MikeSharp01

One possible thing is your right to light (not a view). If their extension shades any of your windows, and judging by the little compass in the top of your screen you appear to be North of them so perhaps in the evening, sun low, the shadow will fall so much earlier, then you may well have a recourse to right to light legislation. The council do not have to take this into account when granting planning permission but you can go after them for a chunk of money to the value of the loss of amenity and it can be substantial or even require them to take it down. Bit more info here. Depending on your relationship with your neighbours you could also do some work in the bottom your garden, EG put your own fence up fractionally inside your boundary, erect a shed a right up against the boundary or some such.

Assuming you really - really want to do this you will need to show actual losses incurred by you and how you started proceedings in week 9, or before because otherwise the other side could argue that you did not inform them that you had started to incur additional costs / accrue losses so they took this as meaning you were in no hurry as it were, and did not wish to enforce the end of contract date - which technically you could have done at that point and only paid for QSed' works completed up to that point. Everywhere else there are dragons I suspect. My advice would be to just talk to them and see if you can meet anywhere in the middle, assuming you still have any sort of relationship.

I suppose that in the end they are all just 'machines for living' in so no individuality there then but once you get into the details, site, house size, shape, orientation, actual U values and so on it all gets very different and because people here are pushing the limits in many places the differences will increasingly small as the 'S' curve reaches its limit (carrying capacity) and we all be using the same technologies to achieve our 'individual' dream.

For me stress is about feeling something is out of control - taking / getting control is the stress reducing strategy I use. In the past I have used people and resources connected to www.isma.org.uk Loads of resources. For the building trade there was a survey by the CIOB back in 2006 - so long in the tooth now but nonetheless interesting HERE.

I have a friend with an explosives licence - she might be able to 'create' a feature in which to run the pipe!

Wheels within wheels.

Would that be a top hat - which would wonderfully accommdate the hair potentially, pardon the pun, standing on end.

Make a feature of it!

@Nickfromwales Interesting - when I put my gas pipe underground - the flexible stainless stuff, I was intending fitting it in a 65mm duct so I coulD ventelate it at the meter end which is outside the air tight envelope. I was intending to leave it floating in the duct, about 15m long, so the gas safe installer could push and pull it to satisfy themselves that it was OK. Would it be better to find a gas safe local to come and observe the pipe being installed in the duct and then buried?

It is a great resource - will be interesting to see how long the UK data remains upto date after March next year.

Were the people that did it CSSW or not?

My friends and I use these all the time. They are now used on real railways as well as the miniature and narrow gauge stuff I get up to. The oldest ones are now well over 10 years and although the colour has faded they take everything thrown at them by way of weather but are a disaster if you drop burning coals on them as they burn wonderfully.

Sorry - who is we, cos might like some laminate faced plywood in kitchen - sometime next year!

Agree @Fredd does seem to be taking the proverbial but it is clear that it (cannot determine gender of Trolls / not sure how) knows a thing or two and in a roundabout way is telling us the tricks the big boys like to play to win in their terms. Not sure if you have been watching the BBC programme about the new estates in Oxfordshire but it is instructive of a number of reasons why the housing stock is a. Where it is, or rather is not and b. who is being sucked in by primeval desire to own a home that may have been constructed using the techniques we are learning from @Fredd. Just my pennyworth.

More computers than went with all the Apollo missions put together, but perhaps fewer than are, as we correspond, flashing through space in the confines of a music playing sports car - wonder how they get the royalties back to the Bowie estate - and it will be in a 1 billion year orbit on the wrong side of the road, now that's what I call panache.

Good thinking / advice @Fredd sadly in our case we had a ridge height criteria to meet and then once you deduct the internal heights then we end up about OK but we will have to do some landscaping around the slab to ensure we have clearance to the DPC.

Interesting point @Fredd but it misses the essential point that most ecocentric self builders have much longer term goals. In our case we are thinking of our possible great grandchildren's environment where the house we are building is still paying back 100 years from now. I appreciate that the design lifetime of timber frame might be questioned but 100 years seems not unreasonable and you might expect much more than that, perhaps an order of magnitude, if you look at medieval timber framed buildings still standing.

Why? I guess it is because profit today is better than the same profit tomorrow. If so it has perhaps lost its connection with many economic models and approaches which can work for slower builds and makes several assumptions about motivation behind the build.

I like it, and Yurt I am not sure.

First one was (is) very bad so did the survey instead.

Welcome - will get to your survey when I have finished reading this pile of dissertation drafts I was presented with this morning, I thought I had retired, and these refectory sandwiches are worse than ever.

@FerdinandI agree that services have a role to play but we are too reliant on them and we need to hold the balance and turn it back a bit.

Nope but I have every faith in your ability to do it - however as everything is connected to everything else I guess we could speculate that there must be a way to get from your question to our take on the topic.

So only 1553 posts to go.

yep ... I was there!