Square Feet

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/08/solar-panel-users-excess-power-scheme New update re the situation after March this year.

I am hoping to buy a plot in 2019. Obviously I will then be moving into the completed house before Christmas.

Yes that is worrying alright. I have no love for our present Westminster Govt and no faith that they will be anything other than bastards on the side of corporate greed. Battery storage is starting to appeal more and more....

Yes, it does sound like it would be best to hang on and see how this plays out, though I can't see it paying anywhere near as much as FITs.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/dec/18/solar-power-energy-firms-government

I bought some cheap Cromar 3 off ebay for a loft renovation I did recently. From memory it was £27 or £28 for a 50m roll. I think that is about half price. It was seconds, but out of the 50m roll, only about 2m had to be ditched, the rest was fine. As JSHarris says, tape adhesion was a bit of an issue as I tried to use duct tape without success - it worked ok for a couple of weeks, then started to come away so you need the proper stuff.

I also found Velux had crap instructions and flimsy plastic bits that snapped if you looked strongly at them. I did find that Velux were very good at sending out replacement parts though - FOC and very quickly.

I hate it when untreated wood goes grey too. They always say on Grand Designs "and it will weather off to a beautiful silvery grey" but in reality it just goes manky and looks like a garden shed.

There is a lot of difference between old single-skin containers and some of the newer twin walled ones. I rent one of each at the moment - the twin walled one is dry (good rubber seals on the doors help with that too) so it has furniture and personal items in, and the rusty old single skin one isn't (it suffers from condensation on the inside of the roof), so it has tools inside.

I think it looks good.

"The crane company have visited site to check the narrow access and hairpin bent for themselves, they’ve confirmed that their smallest crane will be able to get onto site, with difficulty!" Can I ask the dimensions of your hairpin? I am looking at a site with narrow access just now so this is interesting information.... Cheers.

I'm sure if you put it on freecycle someone would come and pump it out. My local oil delivery depot has big cannisters you can buy off them for just such a purpose.

Don't forget to take the covers off your smoke alarms now you are in.... Would love to have a nosey at your house sometime Congratulations - it all looks very much as though it belongs in the landscape and I hope you will have many happy years there.

Nice - and it's in a sporty colour too How much is one of those then?

Ah, fair enough!

I see the crusher seems to be available to hire - would that have been a cheaper option? I guess you would have had to load it by hand that way, but it would depend on what sort of saving could be made as to whether it was worth it.

I have dodgy knees too. I have recently been seeing a physio who has introduced me to the wonders of kinetic tape. It's amazing stuff and makes a massive difference - it holds my knee together and stops it going too far and hurting. This in turn reduces damage and inflamation. I live in Scotland so I have been able to take advantage of a scheme here that allows the self employed to jump the queue for physio if your injury is preventing you from doing your job somehow. It might be worth seeing of NHS England does something similar. It is called 'Working Health Services' here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissen_hut

I read this with interest as I have pretty much no mobile reception at home which is a pain. Being able to make and receive phone calls and texts via our home internet would be great. I have tried googling, but as I am using a fairly obscure phone (Oukitel K10000) I can't find any information on how to switch wifi calling on. I can't see it as an option when I go to the Advanced Wifi menu - I only have 'Install certificates, Wifi Direct, WPS Push Button and WPS Pin Entry'. Does this mean that my phone doesn't support it? Edited to add: I might just have figured it out - it is more a thing to do with your network provider than phone. I am on Three so I had to download and install their Three in Touch app. Hopefully that will do it.... Cheers for the suggestion - I had no idea that this was a thing. Apologies for highjacking your thread Mr Harris....

Wow, what a stunner.

You just don't know that you want or need it it yet

Smartphones don't cost a few hundred quid. Well, they can if you are silly about it. You can get a perfectly fine second hand one that would do the job for less than £20 on ebay. My brand new 'Chinese company nobody has heard of' branded phone cost me £130 last week. I'm sorry, but it seems daft to inconvenience yourself so much for the sake of £20. They also have all sorts of other nifty features that you will probably find yourself using, even if it is only the calendar and torch....

Can't you just use your phone as a hotspot and connect your laptop to it? That way you can do the whole thing in the car without the panic.

'Preservation in-situ' is an established archaeological principle. In the bad old days a lot of sites were excavated for the fun of it and the resource destroyed as a result. With the technological advances that have happened since, we could learn so much more from those old sites if they hadn't been destroyed (excavation being nothing more than controlled destruction after all). So now the first rule of archaeology is always to preserve in-situ and only excavate if absolutely necessary or unavoidable.

Try not to get too irritated by the Wickes ads