jack

Ha, nice one!

Looking very smart. Shame about the lack of dog silhouette.

Google "brick fence holes" - few ideas there. Examples: http://taradillard.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/orchard-wall-gate.html https://www.dreamstime.com/stock-image-brick-wall-pattern-red-bricks-newly-constructed-building-image31530001 http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/1112795

Welcome Archer (sploosh!)

We clearly got a bargain then! From memory, our 9 x 10m bungalow cost around £6000 to knock down and take away in late 2014 (Hampshire/Surrey borders). That was the lowest price by some way - I think most quotes were £8-10k. They didn't do the best job, in that there were a few bits of rubble that weren't cleared away, and some paths were left that arguably should have been cleared. Took the groundworks guy about an hour in his massive digger to sort it, so no biggie.

Good weightlifting coaches will tell you that injuries happen more often in real life than in the gym, even though the real-world weights that do the damage are typically much lower than will be lifted safely at the gym. It's partly a lack of attention, partly a lack of respect given that you're used to moving massively heavier things around without injury at the gym, and partly the fact that the real world doesn't always have knurled grips at a convenient position. As an example, I tweaked my back last year lifting a not particularly heavy bit of aluminium extrusion for our balconies. It was probably less than 15kg, but my back was already tired from having moved things around for the previous three hours, and I didn't think before twisting and lifting. At the time, my deadlift in the controlled environment of the gym was well over 100kg more than the weight that got me... Perhaps rather than treating these as numbers never to exceed, think of them as numbers to have a think about, and guidelines for where we're relatively strong, positionally.

The double kitchen run is about 9m, from memory. There are a couple of others (bedroom supply) that are around 10-12m, and they're single duct. From memory, my ducting has a slightly larger cross-sectional area than the stuff most on here are using. That might explain the relatively low number of double runs in my layout.

I believe doubling up is only needed (if it's needed at all) where the run is particularly long and/or the room has high extract rates. The only double on our house is one of the two kitchen extracts.

It isn't even high enough up the list to get a number at ours!!!

Your garage door is as dirty as ours!

Are these raft foundations?

I knew we'd moved away from coal but that's a startling graph.

Agree - labour is either zero rated at time of supply or you're stuck with it.

Doing that well is harder than it looks!

Think he's talking about what he's in the middle of doing!

I assume that the other requirements relate to the "sealed bids" approach to selling. There's no point taking the highest bid if it turns out down the line that the bidder was just tyre-kicking. I assume they want sealed bids because there's a lot of interest in the land. I suppose in that case the argument is that the pool of potential buyers is smaller, but those that have bid will all be serious and can proceed.

I was never in London around the time of the Troubles (and I suspect day to day it wasn't as bad as your experience), but I understand there was a similar stoicism involved there. I had exactly that conversation with someone today. Far more people die on the UK's roads every week than were killed in this attack. We just have this guttural reaction to events like this that the drip of "ordinary" deaths don't seem to involve. I supposed it's called "terrorism" for a reason.

I remember reading a report like this a couple of months ago. These attacks are more or less inevitable. I suspect we'd all be surprised at how many attacks get stopped before we hear about them. I (like everyone) struggle to understand the mentality. There were reports about chat on Isis social networks talking about the bombs that killed children in Mosul being returned to Britain. So if it's wrong to kill innocent children in Mosul, surely it's wrong to kill innocent children in Britain? I'm not even sure that these people are evil in the true sense of the word. I assume they're not psychopaths, but actually genuinely believe that what they are doing is right. I'd be very interested to know the mental state of someone right before they did this. What are they thinking as they walk into a crowd of smiling, happy families, knowing they're about to end their own life and bring years of darkness and pain to the lives of so many others. Do they feel stressed? Excited? Guilty?

Welcome David. Hope today's sunny for you as well

Snap!

Continued: - Not putting heating the bathrooms. Not quite a disaster, but even with passivhaus levels of insulation, the bathrooms are a little chillier than desirable in winter. - Didn't think hard enough about level access. Solvable, but would have been a LOT easier if we'd sorted it earlier. - Same with the garage - really didn't give enough thought to how we were going to manage the access ramp into the garage. More to follow, for sure...

There aren't enough gigs of storage on the server for me to list them all, but some include: - assumed that external blinds would provide 100% darkness, so didn't allow for internal window coverings. They provide nothing of the sort, so everyone is presently getting woken very early by light leakage. Had I known this I've had built in recesses for proper light-proof window coverings. - didn't put in writing some things that I should have, which came back to bite me on the bum when it became my word against the other guy (I actually think he genuinely remembered it differently to me, but one thing I do have is a reliable memory for conversations, so he was definitely in the wrong). - specified in greater detail what level of finish I expected from trades. According to at least some trades we've had onsite, my idea of basic, workmanlike quality" is "perfection that no human being (or at least English tradesperson) can achieve". I think it just shows how poor many people are at their trades. - I carefully measured up all the window apertures once the frame was up, then proceeded to not get around to comparing them to the plans. Some were slightly short, and that triggered the biggest nightmare of the build (as we all know from watching Grand Designs, it's always the windows that cause the problems!) - kept putting off difficult decisions, which often meant making the decision at crunch time, while under stress (possibly even stress related to something unrelated). Also meant we sometimes paid over the odds for materials, because we didn't plan them far enough in advance. I could go on (and on, etc). I suspect that other people will have different issues. The ones I had above are largely related to my own personal weaknesses as a human, which include a dislike of confrontation, an intense dislike of telling people what to do (you really need to learn how to do this - I'm certainly better than I was as a result of the experience), and problems with making big decisions. I recommend examining your own weaknesses and seeing where you think they might get you into trouble!

That's an very aggressive price, even with you doing a lot yourself.

Designing a house before you have the plot is somewhat putting the cart before the horse. What if north is to the top left and you have all the glazing facing that direction? What if the plot is wide but you won't be able to build deep? I think it's great to work on what you want/need, but until you have the plot, it's probably premature to go too far down into the detailed design. Having said that, in terms of scale and relative positions of rooms, your layout is startlingly similar to what we built in 2015 in Surrey (ours is a mirror version of this). If you get to the point where building this is a reality, I'd be happy to share our own experiences in living with this layout.

If the internal humidity is similar to what you expect it to be long term, then I imagine this would help.