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You could pave the half nearest the house and have a step or 2 up to decking at the back, where you could have a properly fixed rotary washing line. Dig out where you are paving and put that under where the deck will be. Consider keeping some borders / planting pits. A bit of effort on design will cost next to nothing and the finished garden will be much better.

I cut my discs out of some eps insulation I had left over.

As far been said many times in here...You only pay for insulation ONCE! As in put enough in & do it right and it'll serve you well and as fuel costs double, triple, quadruple the impact will affect you less.

A roll of black polythene, a few tonnes of pink pea gravel, a shovel and barrow.

Can you not sell Walk-on Glazing to an obtuse person who runs a theatre?

Sink should have a template with it

https://www.gumtree.com/p/other-garden-patio/3g-quality-astro-turf-20-25m2/1325250024

Heh. Also bear in mind that there are some cost-saving threads around, so you can probably get up to a third more material for the price you first look up in Wickes, and that it is also useful to do a heat model on the famous @JSHarris spreadsheet, and that it is worth taking a few years .. say 10 ... heating bills into account for your lifecycle cost. eg You can get a routine 10-20% off at Wickes itself with a Trade Accoutn and a Reloadable Cash Card, for example. The thing about the fabric improvements is that you only get the chance to do them once, and only have to pay for them once, so some bullet-biting helps. it particularly helps when you are half under a floor at arms length with a staple gun. F

We have looked into the tax position and are seeing the accountant on Wednesday so will add more after that, Our son is thinking of buying the 2nd house so we may sell him the plot adn then he is a self builder so can get VAT back.

Sorry We normally shot fire Hilti nails into steel But if you haven’t got a gun You can simply run a band of gyp sealant down the edge of the steel and trap the edge with your next saved board

Yes sorry separate structural engineer fees are standard rated. You will only get them zero rated if (for example) you order a timber frame kit and they include the structural engineer’s design for the frame as part of the package.

Sod all to do with making one, just about knowing how they work so that one that does heating and cooling can be chosen. Not rocket science, just a matter of reading the specs and understanding that the manufacturers of ASHPs often hide the fact that they will cool just as well as they heat, perhaps because to be eligible for the RHI the cooling functionality has to be hidden, even though it's always there for a heating ASHP.

@Sue B, another one here. This time mine will be (not started yet) a passive slab combined with screw piles (because of unstable soils, clay beneath that can heave, and lots of tree roots that need to live a long and happy life). I have collected a small sheath of cross-sectional diagrams of piles and rafts. Any of the raft of pile companies will have one that they can send you.

@Cambs What was your reasoning in Using Storma to do your building control please It was one of the warranty company’s approved inspectors, so was driven by the choice of warranty company and my desire to combine building control inspections and warranty inspections to hopefully reduce costs.

FWIW, we have a passive slab AND piled foundations. Although we don't have a high water table, we are on highly shrinkable dessicated clay down to 12m and beyond. We could have managed without piles but then would have had to reduce dig to about 3m and backfill - based on my now known cost of muckaway, this would have cost in the order of £40k +. Instead, we had a reduced dig to 800mm, then mini piles. The mini piles were put in in one week and the muckaway was far more modest as well as being considerable cheaper on the groundworker labour and plant hire. We also had the UFH pipes buried in the slab at the time it was done and the heating zones were planned in advance to allow this to be done.

FWIW, the core components of an air con unit and an ASHP are identical, and many units can be run both ways quite happily. The only difference is that a heat and cool unit will have a 4 way reversing valve, a heat-only unit will also have a 4 way reversing valve, but a cool-only unit may or may not have a 4 way reversing valve; it depends on whether or not the manufacturer just uses a generic refrigerant circuit for several models in their range. We've been running our ASHP in both heating and cooling mode pretty much since the day I installed it. Cooling mode wasn't advertised as being available by the UK company that badge engineered it, but was there in the control system and just needed to be set up to enable it to work.

There are different types of ASHP and an AC is an air to air ASHP. A2A HPs can provide cold air only or warm and cold air.

It's not just an English problem. Most houses built with tiles in Scotland are built with felt over the joists, unless it is for a council.

Any WRAS approved pipe lube works OK. Most are just a water-soluble gel that contains glycerin and thickened with methyl cellulose (pretty much identical in composition to KY Jelly...).

Do you have a radon gas issue locally? Just wondering if you'll have to consider a specific DPM?

I have hit a snag. When I chased the ebay supplier about the non arrival of my Unistrut, they replied saying it would cost £200 to deliver it here so have cancelled the order. I have been phoning around and the cheapest I can find it locally is £24 per 6 metre length (compared to just a shade over £20 from ebay) I guess I will have to stump up for that.

Super cute We lost both our six and 12 months ago