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Well the council inspector has been Walked in and said You’ve no plaster on the walls Said let us know when you are completely plastered out and we will re assess When we deem it fit We will give you three months at 100% discount while you finish off and 50% there after We were supposedly in arrears by 2800 which would have nearly doubled byChristmas We are both very relieved Thank you all for you support after a really bad week Gary

If you have no experience whatsoever of bricklaying,I would strongly advise against this. If it was blockwork both skins I’d still say it’d be too much for a novice to take on. Laying bricks accurately can take a while to master. Achieving an output of 300 bricks/day (which your average daywork brickie does) takes a couple of years on Site. Then you need to be able to not just read the drawings but also ‘see’ them I.e. pick out critical items & have a mental plan of tackling them. Sorry to be negative about your prospects but that’s one of the benefits of this forum-you get a healthy dose of realism at times most needed.

Not a groove jetted in These were 600x600mm porcelain. The lady of the house had a 'vision' of black and white, so black and white it went. Porcelanosa sold the dream, then handed me a nightmare. The black and white chequers are 1200x1200mm and each is made up of a full tile of each colour plus 4 halves. If you jet the tiles in half then bring two together then you get a 599x599 quare as the jet takes roughly 1mm of material out during the 'cut'. Problem is you then have no grout gap between the black and white triangles where the black meets white. Solution is to ask the water jet guru to oscillate the jet side to side as it's cutting. Then you can choose 1.5-2mm off each cut which then gives you 3-4mm for grout. This was an open plan bedroom. A curved wall in the corner where you walked into the shower and poop area, and this vanity on one wall of the bedroom, just off. Oh oh and just to piss me right off, there was a mix of black and white grout. Try that for fast access to the loony bin .

Little message for your power crazy council employee

Thank you both. I was planning on starting one here, although a pointer as to how I do that would be handy! Picture below gives a wee idea of the site. It will be a fairly small timber frame project, probably stick built on site although we're still pondering things like that. Plans to follow shortly.

Hi everyone. My names Adam and my wife and I have just bought a (new to us) 1930s semi-detatched house together. Well thats the boring bit over, the fun bit is that this house is a wreck, not the worst i've seen but not really liveable at the moment. We got it just before the cold snap and it had no heating, the wiring looks old with quite a few sockets around that only have two two pin holes, theres a hole in the roof and the shower has been disconnected because it leaked for so long that a timber behind it rotted to the point where, when I pushed my key in to it, i actually lost it. So......the shortened version of the plan is to fix it, extend it and rebuild part of it. Apart from some of the largest bits of it, most of the work will be done by myself. My experience is a bit limited, I renovated my last flat myself, but it was far easier than this. I want this house to be more than just comfortable, I want to know that at the end of it I did everything reasonably possible to make it energy efficient and low cost for the future. I intend on achieving this by insulating everything within reach, completely sealing up every air gap, using MVHR which will be in the loft and hopefully solar panels on the extension which will go to a battery unsure as to weather a heat battery or electrical one yet. Pictures should follow shortly showing what it currently looks like.

Not knocking the technical prowess and thought gone into it but that looks f****** 'orrible! Had the woman no taste? Did she have you do the ducks on the wall as well?

Nice job, but was it a footballer's wife?

Hi everyone. Shortly to start a blog with some more info. We have some woodland up near Cannich (not far from Inverness) which luckily already has full planning for a house. We're shortly to resubmit, as the existing planning is for something much larger and expensive than we need. This will be our first full build, although we've helped on bits and bobs of building in the past. I'm a hydrologist by trade, so questions on water supplies, hydro and flood risk are welcome! cheers

You would need an easement from the farm to allow you to connect in case you ever sold the farm to someone else and you would then possibly need to put in a separate feed at that point.... but I would not worry about that at this point ..! Cut the 32mm, tee in a 25mm MDPE and then stick a non return valve and a meter on it ...

Yes they were chalk and cheese The one that started it all was so aggressive and uncompromising Telling me that that self builders are treated the same as everyone else The one that came down today did mention mainstream builders But added that we wouldn’t compare you with them I bet she wasn’t there more than five minutes She didn’t go upstairs or in the kitchen area Just stood in the hallway about a metre from the front door

Is the farm supply for the house or the entire farm ..? Would guess it’s 32mm or similar. You could run 25mm to yours with no issues as long as there is decent static pressure. And you can buy cheap meters off eBay that are WRAS approved for less than £20... Sewage to a tank is it ..?

Correct I was expecting to skim the house out in a week Ive had a good look around today I think maybe eight weeks to completely skim out ?

I read it as three months from when it's plastered (or maybe even some time after that - ie, from when they re-assess and then "see fit" to start the three month period). This fits in with the three month deemed completion notice protocol.

Fantastic news.

As @jack has said. If the inspector said "let us know when plastering is complete" that's your get out of jail free card. Simply leave one (least needed) area void of plaster and get the rest of the house complete. Well done

Really pleased for you ....now get down to Lidl they have some "Arestel" cheap this weekend and celebrate

Did the government not change this as being too restrictive? I recall our council appeared fixated by a "look that fits" and had publised a document. They withdrew it just prior to my planning application, about 3 years ago.

Yep me to, fingers crossed for ya

@Visti Given that you won't be building the mezzanine now the main design issue that you need to look at in order to future proof the design is Part B of the Building Regs (Fire Escape). This is the relevant extract from Part B for England:

Good luck for this afternoon.

Thanks Jeremy ill let you know how I get on this afternoon

@Ferdinand We bought three of these assembled one then returned two. Wasn't impressed.

Plenty of other stuff isn't perfect (what is, really), but we genuinely don't get upset with each other about stuff like this, and we don't hold grudges.

Got it Extra 0 in there

Hi and welcome to the forum. Good luck with your project. Your place looks positively palatial compared to the last house we renovated.

We sent out samples off to Bradley Environmental Consultants. Cost about £55 to have 2 samples tested. Turns out we have chrysotile roof edging and chrysotile / amosite soffit boards to our bungalow. https://www.bradley-enviro.co.uk/ I'll post separately about the demolition as we are getting the full asbestos survey next month (once we have moved out) to be followed shortly afterwards by the most expensive demolition known to man.

Thanks @Trw144, PM sent

Remember that you don't have to use the gap under the doors as transfer ducts, you can fit ducts in the walls to do this. If these ducts are arranged like periscope ducts they will tend to reduce noise transmission, plus you can add acoustic lining to any transfer duct to further reduce noise transmission.

Latest update on the glazing costs. I have my quote from Idealcombi and it's only about £200 cheaper than the quote from Norrsken, excluding installation. I've had difficulty getting all the elevation plans over to them and so I haven't got figures for the glazed gable section, so I've made an assumption on these, but I don't think I'll be too far off the mark. Some windows are more, some are less, but overall there's little difference between the total figures. For the sake of the £200, I'm going to stick with Norrsken on the strength of the supply and fit package and no VAT reclaim, plus a nicer option on the internal frame finish. Also, the tall window in the hallway that goes to the upper ceiling needs to be done in 3 pieces by Idealcombi, whereas Norrsken can do it as 2 pieces. Thanks for all the help and input, everyone. I'm sad that I couldn't get the prices down, but happy that I've done my due diligence on the glazing.

This was the notice I put up removing the implied right to access to our site by the council: Notice removal of implied rights - blanked.pdf This is an excerpt from the VOA guidance that may be useful: Excerpt from Valuation Office Agency guidance.pdf And these are some examples of case law regarding when a building becomes a rateable hereditamant (which is has to be before it can go on the list): Porter vs Trustees of Gladman Sipps.pdf RGM vs Speight.pdf

The vibration of any refrigeration unit causes slight issues with any pipe work unless it’s flexible. I don’t think I’ve seen a single MI that doesn’t say use flexis, even if it’s only an isolation from the unit to the fixed element of a few hundred mm. BES do large bore flexis up to 1500mm for less than £20 which makes install a doddle so I can’t see why you would use anything else ..??

And hide the kettle ..... you don’t want it looking lived in ..! I would get a copy of @JSHarris letter and edit it and print a copy of it and hand it to the person as they leave ... there is no right of access then without your agreement and they will know you mean business.... Oh, and don’t forget to enforce the legal boots/hard hat/PPE rules and follow it yourself too..!

Hawkins was an atheist who was publicly open about this, but for the large part only commented on this in a personal context. Of far more importance was that he was also a great scientist and thinker who achieved this greatness despite personal tragedy and disability that would crush the vast majority of us. He left the world a better place after his passing and caused no material harm to others in doing so. If I could achieve 10% of that, then I would die happy.

Absolutely. For some reason, we think that there's some status associated with sitting in an office rather than going out and actually doing/building/making something. My kids are pretty bright, but even while they're young we're drumming into them the idea that university isn't a given. If what they want to do needs it, we'll be with them the whole way. If something more vocational or entrepreneurial suits them, that's what we'll be supporting and encouraging.

Read back on my efforts, they may prove interesting. I started from the premise that with a low heating demand and UFH in the slab, controlling the slab temperature should be quite good enough to control the room temperature. Over the very small range of floor surface temperatures required, to give zero to around 15 to 20 W/m² heat output with a nominal room temperature of around 21 deg C, then the floor surface temperature variation can be considered to be near enough linear, making the maths and controls a bit simpler. The theory goes like this. If the slab is kept at the correct surface temperature for the prevailing heat loss (determined roughly by the inside/outside temperature differential) then the system should self-regulate. If the room temperature drops, say because an outside door is opened, then the temperature differential between the slab surface and the room air increases, so the heat output increases. As the room warms up the temperature differential decreases and the heat output decreases, until equilibrium is reached once more, where the heat input exactly matches the heat loss. Sadly this doesn't happen in the real world. I tried many variations of the control system to try and get floor slab temperature control to work, with dozens of firmware variations and three different sets of control hardware. None worked well, and in the end I tried a simple, but very low hysteresis (0.1 deg C), room stat and was surprised to find that, as long as the flow temperature to the UFH is kept below about 25 to 26 deg C, this works very well indeed. I have looked back at why the theory wasn't supported by the real world experience and reached a view as to what I believe to be the main problem, and that is that the incidental heat gains to the house often swamp the heating system heat output. Unless the control system knows what these incidental gains are, it cannot maintain an even house temperature. In our case we had significant unwanted solar gain, almost entirely in late autumn and early spring, when the low sun angle got under the external shading and penetrated deeply into the house. I worked out that we could easily get over 1 kW of solar gain on a bright, cold, clear wintry day, and that was more heat than the whole house needed. There were other really big incidental heat gains too. Run a shower for ten minutes and you dump around 2 kWh of heat, of which a fair proportion heats up the air and gets recovered via the MVHR. One very significant factor when I was working inside the house was the vacuum cleaner. I have an ancient Vax that puts out around 1 kW of heat when it's running. Half an hour of cleaning up around the place on a cold day would easily increase the room temperature a couple of deg C or more.