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Having a large pile of harvested granite, the team were inspired to use it for some serious landscaping. I'm impressed enough to show it here. Not bad for amateurs.

1) ignore. 2) If he persists ask the CARPENTER what tests he did to "test for dead" and safe isolation practice of the circuit BEFORE he removed the fan and if he isolated at the consumer unit, what lock off device did he use to prevent it being re energised. Ask for his electrical qualifications, details of test equipment used, and a copy of the calibration certificate for his tester. And ask to see a copy of HIS Public liability insurance policy. That should shut him up.

I disagree, do you still believe everything you “knew” 40 years ago despite more information being available since then 🤷‍♂️. I listened to that, so woke comes from awake! There are things I have changed my mind about over the years due to reading or listening to debate. (Some of it building related due to this forum) As your link says, woke is used as a bad term, frankly there is nothing wrong(in my opinion) with changing one’s mind after more facts and debate come to light.

you have a scumbag neighbor. Stop all appeasement it wont work as you have found out and just crack on.

Mebbe stop listening to fascists, flat-earthers, "wokerati", the others, and listen to, uh, climate scientists, about it instead? Just a thought.

Yes they are dry, but pouring sand as backfill which will gradually fill the voids. There are also more gaps than would be ok in a building. For comparison see this from a few miles away. 4,000 years old. Roofs have collapsed though...poor show.

haha we have called them worse... they used to be nice till we got planning consent almost 3 years ago! Seems trying to keep everyone happy doesn't work after all 😂😂 Stop it i'm already depressed about it and that didn't help.. I had to double check they ( planning) have it down as an alternative not a change. I did get it in writing as well from them. As for how long there are some underlying factors which I can't go into but we should hopefully be there for a good 10 years. I'm all out of emotional energy! Both, and have it in writing from his solicitor that the PWA in September is for the first lot of planning permissions not the newer one. I pointed out as his client wasn't happy with either we decided to go with the first. Just to add, one of the neighbours is a surveyor so has knowledge but seems to not use the knowledge for instance threatened the Right of Light act on me but failed to read his deeds. Builders been and grubbed up the old conservatory block and foundations today, fingers crossed digger and foundations poured on Friday. Its been a long slog and wouldn't want to do it again. I'll forward this thread to my builder for motivation

The problems of planet Earth have one common cause; the number of people on it.

We have balconies at the back of our house - a full width one outside our bedroom and another outside one of the kids' bedrooms. When I say they are never used, I mean no-one has ever once set foot on them for any reason other than to sweep them. They introduced significant cold bridges we didn't notice until it was too late, and they absorbed a lot of money for something that isn't ever used. There are cases where brise soleil make sense. We really ought to have one above our south-facing slider, for example, as that would cut a huge proportion of the solar gain we get through the summer months. I think for south facing windows, they can do a good job of cutting a lot of the direct sunlight through the middle of summer days. We actually have some of the windows on the south side set back in the the cladding by ~400 mm, and that's actually enought to cut out nearly all of the sun in the middle of the day in summer (the windows are only about 500 mm high, to be fair). But for other windows, especially east and west facing, I think external blinds work a lot better. We have them on west-facing windows and it's quite extraordinary how well they work to keep heat out. No cantilevered brise soleil could have achieved the level of heat-exclusion achieved by the external blinds. You can also have the blinds stay down only when needed - so we don't lower the east-facing blinds at the rear of the house at all in winter. In summer, they come down when it gets dark, feather slightly open at 7 in the morning (so you get light and can see out, but no direct sun), then retract completely in the afternoon.

Start by calling the DNO, tell them about the building in danger of collapse and you want to rebuild but should not build under power lines, tell them about the no wayleave and then say you will grant a wayleave if they move them and underground part of it.

I thoroughly agree we need to stop destroying the planet and stop over populating it. If we solve that, the global warming problem will probably solve itself.

Maybe so but disinformation and the sky is falling in newspaper headlines isn’t a new phenomenon either.

First of all welcome to Buildhub. BH, .....Internationally famous and well known as the Fifth Emergency Service - or is it the sixth - after the Coastguard? As @Dave Jones says above, crack on. Do you have proof of the Party Wall Agreement? If so, pop a copy through their letterbox. Communication is a tricky art: I bet that 99.99 percent (I'll need to check that stat with @SteamyTea) of all problems aired on this Forum would disappear if people could talk to one another over a cuppa, hubba, or haggis or whatever.

Yes to that. Every single PV install my chap has done ( for my private clients and a bunch of members on here ) have all met or exceeded the stated expectations, so there is "definitely something in the MCS water" . You can, but you'll spend 20 years paying them off. There's a company that takes full panels and cuts them down / reinstates the circuitry / re-frames them to suit. The price is £OUCH

Regardless of what you choose to believe consider what if our activity really is having an impact why wouldn’t we err on the side of caution and take reasonable steps to reduce the impact. Cutting consumption and waste and being more sustainable in all areas of life just seems to make sense to me. Ultimately it matters not as if climate change wipes us out the Earth will likely recover despite us and would be better off without us.

Take a look at this well presented scientific presentation. If you are short on time start at 5 minutes 30 seconds. It shows there are a number of cycles that affect global temperatures all of different periods and when all the cycle peaks coincide we get a warm period and when all the cycle minimums coincide we get an ice age. That data shows all the cycles have just peaked, we are presently at the maximum of a warm period and temperatures are set to decline from now on for 50 years or so. I look forward to well presented arguments why this is not the case. (gets tin hat on for incoming)

😯 And that's rather what I think about balconies I completely get what you say about West and East windows being very difficult to shade with a brise soleil, balcony or roof overhang. That's why the house design has very limited glazing on those elevations (and the views from them are not inspiring anyway). My main concern is the South facing elevation and I think that's where a brise soleil could work well - probably better than blinds. Of course the difficulty is not knowing beforehand what works from a performance and practicality standpoint.

Use the Supplied packers Make sure you toe and heel the side hinged windows You may need to get the units out at some stage So don’t bond them in

I would follow the instructions to preserve any warranty. I've read that packers should really be flat so they support both sheets of glass. Otherwise the weight of one sheet is supported by the seal. Any drainage holes and channels should be kept open to stop water collecting innthem and freezing in winter damaging seals.

>>> The art in it is to always be shifting your tone words body language to match/mirror the other person, identify their primary concern, determine if it’s reasonable and come up with a mitigation. In your case I’d tell them to eff off. (my highlighting) Well that started my day with a smile.

Like most predicative models, a number of scenarios are created, one or two of those scenarios showed extreme cooling, there were also scenarios that showed extreme heating. What then happens is that a probability of likelihood is attached, then all that data, along with the error bars, is plotted. That plot, along with other researchers work, is then plotted together, creating a distribution of likelihood (confidence intervals is statistical language). The readings in the middle are the ones that are most likely to happen, and the ones that tend to get ignored by the popular press and the public. There is not much news in saying that in a decade the whole Earth will be 0.1°C warmer, but it is a great story if it is projected to be 10°C cooler, or 8°C warmer, especially if you attach a label to it like 'ice age' or 'earth ablaze'. NASA has done some research looking into past models and how accurate they are. https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2943/study-confirms-climate-models-are-getting-future-warming-projections-right/ Below is a plot of the models that were run in 2004, easy to see how well the ensemble line (black) tracks the observed data (red) which is the yearly observations. You can also see that it (black line) does not get close to the upper and lower limits of the Confidence Intervals of all the models (the ensemble). The dip in the early 1990s is from a volcanic eruption, Mount Pinatubo. The models are designed to cater for this, though the actual date of the eruption is unknown until it happens, so is manually inputted. The important part though is that the 'recovery' time is not adjusted, that is the models doing there thing and predicting future temperatures. So let us, on here, not have anymore nonsense about the past prediction of a future ice age, the people researching it back then never said one was coming, so why should we.

Our site has no tree protection orders, and is not in a conservation area. It's in an AONB, and current designated usage is agricultural. Planning permission had been given for the previous owner to convert some barns; we re-applied and put a building nearer some low-value blackthorn trees. LPA asked their tree officer to visit the site and give comment (something that the previous applicant didn't have to do, because they weren't proposing anything near the trees). We've since had to have a tree survey done for about a grand. The survey results include all sorts of obligations and restrictions that we previously didn't have, and the previous applicant didn't have. I should note that we get on very well with the environmental/arborial company we used, so it's not like they've stitched us up or anything. So, we proposed putting a garage near some blackthorns. The survey however showed that an ash tree near the main barn has a root protection area that will get in the way of development, and now needs to be fenced off, and special matting putting down if anything drives over parts of it. This is something that never showed up on the previous application, and the previous applicants wouldn't have been obliged to do. I'm all for increasing biodiversity (and it's a key part of our plans) but I have to say that leaving trees standing that might be near your development makes it possible for the LPA to enforce further restrictions. If those trees aren't there, they are less likely to be able to do that.

My understanding of the 70s "new ice age" stuff is that popular culture was all over it, but actual science - including climate scientists - very quickly established it was not happening. "Science journalists" have always had a lot to answer for on this front. Fringe opinions often get preferential coverage simply because they're exciting. Hence Betteridge's law.

The small digger has a pincer grabber attachment for lifting the big stones. Without that it wouldn't be possible.

Floor in main house 300mm centers on UFH, 200mm PIR and 100mm concrete screed. Measured on a cold day, 30 deg flow temp, floor surface temp was 22, room just under 20. Floor never feels hot underfoot, you never actually notice it. Our summer house floor is somewhat different buildup. 150mm EPS 70, 50mm thick UFH EPS moulds to give 115mm centres generally for the UFH. At 400mm centres above the EPS 70 there are 70mm wide wooden bearer. The whole lot is capped with 9mm OSB screwed to the bearers and a 50mm perimeter batten. A second layer of 9mm OSB is glued first layer (offset joint lines) and screwed through to the bearers/battens. Not got the UFH operational yet, but floor has a solid feel, and no comments from the wife, which is a good sign.

The exact reason why I have a digger arriving anytime now, so I can 'sink' the room a bit / have less visual impact for the neighbours etc. I'm going to stay 1m away from the boundary and build at or just under the 30m2 rule, as 15m2 just isn't going to give me the space I need. I'll make the roof overhang though, and I'll have a decent maintenance path around the sides and rear, with cover, so it'll be less of a loss tbh. I need to be able to get around for maintenance anyhoo, but at least I'll be drip-dry during the rain.

we call that a cranked roof. Very common in plymouth! It's allways the first area black mould comes a visiting. 25/50mm celotex on the crank ill help a lot, its tricky sliding it behind the tiles but worth the effort.

Around doors and windows you just cut back the pallet and let in a length of timber. Often you can re-use the bit of the pallet you cut off as it'll be at the right width and not need ripping along it's length. Double up if worried about strength. Over wide windows you might want a longer length you may have to buy in/rip down. See the very short pallet on the right? That was cut down at the door and a piece let in and screwed on. If you do want add in posts though use 6×150 screws or similar. Depends what way you're screwing. Might want too to get yourself some extra long 6mm drill bits for clearance through the posts.

Bit hard to tell what is what without seeing the problem in the flesh. As long as there is some ventilation that cannot bypass the insulation, and still does the job, you should be OK. Is that a cable in the top picture?

My M&E guy told me to use 25mm duo (plastic) which has roughly the same ID as 22mm copper. Vaillant's view was it "wouldn't" work with 22mm, but the reality is it's fine, it achieves target flow rate, and the fact the run isn't that long and I'm not using Glycol of course helps. That said if we'd installed the 10kW model (with a significantly higher primary flow rate) this would have been a big issue. 7k is plenty though.

Time over again I would avoid a concrete floor. 150mm concrete plus 200mm EPS here. We have some with LVT and some with good carpet and thick underlay. Mainly to keep things as soft as possible but you know it's still down there. As it's a passive standard house the floors never get cold. They're don't have that nice warm UFH touch, but they don't suck your will to live out through the soles of your feet either. Socks are the normal order of the day with no complaints. I gather from those who run low temp heating in low energy houses that you don't get a hot UFH under foot feeling either. Please write in with the answers subscribers ? @joe90 @TerryE @IanR@JohnMo to name a few. @ProDave has a screed over an I joist floor from memory. Does it chip a little bit off your spine every time you take a step like concrete floors? @JohnMo has recently put UFH over insulation below 2 x layers of OSB floating. I am very interested in this approach. No wet trades. No crucifying hammering of your joints. Another (slightly hippy) idea is an adobe (earth) floor. A shed in my parents house had a floor of exposed earth. It was a lovely surface. Similarly in a garage workshop near me there's an area of 2m2 near one of the car lifts where about 60mm of earth has become congealed after falling off car's over the years and got too stiff to be brushed out. Everyone stands on it subconsciously while shooting the breeze.

Good for you and good thoughts! For a bit of context I have been experimenting with different solutions over the years. First go was on a self build with suspended timber floors some 30 years ago. It worked mostly.. but lets say I could have "done better" as I did not know then what I know now. I have to say.. this sort of thing crops up in my day job from time to time and I don't experiment on my Clients. I have been doing up my own ex council house. I added an extension, laid some hard core, insulation, DPM and then a 100 mm thick concrete slab with A142 anticrack mesh... yes it is still the structural slab. I tied the wet UF heating pipes to the mesh. Then laid a layer of I think about 3.0 mm thick foam and floated a good quality engineered flooring over the top. I wanted a floating floor as opposed to glueing it to the concrete so I can lift parts if it ever get damaged, say by water or me doing something daft. It has the give..and a bit of a spring.. me too am a big fan of bare feet in the house and a massive fan of UF. If you have a leather sofa then it's warm when you sit down as heated from below. In another part I had the old timber suspended floor. Existing joist depth is 150mm. What I did was to get 50 x 50 timbers and fix to them 100 - 120mm wide rippings of OSB with plenty glue. The solum space is tight so then put plenty glue on top of the 50 x 50 (OSB on the bottom side) pilot drilled the joist at an angle and cheek screwed the 50 x 50 from above to pull it up hard against the underside of the joists, leaving a 150 mm ventilation space under. I had to do it this way as there is not enough room below the joists to a battery drill in to screw from underneath. Now I had a 200 mm effective depth of joist with a ledge of OSB protruding. I then cut lengths of OSB nearly the width of the space between the joists and dropped them in so they rested on the OSB ledge. Next I cut 150mm PIR and fitted it tightly in between the joists. I went round any gaps with foam and then use silicont to really seal between the insualtion and the joists. Fixed to the insulation was the UF pipes, then a pug mix then the chipboardd flooring. This is to be a bathroom so from BH have been following folk like @nod and plan to use a decoupling matt for large format tiles. Going to have a stab at laying these myself.. if it goes well will let you all know.. if not.. maybe not. Now the down side of me renovating/ preparing an existing supsended floor was that is was very time consuming and to do it right requires a lot of attention to detail that a builder may not be that keen on. In other words it a great way for Build hubbers as a DIY project. Now technically I know that the foam layer is an insulating layer that reduces the effectiveness of the UF. But I took the view.. the heat has to come out eventually. In both cases I put extra perimeter insulation around the edges. Pratically I have learnt that it's a good idea to over spec the UF by way of closer pipe centres or larger diameter pipes, does not cost a lot. Reason is that my wife is a big fan of rugs and designer stuff. These rugs and their insulating effects far outwiegh my 3.0mm bit of foam. @saveasteading has got a lot of info and knowledge about this so have a look at past posts. He also knows a lot about perimeter insulation and how it can really improve the heat loss performance.

IMO, one the best things that we did was to provide regular Tea and biscuits, plus morning bacon sandwiches. IMO, tradesmen are good people in general, but with natural biases: they will tend to try to do a better job if they like you and feel that you respect them and their work. And yes, Ian has a point. Many aren't too tidy, but keeping the site ship-shape and making sure that nothing that you are directly or indirectly responsible for impedes their work can help.

No, what you are actually doing to misquoting and misunderstanding the research. Here is a very short summary. https://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2013/06/04/the-1970s-ice-age-myth-and-time-magazine-covers-by-david-kirtley

It is to do with geology. Not enough artisan wells, or chalk. Cornwall and Devon are a chain of extinct volcanoes after all. Cleaning up water from deep wells is problematic in a radioactive area, as is cleaning up river water in a heavily farmed area. That is before the residues of 2000 years of tin, copper and arsenic mining is dealt with. There is a reason that Backwater and Red River are names as such.

Hiya. Your proposal is technically feasible. A few thoughts. On the plus side.. you have an eye for detail and I assume your are familiar with things like; logic, sequencing and programming events in terms of timing. Also, you probaly have a good idea as to how you assess risk. Hate to say it but the Rumsfeld quote is applicable.. the things we know.. On a personal level I think you may need to have a certain personality. Remember that you are not always dealing with other professionals. You have to be able to work with for example great trades folk who are terrible at communicating (they will do your head in from time to time) , sales folk, the whole gambit. Can you do this and not end up doing yourself mental harm? Can you cope with that over a sustained period of time? How are your IT skills? Do you think or can you work or learn to work a cad drawing package, just simple one. Something that you can use to convey construction concepts to others? You have time.. but if you have not done this before you face a very steep learing curve with the associated risks. I would go right back to the beginning and review what you know, how did the planning go?, what did you learn from that. Then look at the site you have, do your own desktop study so you understand the ground.. learn the technical terms and language used, you can find examples on the internet. The objective here is to get a handle and understand the things you know you know.. this builds your confidence. All the time you are doing this you end up reading around and gathering tacit knowledge that comes into play later. If you have a pretty good idea of how you want the Architecture to shape up then you can probably get quite a long way.. but you will make unforced errors.. that is why Architects take at least 7 years to train! If you want to get the likes of MBC and others to produce work packages then you need to know what they are omitting and what they are basing their design on. It's the gaps between the work packages and folk using different design criteria that cause big problems. One suggestion. Do the leg work, put together a document that summarises where you are. Imagine you are using this document to sell your project. Next try and find a local SE that is interested in the kinds of things you are interested in implementing. Remember SE's also do a bit of Architectural design. Or you could find an Architect who knows their way around the SE stuff.. the two professions cross fertilise. Some SE's will say.., give me 300 -400 quid a day and I'll not just give you SE advice but a whole load of other pointers about stuff they have picked up over the years and how you can design all these flashing details etc. It does not have to be an SE, could be a surveyor etc.. but all builds start in the ground and the structural concept.. particularly the horizontal stability system. Yes I know I have slanted this in favour of maybe an SE but.. The above is the best advise! Other than to add you need to find folk you get along with and can build a rappore and trust. Here you get it all for free and can explore without losing your shirt!

Plus one. Just avoid any complex designs. Every corner adds £10k they say. Likewise a roof gets massively more expensive the more complex it gets. Try not to let the architect do the thing where they stretch the ground floor plan to be fatter than the upstairs. This means that you have to breach the thermal envelope to support the first floor walls and it's expensive to get right thermally.

get an architect to design the house you want and then send the plans to as many TF companies as you wish to get quotes from. even if it costs a little more it gives you the flexibility to find a company you want to use.

Yes. It can sometimes be worth finding what they would rather not have to do. Builders work basically. So holes in joists, ducts, patching up after. For example, we were doing a daughter's grott kitchen up. Electrician quoted £1500 and refused to chase the walls or work in the ceiling. So I chased the walls and fed wires through the joists, cut holes for downlighters and got a different electrician to join up and connect( £300) It took me several days. On new build there is much less advantage, but you could ask.

You may be waiting a long time because… - Foundation information relates to Building Regulations, not Planning. - If you were to contact Building Control, they would state you need to dig trial holes as old records are far too old to be relied upon.

yes clear the site of everything you legally can.

I'm about to have this conversation with my architect (assuming planning is granted). They've been involved from the start up to the planning application (via interim Class Q) and I'm debating how to address the rest of the project. I'm inclined not to engage them for full Stage 4, since I aim to use a timber frame company that will provide engineering and detailing for the shell. I think they also outsource the 'services' bit (mechanical, electrical, plumbing) so I may not use them for that either. However, the detailing of external junctions (roofing, cladding, rainwater goods, windows and doors) is something they may be able to provide. I (currently) have a good relationship with her and can report back on my findings if you'd like.

we installed external blinds for solar shading. can also be used for privacy to reduce the need for curtains internally, although the effectiveness of that is still to be seen if/when we finish the house.

We have balconies but not for sun shading. We were meant to have a mirriad of brise soleis but didn't bother. Decided to live through a full year to see if they are actually needed. They aren't, the single week the house over heated we used the heatpump to cool the house. Several thousand saved.

If the tree and soil combinatiin present a grpund heave issue, then the ground will need at least a year to recover, or you could design deeper foundations as if he trees were there. How naughty is it? I haven't hesitated to remove poor quality trees, having taken pictures first. Once even got an arboriculturalist (phew) to condemn them. If they are large attractive trees then i would think twice, or more. Not just naughty but might sway opinion against the application.

What is your soil type, don't forget roots are generally as big as the trees and if you have clay then you will have problems with roots. We had some trees on our boundary, these were killed by the power company by over enthusiastic pruning to get them away from the power lines. About 4 years later we cut them down as they looked awful. A few years later we submitted planning, they used Google Earth (not just the most recent) and asked where the trees were as they affect the soil, even long after the trees were gone. There were probably about 8" in diameter.

Yes we had this at our previous house. Some trees had TPOs on them others didn’t. When I contacted the council about it they said exactly that. We had a load of trees up the drive that were near the end of their life due to poor care from years before. However, they were becoming dangerous and a few had been blown down. I had to get permission to take the worst of them down and none had TPOs.

I've told this story before on BH, can't find it so here's a shortened version .... A neighbour of mine is sometimes employed to do what he calls The Sunday Morning Chop. Arrives on site at or just after dawn, cuts down the trees concerned. It's 10:30 before anyone 'twigs' (no, I'm not sorry at all), and Monday morning before anyone can get a TPO. Mostly he's off site by 11. If he gets fined (rarely) , the customer pays it. The deal is that he gets paid in the weight of wood felled. Which is promptly sold (and hauled off by) the local log merchant. Couple of grand for a Sunday morning's work. "Worth gettin' out-o-bed fer lad......"

I believe foxes take more rats than cats, at least if there aren't any leftover kebabs which are their natural foodstuff.

Thank you for your kind words, much appreciated. It took me a bit of time to craft that. It's not perfect but BH is great and nobody jumps down your throat for a typo etc. That said I learn loads here from other folk so for me it's a two way street. You give what you can and your efforts are returned in kind. Hope tomorrow is better.