Crofter

Presumably far more expensive too!

If it's already on, don't paint it. As the wood expands and contracts you'll end up with little lines at the joins.

Yup I'd expect the colour to be a planning condition. Otherwise you could paint it bright pink. Or add a flag of your choice. Etc.

Does that mean stainless? That's the advice I followed on my larch and it still looks good nearly ten years on.

Having seen the view including the gable, definitely go for the natural wood colour. I'm surprised this isn't a planning condition though?

I would use blocks of PIR offcuts to get that 50mm standoff, and cut your slabs approx 5-10mm undersize, then use low expansion foam applied with a proper gun, to fill the gaps and hold in place. I don't see how you could guarantee the 50mm gap if you were filing with any sort of wool. And the u value would be a lot worse.

Welcome aboard!

Interesting. Did the trusses at either end of the ridge beam need to be doubled up?

Good progress. How is your roof constructed? It looks like it's neither trusses nor a cut roof with ridge and rafters.

You've gone up in the world! I'm in the States at the moment where the choice is either watery insipid light lagers, or ridiculously over-hopped hipster IPA.

Nice to see you back on here. I always just use a trowel to mix small batches, or a shovel in a barrow for bigger ones. I don't think the mixing is as critical with mortar as it is with plaster, just give it a good shoogle round until it's homogenous and you can't see any cement or sand on its own . I don't see any reason why a paddle wouldn't work though.

Interesting, thanks. So it looks like I don't have to reinvent the wheel here. Quite a lot to get my head round. That's tonight's bedtime reading sorted...

We've got a couple of properties, one used solely for holiday lets, the other is our primary residence but used for holiday lets when we're not in it ourselves. I'd like to fit both properties with EV chargers. We expect our next vehicle to be electric, and obviously over the coming years it will be advantageous to our bookings to be able to offer charging. Question is- how should I go about this? I don't really want to just fork out for two chargers and then watch my bills go up as people use them for free. There's no great incentive for me to do that. So the two questions are: 1- can I install a charger and be able to bill the user for the electricity they use? 2- is there any sort of funding available to make this whole project more attractive?

I was 37 and working as a fish farmer during our previous build. Doing the house felt like a holiday compared to my job 😂 I'll be ten years older and a coming from a more sedentary lifestyle during the next one. I expect it's going to feel a lot harder!

Yes, that was one of his election pledges wasn't it? I'm amazed that he has any politically credibility whatsoever after reneging on that. The Tories actually proposed this many years ago, and it struck me as a very sensible and progressive thing to do. I suppose I'm politically a bit of a utilitarian- the greatest happiness for the greatest number. A family's annual holiday in the sun means a lot more to them than some rich person's fifth such trip that year. Obviously the idea never made it anywhere near being a manifesto pledge, let alone a law. France have the right idea with their switch to trains for all travel under two hours. But then again they have a functioning rail system, not a privatised mess like us.

According to the book I linked earlier, globally we produce enough calories to feed the whole population twice over. We waste a large amount of that food, and we feed a lot of it to animals and then rest the animals. The conversion factor makes the efficiency of an open fire look like cutting edge technology.

We don't have to just tackle one problem at a time. No need to leave things until 'after' we've sorted something else. By the way, food waste is a big problem in the developing world too, not because of picky consumers, but because of poor access to good quality handling, transport, and storage infrastructure.

We thought everything would be cheap here too, but it really isn't. Fuel is quite cheap- we pay $4/gal which is just under $1/litre, not sure what the current price is in the UK. Food *can* be cheap but only if you buy the lowest quality, and you really have to shop around. Eating out is hugely expensive even before the obligatory tip. I don't what it costs to own and run a house here, but the houses are massive. A friend was gobsmacked when I said we'd built a 450ft² house. Even our 'big' house, about 1000ft², was a quarter the size of his. Peering in the windows of estate agents I have yet to see anything under 2500ft², and that's for a two bedroom flat. They're way behind the curve on EVs too- about 10% of new car sales. Compare that with the UK at nearly 30% or China at 50%. Sadly with the fuel and solar prices the way they are there's simply no financial incentive.

I'm currently in the US and I've been struck by how little domestic PV there is. Whole streets of brand new houses and not a panel in sight. They're also far behind us with offshore wind. There's a few turbines in New England and people are misplacing their excrement over it. They don't seem to be aware that the rest of the world has thousands of these turbines already. Trump has called a halt to an 80% finished project which will have interesting legal repercussions. There are fleets of huge construction vessels now sitting idle. It's pretty crazy.

Just picking up on this point specifically, it's a good example of why any meaningful discussion needs to include numbers and not really on intuition. The transport thing comes in to food as well. We think it's better to eat locally produced food because it's not been transported half way round the world. But this is almost always wrong. A tiny proportion of our food travels by air, which is very bad. But the overwhelming majority travels by sea, which is very economical, and much better in terms of emissions and land use than trying to grow the same stuff out of season or in the wrong climate.

You might find this interesting: https://edconway.substack.com/p/why-does-britain-export-80-of-its Looking at the article you linked (an article on the oil industry written by Leake- very drol) it seems that the estimate of oil reserves is AI derived, which makes me a little suspicious. And I don't know whether it fully accounts for the different grades of crude, the efforts needed to extract them, and the value of them to various industries. My own take on drill vs import is that if we leave it in the ground for now, it's likely to be worth more in the future. Even after we've stopped using oil for our primary electricity and land transport energy source, we'll still need it for plastics, chemicals, and almost certainly aviation.

It's really just a question of aesthetics, but I don't like the idea of using different plank directions on the same floor of the house.

No, not them. Their response and behaviour is largely responsible for the turning of public opinion against covid measures. An unforgivable dereliction of duty. Go and take your theories to the doctors, nurses, pharmacists who had to work through covid. Same here. I was working at slightly above minimum wage doing manual labour in the food production industry. I was deemed to be an essential worker and literally nothing changed at all.

This was all kicked off by the statement that 'many conspiracy theories have been proven to be true'. We're still waiting to see which ones those are. If it's only true in the minds of those who mistrust the official line, then it's still a conspiracy theory. (By the way, if you go back in history a few decades, you will actually find a few examples, like the Tuskegee syphilis study.) If you aren't trying to prove the point that many conspiracy theories have been proven to be true, then you're just having a rant about covid measures, and that's way off topic for both this discussion and this forum in general.

This is clearly a subject where you hold a strongly held belief, and I'm not going to try to change your mind. It's also got nothing to do with the original subject. Or with building houses. You raised covid as an example of when conspiracy theories have been proven correct. But it's not a good example because whilst you and others believe in things like the lab leak theory etc, it is not the accepted version of events. You are highlighting examples of change in policy, confusion, and negative impacts of certain measures, but again none of these is an example of a conspiracy theory being be definitively proven correct and accepted.