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Spoken like a true Norn Iron man Declan Seemed to be the solution to most things in Derry in the 70s & 80s ...

Block work and brickwork

Hi All, Just joined and hoping i can offer some great advice and answer all questions cost and estimate related ! Thanks, TheQSguy

Should have hijacked it and left it sideways across a roundabout on fire.

Hang in there @lizzie and keep your eye on the prize. It will be worth it.

Sure his ma would have beat him harder for missing his tea than if he had got caught hijacking the bus.

If you get caught by that find out if the company has a "Commercial Entity Agreement". If it does that section 75 of the consumer credit act might still save you.. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/personal-banking/credit-cards/section-75-credit-card-warning-online-payments-lose-protection/

My cold wife once had the living room my wbs is in at 32 degrees when I was at work. Only thing that got the heat out was opening all the windows and doors and even that took a 2 days.

They have until the end of the month to respond . Not too worried about turn around time tbh ....

Thanks Nick I have found a setting called 'party' ...if only.....that seems to have boosted the fan speed a lot.

My dog is is almost 16 and blind. He is a cocker Spaniel but hates water, I trained him to hate it because we had open water in our last garden and I didn't want a dog in the river every day, now he wont even step in a puddle. He is old and frail and every day with him now is a bonus, he is not quite ready to leave us but I fear it wont be too long and something like the heat he has had to endure may just tip the balance. He is asleep in the cooling fan air and mvhr adjustment has reduced house temp hugely, still too warm at 26 but much better than the weekend.

I only have hard floors here but I have a cordless Dyson upstairs that was close to £300. It’s ok. Irritating when it needs recharging as you have to stop and recharge the whole unit as there is no separate battery. It’s also a pain to empty if it collects dog fur (which is why I tend to use it upstairs rather than down). The dog fur tends to get stuck up the top of it and I have to shove something in it to get it out as it doesn’t come apart. The dust canister is pretty small too. Downstairs I have a Vax Air cordless Lift duo. More like a conventional upright vac. It also ‘lifts’ out of the main unit to make it easier to do the stairs for example. Mine came with 2 lithium batteries which makes it easy to keep going when a battery runs out of charge. It’s easier to empty too I feel as the canister comes apart if anything gets stuck in it unlike the Dyson, and the dust canister is larger. It was only about £100 and I don’t see that the Dyson is 3 times as good TBH. I also have a Vax cordless hard floor cleaner that takes the same batteries and isn’t bad. Actually I must take all of the corded ones I have here to the tip as I don’t see me using corded ones ever again. Corded vacs are more powerful, but for hard floors that’s not much of an issue. I did try a robot vac at one stage. Bloody thing was hopeless. Used to get stuck on the bottom of the kitchen stools and, well almost anywhere really. By the time I had rescued it and set it off again and then emptied it, I could have pushed the cordless one round so I got rid. The Shark Liftaway has great reviews but is corded hence I haven’t bought one.

Welcome and another very useful addition of skilled knowledge willing to help on what is an amazing resource for self builders And the like.

I listen to Radio 4 on Digital, so 40 years and 3 seconds behind the times.

+2. I don’t think it would make for a tranquil living room, quite apart from any heat loss issues.

And you had never heard of Buildhub at that time - or you would have been a bit more savvy

A SE will do you a sketch, prob £200, and you hand it to BCO. BCO smiles and says "can you email the SE calcs to me please?", SE does so, and job done. You dont need anything more than a pencil.

Ditch the cat slide dormers. I think they look horrible, and create a very difficult edge detail to both get right initially, and then to maintain. Put proper little gable end dormers instead, look much nicer.

I used Excel with formulae and conditional formatting for the Gantt part. Excel has the advantage that it is very flexible - e.g. adding quotes and tenders etc, plus I can use it on the move on my smartphone. The disadvantage is setting it up for what you want can take some time and requires quite a bit of knowledge, plus you need to be disciplined in the way you use it. And it does not take care of scheduling dependancies automatically - down to you to identify and work on. Happy to share - PM me your email and I can send it across.

So we are in but not 'finished'. The last few days the house has been almost uninhabitable in the heat. The first few days we were freezing then weather changed now I am getting readings of 33 in my bedroom at 7pm at night. Living areas 30 degrees positively cool by comparison. It is far hotter inside than out. I have temp blinds at the windows and they must be helping. The glass is red hot. They MVHR has not been commissioned yet it is just running on a temp auto setting so I dont know if that makes a difference. It does have summer bypass facility but I dont know if that is operational on this temp auto setting. The boiler seemed to be permanently on (may account for the £300+ gas bill I have just received for the 3 months Jan-Mar when uf heat was put on low to cure the slab - nothing else but ufh and hot water runs on gas). I found the manual and have turned the boiler to summer setting, hot water only on a timer and so boiler is off now, the boiler was telling me water temp was 78F I turned it down to 65 maybe very high temp is why it hasn't fired up and heated any water since I turned it down, it was scalding coming out of taps before. Probably just diluting down to 65 now. The plant room/utility temp has dropped from 35 to 27 since I got the boiler off. I have problems with data cab so no phone and I have had to remove router and plug into bt master socket to get internet, it is very precariously balanced on top of the hot water tank. All this in a super insulated airtight MBC house, how I wish for the leaky 30 year old rental house where at least we could control things and actually live in it....oh and just to add joy to the day I find my very expensive white silicone render on the back of the house spattered with dark grey masonry paint where it must have splashed when they painted the back wall......and my 20 year old olive tree looks like its dying....... Please tell me things can only get better....2 years of absolute hell to get here and the two weeks we have been in have been very difficult in an awful lot of ways. Yes never again is on my lips!

@newhome If I was a more sceptical person I would say they keep enough 'flaws' in the design to keep belt feeding new models out. I only bought mine 6 months ago and saw earlier they are onto version 10 now!

I noticed @lizzie had this problem today also. I just checked the gas meter for the second time today, first time was just after it was connected in late January. When the boiler was installed the heating controls were not in place, so the builders switched it on and left it running 24 hours a day. This was necessary to some extent to dry out the house. We moved in in mid March and the builders would often be working with multiple doors/windows open. They would think nothing of having the heating running and the house open whilst it was freezing outside. The heating controls were eventually connected at the end of March and eventually I had to tell them to just use the garage door to get in and out as my wife was freezing. This was probably early April. There were also two large holes in the plant room wall awaiting ventilation to be installed. They were blocked off but at some point someone opened them up. For most of April, basically 1000 square foot of the house was open to the outside. They also drilled a hold in the kitchen wall which is our main living area to bring a gas pipe into the fireplace. I couldn't understand why it was so cold one day and there was a draught as I wasn't there when they did this. Eventually it will be under ground level and sealed off. Finally much as the house is very well insulated and has triple glazing, the seals have still not been completed around the outside of the windows which is probably adding to heat loss. Anyway, I checked and we have used £1700 of gas since the meter was installed in January. This seems absurd until you realise that a 42kw boiler running 24 hours a day would use over £30 a day of gas. The boiler was probably running almost constantly for two+ months. So if you install your boiler in the middle of a very cold winter, don't let it just be left running if you don't want a large bill. Also don't let builders run the heating and then open every door and window in the house when they get too warm which seems to be how they like to work. And finally watch for the builders making holes in the outside of your house and then just leaving them open whilst they work at normal builder pace.

Nope, just space heating and hot water. There were no thermostats or timers connected for 2 months so the boiler would have pretty much run constantly.