience of skips / dust / etc and when you’re finished she can come round for tea and see what you’ve been up to…. In reality, if yours was a knackered semi that you have improved then it’s likely you’ve increased her property value not decreased it.

Hi!, welcome. You have a list of questions above, each of which could be answered by a service provider - and better still two or three service providers . We can just give you an indication. Its important to draw your attention to the fact that we aren't experts at anything much - except a few members and it doesn't take long to work out who they are and what their specialisms are. But some members sound like experts and aren't. You need to go through the process of Due Diligence (a self build is an business decision just like any other) with every single bit of your build. Here, you will always get a sympathetic ear about self-building, especially from those of us who are near the end or have completed our selfbuilds. Its very hard, nervy work. We know from bitter experience and I for one am very grateful to everyone who has supported me. Very grateful indeed. Shame I can't give back directly to those who helped. So instead, we help newbies like you. Good luck. Ian