Rendall

Good question I'd not thought of. It's an existing property though, so presume they'd take the 'already that way' view - and I'd guess tender hoses have longer reach than the 40/45m length the delivery tankers have and they'd be able to get that same point as the tanks and from there its around 55m from the front of the house/70m to the back.

Hi All I need to knit together a few components for our offgrid renovation and am just thinking about the spatial 'certainties' and would appreciate thoughts on the permutations and things to bear in mind with this. The plan is to have a solar/generator/battery combination plus either LPG or oil fired rayburn with backboiler for DHW and CH. The access track along the side of the house will limit oil or LPG deliveries to the rear of the property as it is only 2.4m wide, and the closest point the tanker would get to will be more than the 40 or 45m distance it appears most operators state as the length of the hose (or are there operators out there who deliver with extra long hoses?). Therefore the space that then appears to work best for deliveries plus planning regs to site the tanks for both the LPG or kerosene for the Rayburn, plus the red diesel for the generator, is about 70 meters south from the house (and about 2m lower in height). Are there issues with this distance? We could locate the generator near the location of the tanks too, or else locate this up closer to the house itself - I suspect the latter be easier operationally and is my current thinking. The wider solar aspect of the system has two possible locations in relation to this. Option 1 is about 120m SW of the proposed site of the tanks. Option 2 would be about 50m north of the house (slightly shadier early morning and needs agreement with farmer). Added to all of this there is a future possibility of a pico hydro in addition to help support the renewables side of all of this, funds & permissions permitting, so I want to bear in mind how that might graft onto all of this. The penstock would come down an old smooth incline to a turbine house adjacent to the proposed fuel tank location 70m SW of the house. Suspect a map may be useful (!), but any thoughts or whatouts in the first instance?

Hi All - Just wondering if anyone has feedback from having a renovation mortgage with Buildstore? Some of the online reviews about their support and customer service are pretty poor. Ecology are the other firm I've been looking at - so any perspectives there would be useful too.

Random selection of Escape to the Country, the Incredible Spice Men and I think I might have been hovering around in Michael Wood's Great British Story. Can't understand the dynamic of renovation or build programmes as there seems to be little incentive cash wise for the participants, and to make good TV even with the 'best' project the producers need to drill into some aspect to portray it as being about to go off the rails for there to be any drama in the episode, before they then come back to end it all with the well isn't this lovely bit at the end.

Thanks @Ferdinand. Yes its all a very subjective area, but one of the aspects in all of this I'm more comfortable with (or at least have my eyes open on) as my day job is in conservation too and involves responsibility for a range of Grade1 buildings, SSSIs, SPAs, SACs and the like. It doesn't make it any easier to navigate the vaguaries of what different people's perspectives or interpretations are on aspects of regulations, but I've been around enough conversations of this ilk that I hope if needed I'll be able to navigate through to agree the parameters for some agreed principles and approaches. Another advantage of the day job is that we'll probably already be/or have been working with some of the various officers on other work in the area which will help give us a heads up on their likely viewpoints and stances. Re your earlier note, yes, on skills such at the tree management, walling, I'll be picking these up, and we've got a good generalist to hand. Current plan is a blitz, and designing for a good 25 years plus. Skirt insulation is a good point which I'd not considered. I'll post on the energy aspects separately on here in the topic area as this is a multi-faceted element. Current design is solar/battery combo to give around 5000kwh per annum with a generator back up, and then a gas fired rayburn with backboiler for DHW & CH. There is however potential for a pico hydro but whilst the year round Kw generation on this would be fab, unless I can reduce the capital cost of the install, the initial calcs suggest it's not as good an option (and this would be a whole other area of NRW licences to apply for). I want to model this some more though.

We'll be very sensitive to the ecological aspects on this - it's something close to my heart and I'd want to know we're putting the wider land and landscape into a more sustainable and connected condition than it is now. In my view climate change and ecological breakdown are something future generations will judge ours on.

Grade 2

Yes I'm sure we'll keep/restore some of the furniture. Earlier in the year I opened a drawer and found a George V penny which gives a sense of the timelessness there. Elsewhere there's a photo album and letters from a soldier in the first world war (I'll track down a museum for this one once/if we complete on the purchase). The area is well documented from a historical source perspective, and the accounts from when the house was built in 1868/1869 even survive.

Track is Ok (by my standards). We've go up and down in a skoda octavia and Peugeot, and it's also used by the local farmer. The bottom end is also used by Natural Resources Wales and so they have a repairing obligation when they use it for any works. It's mainly been surfaced with slate waste and the valley has a couple of convenient former waste heaps which are what the previous owner and farmer have used to surface as and when needed. Snowy winters will be a different matter!

That makes sense - I was confused by the contrasting information from the council in relation to what I'd gleaned from elsewhere, and this was going to be one of my questions for the collective minds on here so thank you for this.

Some pics and a vid clip..... first floor.mp4

Yes, but from what I gather from the council, there's a now only 5% rate for buildings which have been unoccupied for two years, and no longer a 0% rate. Is that national or just a local variation (Gwynedd). Annoying as the council tax was stopped back in 2008 so we'd be able to evidence the ten years!

Yes, I've spoken with Ecology and they'd be one of the options for us.

I thought I'd say hello having stalked this site for a few months. We're looking at taking on the type of project most sane people would walk away from, but happily the wife and I have a healthy dose of insanity which keeps us ticking along. It's a detached mid-Victorian house, but perhaps more Georgian in its appearance and style, which is tucked away down a valley and accessed along a mile and a half track. It's been unoccupied for the last ten years, and pretty much untouched since the 1920s/1930s. Much of the furniture in the house is from that date, having been left from owner to owner. It's never had an electrical supply (or even internal wiring), and apart from design and installation of a complete offgrid energy supply, it needs a full reroof with new guttering and drains, repairs to the chimneys, re-plastering in many internal spaces, renovation/replacement of the staircase, new DHW and CH system, full plumbing, two new bathrooms, new sewage system, upgrading of the private water supply and treatment, new sash windows, new external woodwork. It's also grade II listed and has a resident roost of lesser horseshoe bats. Despite the list of issues, it is though fundamentally a well built house, with slate walls and sound internal timbers (although I fully expect to uncover gremlins in due course). It's also perhaps one of the most beautiful houses I have seen, and set in a stunning location. It's a private sale scenario, and ultimately the final sale price will be dependent on the equation between the tenders and the forecast completed valuation as we'd be looking at a renovation mortgage. We have an offer agreed with the vendor based on our current projection of costs, but we've essentially got to develop and move forward the first stages of our plans 'at risk' as it could either all fall through in terms of the financing, or we may even choose to walk away if any real deal breakers are uncovered. As it stands, over the next few months we will be drawing up the LBC, and draft and issue specifications for the tenders based on a few distinct packages of works. Hopefully we will be in a position to complete in the spring. As its a private sale, and the current owner probably suspects that he's unlikely to easily find another mad couple quite as keen on this as us, he's given us the space to do both the heart as well as the head phase without worrying about other potential buyers. We've been spending the last six months digging into the feasibility, getting surveys and opinions of some of the critical elements, and each time the answers are there and we've been able to move onto addressing and working through the next issues or questions and so far no deal breakers have turned up. Everything we'd want to do is technically feasible but getting tendered costs against these though is a very different question! The irony is that we were not looking for a project at all, but this one has sort of found us. Previously we've only ever needed to do very limited works on previous houses - bathrooms and kitchen refurbs, bits of repointing, roof tile replacement, external decs, chimney lining and so forth - so a major renovation is new for us as a couple. I am fortunate in that my job has meant that I've been around a number of projects involving historic buildings over the last ten years, but it's very different when you can rely on the collective expertise and decision making of a project manager and a professional inhouse team full of technical experts to when its just up to you and the dog. Although, reassuringly it seems the dog does sometimes know more than me too.