Crofter

8t is a small lorry. I buy aggregate in either 20t or 13t loads, in either case it's a non-artic tipper lorry. What about collecting directly from the quarry with a smaller vehicle? You'd need a decent 4x4 and heavy duty trailer to make it worthwhile, but you'd get a very cheap quarry-gate price and have manageable load sizes. You might even find that you can turn up with bulk bags and get them to fill them and lift them onto your trailer.

Just caught up with this thread. We're having a walk in shower with a fixed screen- nominally 1600x900, although I might end up going for 1600x800 depending on prices/availability of the bits. SWMBO is of the opinion that you *must* have a remote mixer for the shower in this situation, as otherwise you risk getting your hand hot/cold/wet as you reach in to turn it on. I've been showing her plenty of pictures in catalogues where an exposed mixer is mounted underneath the riser rail, and I'm not convinced that it's necessarily an issue- won't there already be a TMV on the UVC, removing the risk of scalds? My main objection to having the mixer fitted remotely is that I only have a 25mm service cavity, and I think this means that I cannot go for a concealed unit. Obviously there are ways around this: - box out the whole 1600 long wall of the shower, to create a bigger space - fit a longer output hose and have this dangling between the mixer and riser (ugly!) - route the output back into the wall from an exposed mixer (a little ugly) - find an exposed mixer designed for the task, with all three connections on the back (doesn't exist?) The third option seems by far the least bad. But simply mounting a bar mixer under the rise remains considerably easier.

Yep I've been reading some reviews and soak.com don't come out all that well. But they do have the advantage of stocking something I actually like, at a very good price. I'm probably getting overly fussy, but what I'm hoping to find is a set with an overhanging basin, rather than a stepped out unit. Just looks neater, IMO. Most of the bad reviews I've read are around long waits for delivery, or long delays in getting items replaced after transit damage. Fortunately I'm not yet at the stage where I would be held up by this, unlike the irate reviewers complaining that they had ripped out their only WC and ordered a 'next day' replacement, only to find themselves waiting weeks with presumably crossed legs until the new one turned up.

Inching closer to a decision... has anybody used soak.com before? I like the look of some of their stuff and it has a ten year guarantee. I'd love to get an integral moulded worktop/basin, for ease of cleaning, but cannot get the combination to come in at under £600 by the time you add all the bits and delivery costs. If I forgo that requirement I can drop the price to c.£250.

I'd echo what others have said about sheer weight not being the biggest factor. I installed a 240kg sliding triple glazed door entirely singlehandedly without incident, but took a lot of time over it. In contrast, doing the roof on my own left me walking like John Wayne for a few days because the awkward positions in which I had to work took their toll on various joints. Whilst we may laugh at H&S advice, I think it is valuable to have some numbers available to inform decisions about what we consider acceptable loads. Without this, all we have to rely on is bravado, and that generally won't end well.

@Russell griffiths I know exactly where you're coming from! I designed and have built my house myself, literally, and there was a lot of research to work out exactly what was needed. I must have done something right because my estimated cost is within a few hundred pounds of my actual spend. I'm going to go a bit over budget, but that's mostly due to feature creep, going for higher end fittings etc. I'm afraid I can't really help with where to find a detailed list, though- I just built my house in Sketchup and then worked it all out. It was really helpful to speak to tradesmen, mostly in my case just neighbours or friends who stopped in for a chat. My sparky was also very helpful and his input made me realise how easy it would be to forget bits of the installation. For instance, I'd thought about where I wanted lights, but hadn't given any thought to where I wanted the switches to go! He rattled off a plan in about half an hour, whereas I would probably have been scratching my head and agonising over every decision for days.

SIPs are maybe a bit under-represented on the forum. We've got lots of people on here who've chosen timber frame, brick and block, ICF, etc. The advantages that people generally espouse for SIPs are speed of build and, if designed correctly, elimination of thermal bridges. The latter can be met with any decent build method. How important is speed to you? SIPs will need access for large vehicles to handle and lift the panels, whereas a stick build could be done anywhere that you can walk to.

By way of update, I am now committed down the Bosch route- if I want everything to match, that is! Picked up a couple of bargains (oven and hood) on Gumtree. Oven is a couple of years old, looks brand new, and the (glass) hood is still in the packaging. £110 total spend so far. Holding out for a matching hob if possible now. My £2k kitchen budget suddenly looks much more achievable

I can't find the quote/invoice but it was about £35 per joist, mine were 300mm depth and 4.8m long.

I have used them, they were supplied from a place near Inverness. I don't think I had any other choice, though.

That sounds like handy stuff. At that price, does it come with cut edges, needing turned back and sewn? By the way, I think my boat's cockpit cover is made of this kind of stuff. It got a hole in it recently and the self adhesive repair patch lasted about two days. I then tried a PVC dinghy repair kit and that's done a great job. Just in case you get a hole in yours...

Fitting PIR into a timber frame is a right pain, because as you have found the sizes don't match! Timber will be nominally 4" but actually be regularised to 95mm, and then your 100mm PIR cannot fit. The other thing that makes it a pain is the tedious gap filling with expanding foam around the edge of every board. You only need to leave a few gaps to cause significant drop off in performance. If you have a contractor local to you, consider blown in cellulose insulation instead. The on-paper performance isn't as good but it will totally fill the space, and may actually perform better in practice. Or switch to a glass/rock wool for the frame, which is what I did- but I had to overlay this with a layer of PIR to get good enough performance. This continuous layer had another advantage though because it cuts off the thermal bridging.

In theory you need an abstraction licence but in practice you'd likely be under the radar. I have a small burn in the garden and wouldn't want to use it for washing clothes in... at least not without some sort of filtration or treatment.

If you literally mean just one year... then pretty much anything will do. I've made a log store with a piece of 1200 gauge DPM as a roof, stapled on- a bit ugly, but it's surviving Skye weather surprisingly well.

You will need: - excavation down to firm subsoil. Very site dependent, but presumably your friend will have somewhere to put the spoil. Probably a day's work for a decent sized machine and dumper, plus on-site costs. At the rates I paid, that would be about £400. - import sub-base material and whacker it down. If you want a 100mm base, you're looking at about 40m3, or about 80t, which is going to cost about £2000 at the price I pay. Hopefully you're closer to a quarry and can get it for a lot less. - pour a 100mm slab of concrete, 40m3, that would cost me around £4,500 So far, that's around £7k. You'd almost certainly need rebar in there, not something I have had to price up personally. Plus labour for a pour of that size, unless you have lots of friends who owe you favours. The above spec is a bare minimum. You'd be fortunate if you found that you had good solid ground 200mm down, and a 100mm slab is probably insufficient to support anything other than very light loads. It would at least need localised thicker sections to support the steel frame. Will be interesting to see just how high my local prices are compared to other forumites...

When I costed up my project, I used Wickes online prices for convenience on all applicable items, pulled other prices off website (e..g instant online quotes for roofing sheets) and phoned the BM for the rest. Interestingly, my budget has ended up within a few hundred pounds of that original estimate. Partly luck, of course, but also because the things that inevitably crept up in price were offset by the value of shopping around when the time came to buy. For example, when I did my bulk purchase of the timber and sheets for the framing, I had estimated about £1500 but it came in at just shy of £1000, because it was a big enough order that I could get three or four BMs interested and haggle the price right down. If I were to build again, I would be bolder with bulk buying and try to get everything at the start. You get a much better reception when you are talking bigger money. You then run the risk of timber warping in storage, sheeting getting rained on, miscalculations in materials, etc- all reasons why I didn't initially do it that way.

Nice Sketchup work, @Kuro507 It's a lot of fun playing around with different ideas. Why not set yourself a few challenges: what would I build if I was constrained by X, or Y. What if it had to be a bungalow, what if it was overlooked on a side, what if the plot was very narrow. I've got to ask though- why are you determined not to use an architect? Admittedly I didn't use one myself, but my project is very small scale and I figured there was only so much that could really be changed about the layout. I then went and totally changed the layout a few weeks ago, just as I was starting to do the internal partitions

And is that inlet duct ventilated insulated?

That crossed my mind too. The ones that @Stones posted about in his blog are only 15mm deep. I haven't checked to see if there are IP rated versions, though.

Horrible new to wake up to. Thoughts are with everybody involved.

Just wondering what the effect would be if you simply passively ventilated the cold space. It should really be either part of the heated envelope, or not. Maybe fit some kind of ventilation that can be opened or shut depending on needs. In my own house, my rather low tech solution is that I have a skylight that I can open or close.

Sorry for my ignorance but where is your vapour barrier- in the roof, or the ceiling? Or one each?

Could you fit a fire hood, tape the VCL to that, and just fill the space above/around it with expanding foam? Would save a lot of faffing around building little boxes from PB.

Some good ideas there, thanks. I think I can rule out widening the beam, which saves me a wee job.

That's what the sparky said... I'm just not convinced it would look right! I've probably got too frigid a picture of what I think it should look like in my head. Off to do some Google image searching...