Benpointer

I sympathise with your experience and await my results with some trepidation. But on the specific example of the local business who fitted your flooring, the rules are pretty clear: supply and fit must be zero rated; supply only - you have to pay VAT and claim it back. Rejecting £10k of a £15k claim seems odd though. What reasons did they give for rejecting?

Yes, totally agree. It's painfully inefficient / deliberately slow (delete as appropriate).

It's bizarre. The two which they skipped were for 3 Veluxes from Sydenhams and Celotx boards from Insulation Online (CMO Superstores) - no idea why they missed those out. Especially as four of the invoices they did ask for are the deposit and balance for our floor tiles and deposit and balance for the timber cladding - you'd imaging if the balance invoice was valid the deposit invoice doesn't really need checking. Probably all selected by AI!

Ah sorry, no, my post was not very clear. It's 10 invoices in total: the largest 9 by value and the 12th largest by value. When I spoke to the agent he said they were halfway through processing submissions from 20th July (our additional information was submitted on 21st July). If your submission was before the 21st July, I would definitely give them a call.

Update: I received an email today from HMRC requesting 10 invoices, the 9 largest plus, oddly, the 12 largest by VAT amount. It's a bit tedious finding and uploading the pdfs requested, but that's all done now so fingers-crossed it all progresses smoothly from here. 5 weeks to wait if there arte no issues, apparently. On the plus side, HMRC must be satisfied by our answer to their planning query. Also, the helpful agent I spoke to yesterday was spot-on with his comment that our claim was about to be looked at (or else he pulled it from the list and got it looked at, if we're taking a cynical view!).

Update: I called the HMRC DIY and House Building VAT Enquiries Team on 0300 322 7073. 20 minute wait then I managed to cut myself off! 😱 but called again and got straight through. Helpful guy explained that they are currently dealing with the 20th July claims and ours should be looked at this week, as we returned the additional information on 21st July. For us it looks like the process has been / is: Submitted the online claim on 19 June. That got looked at on 21 July and they then asked for proof that the planning approval was really for us (the approval was addressed to our planning consultant). Annoying. I submitted the additional evidence the same day (21 July). But we are then back in the processing queue and will not be looked at until this coming week (5 weeks). Assuming they accept that the planning was definitely for us, they should then ask for 10-15 invoices, according to the agent. Once they get those, if there are no issues they will approve the claim and pay within about 5 weeks (he said). If we are in financial difficulty we can ask for the claim to be prioritised (which I don't plan to do as we're not, and I don't like the idea of queuing jumping at the expense of others but if we were genuinely in difficulty it's a useful option to be aware of). I'll keep you all posted.

Nothing yet. Over two months for me now as well. Going to call them tomorrow. According to Gemini: Yes, you can chase your progress by calling the dedicated HMRC DIY and House Building VAT Enquiries Team on 0300 322 7073.

Checks... Yes I uploaded the documents via the portal. Given HMRC exists to serve* us all, why do they make it so bloody difficult to claim what is legally due with regard to self-build VAT? (On other matters, income tax, IHT, I have always found HMRC staff very helpful.)

Jeepers, that's a lot of invoices! We finally got an initial response from HMRC just over a month after the initial submission: "You are not named on the planning permission. Please provide evidence such as your Building Agreement, Purchase Contract, handover documents, land transfer documentation etc; to show when you acquired the Property/Land." This is because our planning consultant was sent the planning approval. Anyway, we've now uploaded several further docs to show we own the plot, we're the actual planning applicant etc. So we wait another month, I guess...

Just checked: my application on 19th June and got the following, obviously automated, message: "We have received your application. We will write to you within 2 weeks to tell you your claim reference number." That's 4 weeks ago now - I've heard nothing.

Some of the trees will grow quite high but they are quite well spaced out so I am sure we'll be seeing the sunsets for as long as we're around. None of them are fruit trees - apples in particular cause havoc for mowing, especially with a robot mower which is what we have. So they are what I would call ornamental park trees: maple, willow, oak, chestnut, birches, elder, hornbeam, ginkgo, etc. - quite a mixture. Mrs P. tells me we do plan to have some fan-trained fruit trees along a south-west facing fence were about to put up on one part of our boundary. Who knew, eh?

There are a few snags and a few things we would/should have done differently Pete, I'm not sure whether that would make for an interesting blog though. I do plan to do something when we have had a year in the house, to reflect on our experience and lessons learned. (PS If you are who I suspect you are, do drop in or stop over whenever you and Mandy are down this way - not many canals nearby though, I'm afraid! ☹️)

Back by popular demand! (Well, one person asked.) I said the previous blog was my last. I lied. This bonus edition focuses our efforts to landscape the garden. Just before we moved in in February the rear ‘garden’ looked a bit like this: Fortunately, we’d stayed close enough to the build budget to have some funds still reserved for landscaping. It turns out that landscaping is expensive - similar costs to groundworks in our experience. Last year, while waiting for planning and itching to do something, we’d engaged a garden designer to help us meet some key requirements. We wanted to create a small garden with multiple planting and seating areas with level access from the house and wheelchair access to all areas. The designer came up with a design we liked - an interesting mixture of curves and angles, with planting and seating areas as requested. We ended up adapting this design to form the skeleton of the garden. In truth we were never likely to take any design without tweaking it but if we attempted the design ourselves it would have been very boring compared with the garden we now have. (We also ditched the designers planting list suggestion but Mrs P. was always going to have the plants she wanted, and why not?) One reason we had to adapt the design was that the fall in height was more than we planned for at 1.6m, and we only had about 12m distance to manage it given we wanted a terrace with level access next to the house. For comfortable wheelchair access I find it’s best to limit ramps to no more than 1:20 gradient, which implies we needed to fit in 32m of ramps in a 12m x 15m area. So the paths became a bit more meandering. Here’s my amateur attempt at trying to gauge shape and fall of the paths. Our excellent local landscape gardener Ashley Ralph (Ashely Ralph Landscaping - I’m not on commission!) started work in February to turn our amended plan into reality. Marking out was fun! This photo shows just how tight a space Ashley was working with. Cern Abbas Giant eat your heart out! Anyway... we needed quite a few retaining walls, which means a lot of trenches and footings. It rained a lot in February too, which added to the challenge. It would have been nice to achieve this with less concrete and fewer concrete blocks but I can’t think how that could have been done. Ashley, with Francis driving the dumper. The block walls were capped with sandstone copings and given a sand and cement render finish. We remembered to run some armoured cables and blue water pipe to allow couple of electric sockets and water taps. In the end we decided not to bother with external lighting even though we’d got planning permission approval because we rarely need it and are happy to use portable rechargeable lamps when we do. The paths and seating areas are in resin bound gravel; here are the paths edged in red setts then with and a concrete sub-base on type 1. Here’s the scene before the resin top-coat is laid but after the planting beds have had their topsoil put in. Troy's taken the idea of 'beds' too literally: For the terrace we used the external version of the internal 900 x 600 porcelain tiles we use throughout the house. The external tiles are 20mm thick rather than 10mm and have a slightly rougher surface for slip resistance. We used the same tiles for the front porch area. The walls at either side of the rear garden have drops of over 600mm so our building inspector insisted we put up ‘fall protection’ which we did using locally sourced cedar slats, fixed horizontally to posts ‘resin-studded’ to the walls. This doubles as screening from our neighbours and provides extra shelter and structure for climbing plants, so we were not too upset at having to do this. (The wider gaps at the bottom are deliberate here, to allow jasmine to grow through from the other side. Beer at bottom right is entirely incidental!) The final step for all that hard landscaping: the resin bound gravel surface. We think it looks great. It’s very smooth to wheel on and all the gradients are good too! For the planting beds we imported a fair amount of loamy topsoil to go over the existing heavy clay. Hopefully this will give a good balance with the underlying clay retaining water whilst the surface soil doesn’t get waterlogged. The beds are not enormous but it is going to take a lot of plants to fill them. That, and time to allow the plants to grow and establish themselves. Er… planting beds Troy! Obviously Mrs P. is in charge of the planting as I haven’t got a clue. The beauty of raised beds is that you can put the soil you want in them. One of the beds closer to the house will have sharper drainage and is going to become a Mediterranean garden. Another has been filled with ericaceous soil for acid-loving plants. I do know that we have some of our favourite plants already planted or planned, including roses: Nye Bevan, Claire Austen, Queen of Sweden, Champagne Moments, Donahue; also various peonies, hydrangeas eryngiums, achillia, lavenders… and lots of others. But plenty more planting opportunities according to Mrs P. - I’d better check that budget again! Well, that’s it for this bonus edition garden landscaping blog. A big thank you to Ashley and Francis for all their incredible work building our garden, and to Mrs P. of course for great plant choices, all that planting, and green fingers. After all, what is a garden without plants? That’s definitely it now… …until the epilogue maybe. Ben

How would 'high-retention storage heaters' make any difference? Electricity in = heat out eventually no matter how high the retention surely?

You may be right, we'll see. But the question is ambiguous and no steer on how to answer it. If the question had been how many kitchens and utility rooms in total I'd have answered 2. Mind you, we have a pantry too so should that be 3?