MikeSharp01

Replace the top of the threshold with a fibre glass box section filled with expanding foam. This should take the load not already taken by the horizontal side fixings on the frame. Think GBS did this and we are using the same approach on our build.

Ours was submitted electronically as a set of PDFs all bound into one document. Sadly Milton Keynes is a bit out my way - I am in Kent otherwise I would have given you a hand for a day. I have a total station and have taught myself to use it so it ain't hard, I paid £650 for it but I was looking on ebay / gumtree for 6+ months before the one I wanted came along at a price I was prepared to pay.

Where aBouts are you!?

Yes I used to have a car like that!

Welcome to THE self build forum. The dreaded mortgage is always a good place to start. Lots here go to Buildstore I think, if its an eco home the ecology BS direct and some use brokers. If you just enter mortgage in the search box you will find many links to tales littered with wisdom and a few with woe.

Yes mine worked OK but there were some voids under it where the concrete did not get even though I had all those holes, suspect I lost concentration on it as well, and, although I have not got any cracking in the slab, I think I should have surrounded it with a ring, welded, of rebar as the slab is thinner there and so any stress will have a better chance of cracking the slab and I don't want them to get out. .

Work on perpetual motion cos I suspect Trump and Kim Jong-un will bring about world peace shortly - on the beach fashion sadly, but peace none the less.

Is your list hyperlinked? It might be a useful resource in itself!

I have only had one and I think it is M, I always go for M as it is my first initial!

Eh up Erwin. Looks great, remember if you need a hand that I am happy to return the favour you did us. Quick question, have you elevated the mesh or is that to be done, looks like it is resting on the insulation in the Pics.

We wanted to use Colourcoat Urban and every time I met a rep at a show they were great but the follow up was much weaker - sounds like they have gotten their act together by moving it to Catnic as its a great product but we have had to move on. I only hope the sales team minions I met were moved as well otherwise the poor bloody infantry get it again for poor leadership.

Ok CJ-Lithium then.... not quite star trek!

Oooooops.... If you had a square made of four bits of timber with a nail at each corner you could squeeze it quite easily into a diamond shape - that is racking. If you put a diagonal across the square, nailed at each end, it becomes two triangles and suddenly it is much stiffer you won;t be able to deform it to a diamond without bending or breaking it - so the diagonal gives the structure racking strength. Your steels, uprights and horizontal members are in effect the square. Once you fix them to the wall the wall effectively becomes the diagonal member and makes the structure stiffer. It may be that the SE has already specified diagonal members in the steel frame in which case the wall is probably not needed to do the racking unless they have designed the cross braces to do half the racking strength work and the wall the other half - which I doubt.

Just saw on the BBC that there is a company looking to extract the lithium from old Cornish mine water! What is the generic name for a Cornish man / woman because that will be the prefix for Lithium from Cornwall.

Interesting Ian. I guess you don't need to worry about cold bridging so as long as you get the anchors well into the concrete core of the ICF that should do it.Do the three steel columns form a stand alone structure? (IE would it stand up without the walls or are the walls doing the racking work I wonder). If not stand alone then fixing might have to be done through two sides (at 90deg) so you have racking strength transferred to the steels in two plains.

+1 defo the SE patch. It can be done but just how much and what form of beefing up will be required will depend on where in the length the hole is going and the load profile at that point. Remember it is not just the load but also the deflection, which can produce high stresses in gusset plates and their fixings and the fire rating needed because that will have to be at least as good as the plain beam. You also do not have much meat around the hole to run strengthening through (((203-110)-60)/2) mm each side. You may need top and bottom strengthening as well. I presume you don't yet have the steel so it could be fabricated off-site because doing it on site will be a specialist job of the first order.

Can't help feeling that you may be overthinking this. If you seal the aqua board joints & fixings and then tile with grout sealer not sure why you need any more, it is not a swimming pool is it, although I suppose if you run hot water down the walls then you might get some condensation in the substrate somewhere which will need a way out.

Thanks all. @Pete Buttboard would work in most places but I like the thin batten idea from @Onoff although it does mean having extra batten's close in to the join so as to prevent and 800mm wide dip to fill.

I am about to start boarding out the garden room with dry lining board. In a couple if places the runs are greater than the 2 400mm and so I will have to form end on joints. The question is how to finish these joints using a dry lining approach. Side to side joins are easy because of the thinning of the board edges but when jointing end on no such provision is obvious so any tape will be quite proud and I am worried the joint will be visible. Any suggestions? Can you get boards with thinned edges all round?

In my world the contemporaneous note book is the bible, all the computer stuff is just that, stuff. The temporal, thought and associated decision based knowledge is all in the note book and hard coded along the time line by the dry ink on the pages. The idea being that you can follow your thinking and track the points at which decisions were made if there was ever a problem the note books got called in! EG on the 24th of October 2015 we agreed the budget for the kitchen and that is the figure in the spreadsheet. All in hard bound, I have created a large pallet load of them across my professional life. Still using it on the build but have augmented it with small moleskine notebooks I can have in my pocket around the site. All the non critical tracking is on the CAD systen including links to products, PDFs from engineers and architects, letters etc. The spreadsheet for costs, links to quote documents and invoices etc - All in a one drive folder so I can access it from anywhere, pintrest for images is about it although I gave a folder set in Gmail for the build where I link all the emails up.

Another approach is to get it mixed on site by a mixer truck that way you can control the mix as you go.

Just seen this thread - not good news. There may be a middle way for you here Ian. Why not move on but not let it drop. IE take the intellectual decision to stop the past affecting your future but at the same time just prod the claim along gently in the back ground without rancour as it is no longer a problem for you but you might be successful in getting a result and inadvertently help others using this technology. Looking through it all DURASOL have a problem at the bottom of this because their advice is just wrong and very plain to see. Just saying the build should have used common sense is not a defence, your builder was actually following their advice by the sounds of it, if the advice he was given by DURASOL is as it appears on their website. There is not, for instance, associated footnote that indicates there are any limits to this claim that there is no need to support them. If the DURASOL advice now changes then your case is strengthened if it does not change the DURASOL will now be liable for any incidents and were any incidents to result in death of injury then things could get very nasty for them - nobody wants that. Move on an plan a strategy to follow it up off-line by showing all the parties that there is a problem here that has cost you money and you intend not to let it drop.

Talk to a mortgage professional before you make any decisions such as giving up your offset facility you never know what's out there.

In theory this should not be a problem that cannot be solved provided you achieve two things and one risk item does not crystalise: The plot will need to have a value in excess of the mortgage, by a significant margin - lenders will have appetites here from about 70% loan to value down. This just means that the plot is significantly more valuable than the cost of the build. However this is as the plot stands because: Any building / preparation work you are likely to do must not devalue the plot below the appetite threshold with a margin in hand the lender is likely to set. The risk item is that lenders might not see this as a 'domestic' proposition and want you to take a commercial mortgage - fewer rules around repossession should you default, particularly if you have another domestic mortgage somewhere else. Mortgage broker is the way forward, but push for what you want and don't get managed into the box they have ready for you!

"Great service full refund when quoted saw depth and brand wrong on web." 71 chars.