jamieled

Cheers. Reason for asking is I have a metal ic cover (Due to location) with no seal and I can't see it being airtight. Same with rodding points. Trying to figure out whether I have the wrong bits or whether they don't need to seal.

A couple of questions for those who have done this. 1) What does a drainage test (witnessed by BC) involve? How much, if any, internal foul drainage pipework is required? Does it include the treatment plant? 2) Are inspection chambers and rodding points supposed to be airtight? If not, how are they dealt with in a pressure test?

On the subject of nordan/Rationel delivery charges, it's worth noting they are negotiable. We got costs from both, and while window costs were similar, delivery costs were not.

Optimism bias is now also well recognised within all major civil engineering projects. When looking at costing flood schemes (as an example), the optimism bias allowance slowly reduces the more detailed the scheme design gets as more unknowns are removed. Its something all self-builders could consider in a basic manner( and it has helped us). While we're employing help for certain aspects on our build, we are buying in all the materials. At the beginning it was quite difficult to figure out an end cost, so we added large contingencies on to the more uncertain aspects. Now we have a more detailed design (and better understanding of how it will be built!) and we're getting quotes, we're able to reduce contingency a bit as we're more certain of the end point.

£400 I believe. I think the cutting company took it out the wages of the poor bloke who did it!

I've heard of a few tree cutting jobs where at BT line was hit. There was a charge/fine for it.

@Patrick, about 40 minutes drive west of Inverness, near Cannich.

@Patrick, definitely from the UK, and preferably local. There has been quite a bit of harvesting round us so we're hopeful of finding something. Haulage is often significant money.

I think the longest length is around 7.5m, which is ground floor to gable. The question arises because this is planned to be fairly diy - we will buy in roundwood larch, mill it, dry it a bit and then use it. So at the moment we're just sussing out the roundwood timber market to see what's available and how we could use it.

@Russell griffiths pretty rustic look going on here. @Temp, I feel a bit embarrassed about my googling skills now, but thanks for those, will have a read.

We are currently planning our cladding. This is vertical board on board larch. However, despite our best research efforts we are struggling to work out details around windows and also where two strips of cladding join. For example, on the gables the lengths of larch cannot cover the entire wall, so what is the best way of setting out the cladding? Should it all stop/start at the same place or should adjacent joins be misaligned to avoid creating an obvious horizontal line? Any pictures most welcome!

Probably just under 10m drop over the 300m length to the tank. Then about 20m drop over 80m from tank to house. It's difficult to get a route from the burn to tank with a continuous fall. Although it's not got any big bumps, I reckon we'll end up with the occasional airlock, so I've put in a bypass at the tank that I can connect a pump to if needed.

25mm from the burn to the tank then 32mm from there (from the tank to the house is bit easier going so we can get to a decent depth there). Got quite a big tank which will give us a bit of a buffer if we do have some freezing. I haven't figured out how I'll deal with the small section of pipe where it comes out of the burn - ducting and insulating will be a bit tricky. I was considering whether an alternative kind of pipe might be better for that section.

Private supply for us. The water utilities take quite a precautionary approach to frost depth due to past experiences with freeze thaw events. There is a lot of pipe on their networks that would not meet current regs. In my opinion their idea of frost depth is overly precautionary in many places.

@Conor it's about 300m and seriously hard going with the pick axe. The plan is to bury it enough to deal with most surface frosts and continually run water through it and the tank in cold periods. In the woodland the ground never seems to freeze as much as it does in the open although no doubt it would do in a prolonged cold spell. Where the pipe enters the burn its solid bedrock so no chance of burying it there anyway.

Thanks all. We have it wrapped in building paper for now. I suspect we'll just have to see what the weather does and how the frame responds.

Is there any guidance or wisdom out there concerning exposure of timber frames during construction? We've found ourselves in the situation of having the frame exposed for the next few weeks (probably about 4) until we can get up to roof level. Is there anything worth doing in terms of temporary protection or is it unnecessary? Located in northern ish Scotland.

Been a busy few weeks. Following the groundworks, the slab was set out and poured. It was a bit of a warm day, and there was a definite sense of urgency as it went off fairly fast. Now we've got a local joiner putting a frame up for us. It's being built from I-beams on site. I'd planned this all as best as I could, expecting our posi's next week based on what the supplier told us about lead times. It now turns out it will be another 4 weeks. While I'd rather not leave the frame exposed longer than we need to, we can't do much about it now, so we'll have to wrap it up as best we can. At least it's not winter. In the meantime, the tedious business of burying the water pipe continues...

Scotframe were bought by St Gobain at the end of 2017. That loss may not be reflective of the scotframe business in isolation ( would need to dig into the accounts to understand why though).

With SEPA the abstraction limit is 10,000 litres although beyond that there is a sliding scale of complexity in the effort required to get permission. We used to go kayaking in December/January on some of the speyside rivers where the distillers discharged waste warm water straight into the burns. Nice to warm your hands up with, but sadly not so common now.

I have a feeling that for planning you don't have to do much to invoke a permission - on some of our commercial projects I'm aware of us getting a contractor in to dig a trench simply to ensure the development is initiated in planning terms.

Our temporary setup at the moment uses a bucket composting approach. Not much more to it than a bucket and a wee wooden shelter though!

I doubt it, but worth a shot. The way I see it, estimated build cost is a poor way of identifying the work required by building control unless (as they seem to be doing, it is all indexed the same way). Take my 3 bedroom house. I could go to a main contractor for a turnkey build and spend £2000/m2, or DIY at slightly over half that (maybe, we'll see where we end up!). The work required by building control is the same in both cases which is why a pick your own build cost approach doesn't work.

In contrast to @ProDave, we could only use the RICS index to calculate our build cost as the council would not accept any lower estimate (although I expect to come in a lot lower than the indexed build cost). It may be that they have tightened up a bit in the last year or two. I suspect estimated build cost is used a proxy for the effort that building control need to put in, so I was not overly concerned about it coming out higher than I expect to end up with. The fact that I will end up building it cheaper than estimated is probably irrelevant. See here for an example: https://www.highland.gov.uk/downloads/file/13353/building_warrant_fee_guidance

You have my sympathy. 300m through sitka spruce for us with no digger access. I'll have arms like popeye when I'm done!