Crofter

Plenty food for thought there, thanks. I do have a very local sparkie (as in a few doors away) but he seems plenty busy. No harm asking. On the legal aspects, I had assumed that SSE would come along and install the meter and then go away again- and they would have no knowledge or particular interest in my CU and wiring. Happy to be corrected on this but curious about what sort of enforcement system would apply. I don't have a supply in the house quite yet- the cable has been taken to just outside and a duct installed, so now what I am wind and watertight I could get them back to finish it any time really. I hope I haven't jumped the gun, but I already bought a reel of 2.5mm T&E and one of 1.5mm, with the intention of using this for the sockets and lights respectively. Obviously the kitchen appliances, water heater, and shower will need something else. These higher power circuits are all going to be along one wall so I could leave that unboarded maybe? I consider myself competent enough to do the sockets and lights as I've done that sort of thing before, but I'm more reluctant to get involved with the other stuff. @ProDave what can I do to tempt you over to Skye... a free weekend break in a partially finished luxury self catering? Complete with a lovely Burley stove which as we both know is the connoisseur's choice of stove

Useful as fairing boards for sanding down things like car bodywork, boat hulls etc.

I should preface this by saying that my build is exempt from building control/regulations so in legal terms I have free rein. Hence my question is really about what is practical, achievable, and advisable. If time was not an issue, I would do loads of research and aim to wire in everything myself, no doubt with the aid of a heap of questions on Buildhub. But the fact is I need to get a shift on and get my project finished in the next few weeks- or at the very latest, by about June. What I am considering is to position the wires themselves in the service cavity, and quite possibly do the connections at the sockets and other fittings, but leave the whole CU side of things to someone who knows what they're doing. What I'm wondering is if this will prove a hard sell and no sparkie will touch my project with a bargepole. I expect that my explanations of being building regs exempt will fall on deaf ears, as it has done with almost every trade I've talked to so far.

Surely these high temp devices create lots of particulate air pollution

I wonder to what extent the stainless mesh fitted to my stove will alleviate particulate pollution- it is described as a soot catcher and is designed to burn off small airborne particles. One of the reasons my stove is rated at 89% efficiency, compared to less than 80% for most good stoves. Another consider that comes to mind, that might explain people's reluctance to accept the arguments against stoves, is that burning wood is as old as Homo Sapiens itself. Is there something about the higher temperatures reached in stoves that makes their emissions worse than what we have endured for the preceding millenia? Or is it just that for the last fifty years or so we have had cleaner alternatives?

One odd thing I noticed in the article is that they claim that wood that is too dry (below 20% MC) causes more pollution. I'm not saying this is wrong, but I would very much like to understand the mechanism involved. Also, there is room for education on correct use of stoves- I know people who insist on sitting with the stove door open, people who try to burn green wood ("it's OK if you use some coal too!") and, most commonly, people trying to keep their stove smouldering away at a low heat overnight. An extremely messy and polluting way to avoid having to relight it the next day.

You have to be careful about what your starting assumptions are. The article seems to be from the point of view that everybody should be on gas heating and the trend for stoves is simply a lifestyle choice. However my experience is that there are still far too many people burning peat and coal on open fires. This is probably a geographical thing. The inefficiency of an open fire horrifies me and IMHO they should be banned. So I find it hard to get aboard the 'anti stove' bandwagon.

I once bought a 'Yardmaster' metal garage, because I had just moved house and needed the space ASAP. Utter load of rubbish. It would cost about the same in materials to build one, but I'd have ended up with a far better shed.

I researched a lot of different options on windows and doors and found similar costs to what you describe. Another significant factor was that the number of elements in a window has a bearing on cost, and of course it costs much more to have two small windows than one window of the equivalent size. Hand in hand with this is that smaller windows lose proportionally much more heat than big ones do. Now whenever I see a house with a row of several small windows, or a window broken up into several panes, where one large window would have done the job, I shake my head and wonder why anybody would have wanted to spend more money just to get a more interrupted view and worse U value. I was happily oblivious to this before!

That was via @iSelfBuild who was ordering his own windows at the same time, so not sure if it's a repeatable offer I'm afraid- you could try asking him though. And of course it was pre Brexit (he ordered then directly from Poland). French doors ought to be fairly economical, he did try to persuade me to go down that route at first but I didn't think it would have worked on my site due to lack of space and exposure to high winds.

Good discussion here:

Mine worked out about £360/m2 inc vat for a small order (about 11m2) in TG aluclad timber. The tilt/slide patio door was almost as much as everything else put together, though. The relatively simple kitchen and bathroom windows were really quite inexpensive.

I'll have to decide on this myself at some point. My floor is 16ft span suspended timber and has a bit of bounce in it already- probably inevitable unless I'd used much deeper joists. At the moment I'm thinking bonded floor (bamboo) with a flexible adhesive, incorporating electric UFH mats. Sounds expensive, though...

I never knew that- every day I find something about which to be grateful for my choice to avoid having to comply with building regs. I didn't like any of the front doors I could find- insufficient glazed area, and universally made in wood which I worried would be difficult to tie in with my rough sawn cladding. I ended up buying what was described as 'half a French door' which was TG alu clad to match my windows, maximum glazed area, far, far better U value than any of the front doors I considered, and was cheaper as well. I was left wondering why anybody would choose a conventional front door, and now I know

Think I missed this thread first time round, congratulations to you for seeing it through with the planners. They can be a contrary bunch. One of my childhood memories from my parents' self build was of driving around the local area to take photos of houses containing all the features the planners had said we couldn't have, because they were out of keeping with the vernacular.

Hi and welcome to the forum. Harris is indeed lovely, as you'll already know. Some of the best beaches anywhere. You're not far at all from me- I'm in Skye. I'm sure you'll have lots of fun organising haulage etc

Because the MVHR ducting is the best ventilated part of the whole house!

We went for the old trick of having a baby half way through the build. Now I grab every chance going for a bit of shut eye.

That's a slightly different aspect of the detailing but a very useful one, thanks. I used black Siga Wigluv tape to seal the join between the window and the frame, and the reveal boards should hide that. Te plan had been to run a bead of sealant but the PVC strip seems quite interesting.

Thanks chaps! Google image searches had suggested keeping boards intact, and I was starting to wonder if I should have thought of this way back when I drew up the positions of the opening! But I do tend to over think things...

Hope to crack on with some of the wall cladding this week. 100mm wide vertical boards at 150mm centres, with a second layer of the same on top to close the gaps. All pretty standard stuff. Question is- when I get to an opening, and it inevitably doesn't exactly hit the edge of a board, do I stick to the pattern and just rip the board down to the necessary width? And if it's a window, I would have to just take a chunk out of it. Seems a bit of a faff and a good way to expose end grain. Or, alternatively, do I plan the spacings to be slightly over or under 150mm so that each opening is met with a full width board? Makes marking out tedious. I don't know if anybody would see the slight difference in spacing, it would only be a few mm. @Tennentslager what did you do?

Guess it was too subtle for me when you first posted it

Bumping this as I'm about to install the flue and flashing. The Dektite flashing didn't come with a fixings kit- I wonder if I can use some of the 'stitch' screws that came with my roofing, to fix it to the metal? They are self cutting and have sealing washers. Not sure how much of a bite they will get into a single thickness of the roofing sheet though.

I went to pick my backer board up from the BM last week. The guys in the yard had absolutely no clue what I was asking for, despite the office having sold me it and given me a ticket. Eventually had to get the manager to dig it out from a hidden hidey hole. So, yeah, they obviously don't sell very much of it! I am tempted to use backer board in the shower enclosure itself, but irritatingly the sizes it comes in (800mm wide boards) don't tie with my stud centres. Plasterboard would be easier and cheaper...

Unfortunately the best views are to the north/ north west (over the Minch to Harris). In the other direction, to the south, you're looking out over the village and on to a wind farm- so there are no windows looking in that direction! The topography of the site also plays a part- if I had built the house the other way round it would have had the long axis running down the slope, so the piers would have had to twice the height. And I seriously doubt I would have got planning for it.