Crofter

Does your worktop anywhere back onto an internal wall? You could then steal some space from the other side and have a roller door to hide the extra appliances.

Have had a Lenovo for a couple of years now. No frills and pretty sturdy. As used on the International Space Station! Mine was £200 from Gigarefurb and it's been one of my better buys.

Didn't @Stones mix and match oak and oiled pine on his stairs, to good effect? Depends on how fussy you are going to be. I'm quite glad that I made the decision to go with painted MDF skirts/arcs, and painted pine for the liners. Filler and paint can hide a multitude of sins and it's massively easier and cheaper.

Blimey, I think I would have gone to Wickes and spent £20 on a new door!!

Make up your lining and assemble the three pieces, leaving the jambs over long. Header should be measured to give an opening at least 4mm wider than the door. Tack a bit of batten across the top of the roughed out opening, rest your door against this with something to prop it up. Shim up the bottom of the door to give the desired clearance to the floor, and to bring it level. The brand new door should be perfectly square- mine were anyway. Lift the lining into place around the door. Determine how much you need to chop off the jamb on each side, and cut to size. Install the liner into the rough opening using packers as required to maintain the desired gap all around. Ideally you can fix it using screws which will be hidden underneath the stops. You probably knew half of that already

I found it was a lot easier to build the lining around the door than to make the door fit the lining. And don't skimp on the gaps. For hinge spacing, maybe just copy whatever other doors are in the house.

Let's say you can get energy at 2p/kwh in China. Let's say that this is the only cost involved in a panel. So the people all work for free, in a factory that was built for free. The copper, silicon, aluminium, and glass are all free. The units are shipped around the world for free. Nobody at any stage extracts any profit or takes any overheads. This same panel is sold at cost for 60p/w which is not far from the current wholesale rate. The panel would have to operate at rated output for 30,000 hours to claw back its production cost. At an average of 8 hours a day, this is just over ten years. Most panels are capable of lasting longer than that. So can we put this whole thing to bed, please? Even with the scales stacked completely against them, PV panels are still quite clearly energy positive over their lifespan.

Good post and analysis. Similarly, wind turbines can repay themselves in under a year- depending on site conditions etc.

My corrugated iron worked out about £10/m2, for the heaviest grade of sheeting with the most durable coating, inc all flashings and fixings. If you go for thinner sheets with a galv finish, and no fixings or flashings, it's about £5/m2.

They're the ones who I've got a quote from! Yes their 3G looks decent. If push came to shove I could hire a van and road trip it, but hopefully there's a better option than that.

Anyone...? I'm finding the whole budget windows thing a bit of a chore after my dealings with the higher end of the market. Hardly anybody talks about u-values, and it's pretty hard to convert a WER rating to something more meaningful. Lots of companies only do A rated as their top spec, and I've already determined that I should be aiming for A++, at least on the north and east elevations. Got a good quote back from a company 600 miles away, who won't deliver... would be great to get suggestions for any options closer to home. I'm tempted to give Russel Timber Tech in Glasgow a go, although it might look a bit odd to mix timber and uPVC on the same house.

It's not planning you need to speak to, it's building control. You don't need the building to break apart- just if it does, it must be in no more than two sections. According to my LA BCO, it needn't be road transportable either- movable around its own site is sufficient. In fact according to the case law, it can be boxed into a tight spot where no crane could ever access it, and still count as a portable building. The quality of being portable is inherent to the building itself and not dependent on its surroundings. Measurements, to the best of my knowledge, are from the outside face of the exterior walls, and do not count gutters. I'm not 100% sure whether a soffet overhang counts though.

Having finished the new build I am finally turning my attention to our own house, which is a 1970s bungalow. Some of the windows are the original timber framed single glazed units, and some have been replaced with what appear to be medium quality DG uPVC. I'm looking to buy (supply only- I can fit them myself) windows to replace the old SG ones. They'll need to visually match the other replacements to a certain extent, although they are on different elevations and in different rooms so an exact match isn't necessary. On the new house I went all out for 3G alu-clad, but I'm on a much tighter budget this time around. The obvious solution is to pick up the phone to the local BM and get something from them (JeldWen?)- but is there anything else out there that I should know about?

Ah, good thinking. It says 3-4hr working time so something doesn't add up. Probably need to spend a bit more!

Thinking of getting a couple of rechargeable LED site lights- this sort of thing: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/10W-Portable-White-LED-Hi-Power-Slim-Work-Light-Rechargeable-Flood-Light-Camping/122988142303?hash=item1ca2aa1edf:m:mV7kj6vuCv6lhnkthQkW6Ew:rk:3:pf:0 Sealey seem to sell similar things at three times the price. I'd only need battery life of 2-3hrs to let me get a few jobs done in the evenings. Reasonably weather-proof would be useful. Might be operating a chainsaw using these so would want pretty decent light- thinking I should get a pair to reduce shadows. Anybody got real life experience of these things?

Those little Burley stoves are extremely efficient and have a flue temperature of less than 150degC, so the twin-wall section of flue is never going to feel dangerously warm. Of course the regs are all written with the worst case scenario in mind, where creosote build-up leads to a 1200degC chimney fire and a glowing red flue.

I used cement board instead of plasterboard behind the stove, and the service void acts as the required air gap. Being a little paranoid, I was worried that the airtightness/vapour membrane might at some point in the future sag and risk touching the back of the cement board, so I installed a second layer of cement board inside the service void as well- this ensures that the 12mm air gap will not be compromised.

Well it's pretty much the whole point of passive house design. There is a great deal of 'waste' heat given off by your hot water system, as well as fridges, and even the occupants of the house. So the idea is that you insulate the house to the point where it only needs this background heat input to achieve an appropriate temperature. There's also solar gain to consider. It's not MVHR as such that allows this- it's more down to the level of insulation, and not having oodles of windows (even the best windows lose heat at three times the rate of a standard wall).

I used JJI joists and yes they are a bit more expensive than a solid timber joist. From memory I would have spent around £25 on each joist in solid timber, and £36 for JJI. So the total extra cost over my build was around £165 (it's a small house, only 15 joists were needed!). The advantages are several. Much much easier to work with- I installed them all singlehanded as they were so light. Every single one was perfectly straight. Thermal bridging greatly reduced. They use less timber overall so are probably a more ecologically sound option. I don't have any experience of posi-joists, but I imagine they offer similar advantages.

I put a lot of research into my membrane choice- everything is there on the BBA certs fr tear strength etc. Ended up using Cromar Pro Vent 3 on the roof, it seemed good value for money given the specs, and it lasted very well exposed for many months on a fairly exposed site.

I had my membranes exposed for longer than most people (not quite as long yours though) and whilst the roof remained perfectly watertight and undamaged, the wall membrane at the SW corner suffered some rips and tears. After advice on here I put a patch of new membrane over the top, as there didn't seem to be any downsides to having multiple layers.

I had the same headache, ended up buying dressed all round timber and cutting out my own joints with a circ saw and chisel. Worth hand picking your timber at the BM to avoid anything badly twisted. When sizing the liner, the rule of thumb I was told was that you should be able to fit a 2p coin all the way around the sides and top. One essential thing to have to hand is a pack of plastic spacers in 1mm increments- these let you pack out the liner precisely. I didn't cut the doors down at all and propped them up in the doorway, building the liner around them. This ensured that everything was square. I screwed the linings and then filled the holes left by the heads. Primed and painted all skirts, arcs, liners and stops. The walls are all white so the pale blue painted skirts/arcs are a nice feature that gives necessary character. It's also so much easier and cheaper this way.

12m is a pretty big span. Playing around with the interactive span calculator on the JJI website (https://www.jamesjones.co.uk/interactive-span-table) shows that you can only go up to 8m span, and that requires 450 deep joists at only 300 centres. Unless you have a completely open first floor it will almost certainly be worth having a supporting wall.

With windows, I found the savings are to be made by keeping things simple. So go for big panes, not lots of little ones, and have them fixed where possible. Incidentally the bigger panes lose proportionately less heat than a bunch of smaller panes in the same frame. Other tips- source your own fittings where possible. I was shocked at what sparkies and plumbers are charging for fittings, despite them supposedly getting a good deal on their trade accounts. It might be worth checking with them beforehand that they are happy with the quality, just in case. You can also get good deals by being ruthless about pursuing low prices. There seems to be two different worlds out there- you get the people selling to the Grand Designs, Homebuilding and Renovating crowd, and then you get people selling on eBay/Amazon etc. I went online for my bathroom and the whole thing came in well under £1000. A posh high street design studio wanted to charge me double that just for the walk in shower enclosure alone.

I don't have the full breakdown as it's on my old laptop, but rough figures from memory are: - Fees £1200 (planning, building warrant, road crossing, road opening) - Access £5000 (plant hire and several lorry loads of stone) - Drainage £6500 (Puraflo system, septic tank, soakaway) - Services £3000 (water and e;ectricity- no phone line) - Foundations £700 - Structural timber work £4000 (cost to build the shell inc sheathing on walls and roof) - Roofing £1200 (corrugated iron) - Cladding £1000 (larch) - Windows £4500 (3G aluclad) - Bathroom £800 - Kitchen £2000 That lot adds up to about £30k- there was another £10k on the stuff I can't remember off hand, such as plumbing, wiring, plasterboard, joinery, flooring. I've not included the furniture or furnishings. If the site had been easier to develop, with services already in place, then the project would have cost under £600/m2