jack

The issue here, as I understand it, is that having the pumping company supply may not work. The question is therefore whether it's possible to have the pump supplied separately and still zero rate it. @Vijay, is there any reason the concrete company can't just hire the pump themselves (using the pump people you've spoken to) and roll up the cost into their invoice?

On pots and pans for induction, we bought this set from John Lewis just over a year ago. I've just written a review (which may not appear for a bit apparently) on the JL website, but short version is that the exposed aluminium along the top edge of all the saucepans appears to have eroded, possibly due to the dishwasher. The result is a pair of thin stainless steel edges sticking up. The inner one is very thin, so is very sharp - so sharp that it cleanly sliced off a layer of skin the other night while I was wiping it out! It's out of stock online at the moment, but I'd caution against buying this set in-store or if it becomes available online again.

Is the way around this to characterise the situation on the invoice as paying a company to pump concrete? You then aren't hiring anything - they are using their own plant to perform a building service as contracted.

Did you see this thread: Your problem might be something similar. We have the same problem with some corn bulbs (a term I hadn't seen before!) in our hallway, which I hope, one day, to get around to looking at.

I agree with @Ferdinand Even informally approaching the tree officer in my local council would likely result in immediate protection orders being placed on whatever you're enquiring about! They slapped TPOs on all the trees in my front garden when another potential buyer enquired about the tree situation before we bought the house. We later learned that none of the trees is of sufficient quality for a TPO to be appropriate. As it happened, we didn't need (or indeed want) to take them down, but if we had, and there hadn't been TPOs in place, talking to the tree guy at the council could well have started a long and potentially costly battle. Also, if you get a decent local tree dude/dudette, they'll have experience with the council and know how best to approach what you want to do. The guy we ended up using when we needed to trim a tree with a TPO on it was excellent.

It's possible.

I've been to many car shows and never bought a new car, so I guess not. What am I doing wrong!?

I hate it when that happens!

If you're already having UFH, perhaps just wire for a towel rail but don't install it unless you find you need it?

But why are your windows opened frequently? If it's because the house is stuffy, then with MVHR you likely won't have that concern, because the air is always fresh even when the heating's on. The only time I ever open windows is at the end of the day after a long hot spell, to let cool air through the bedrooms for a couple of hours before we go to bed. I can't imagine any reason to open the windows in winter - the air is fresh and at a comfortable temperature, so the windows can just stay closed and do their job. Even if you do periodically open windows, the MVHR doesn't care. You lose some efficiency due to the lack of heat recovery, but it isn't the end of the world. We've been living in our new house for a bit over a year. It's the first place I've ever lived have MVHR and I now wouldn't be without it, simply from a comfort point of view. I'd have thought you could get a decent system supplied and installed by your main contractor for £3-5k, depending house size and the quality of the system you buy. I have no idea where the £10k figure comes from - even with a top end unit from someone like Paul, I can't see how you could spend that much.

You're welcome!

Methinks the lady doth protest too much.

It could well have been a brick. Nothing would surprise me with @Ferdinand

We had one two mins walk from the house we were renting when building, so it would have been really convenient for them to be competitive. Unfortunately, they were often twice the price we were getting at TP and Jewsons, even for cash. I just assumed self builders weren't a market they were interested in.

We're going for this option in our bedroom, now that the ceilings are being re-done anyway following our leak. I HATE pelmets with a passion.

Yes! Especially if you intend, as we did, to have a sleek modern look to your rooms. We made the mistake of believing that our external venetian blinds would avoid the need for other window coverings. We were wrong. They let light through the holes in the slats (for the control/support tapes) and side gaps, which means the rooms aren't properly dark in the evenings or mornings during the summer months. Had we known about this, we'd have left more space in the recess above each window to allow for recessed window coverings. At the moment, we're trying to choose whether to attach window coverings to the windows themselves or go for coverings that cover the entire window and reveal. The former approach brings all sorts of complications with added weight and clutter. With the latter approach, we can either mount something like roman blinds to the wall above the reveal, or run ceiling mounted tracks for curtains. We aren't big fans of curtains, so roman blinds are currently the lead choice.

Old school!

Aw, come back Nick, we were only messing. Nick? Niiiiiiiiccccck!

Welcome Ed!

Based on where it is, it's pretty unlikely you'd trip on it. You'd usually place your foot close to the top of the stairs (when going down). By the time your toe getsto the raised bit, your foot is decelerating, with the toe higher than the heel. It'd be just about impossible to catch it, but even if you did, there's no momentum to cause you to trip (you don't trip over things in front of you unless there's a lot of momentum). On the way up, your foot is raised over the last step and above the raised bit, then lowered onto it with little to no forward motion. Again, no way of tripping. I had the same concerns with the slight lip where our carpet joins our top step, but it just hasn't ever been an issue.

Why don't you do it in his garden? No-one would ever find the body!

I missed the hollow-core. Sounds an expensive build-up. If you're adamant about screed upstairs, I'm pretty sure you can liquid-screed even on top of 22mm chipboard + easi-joists if you engineer it right.

We have a very similar spec house to Bitpipe, but no heating at all upstairs. Bedrooms are fine without, but we should have gone for heating in the bathrooms, as they get a little more nipply than ideal in winter. I'm currently planning to install a small IR panel on the ceiling of each upstairs bathroom, which should at least take the chill off the tiles each morning in winter.

Just act like whoever you're talking to at BT. I don't think I've ever spoken to a single person there who understood anything they were reading from the flowchart. Me: "Hi, our broadband isn't working. I've tried resetting the router but I'm standing beside it and the red light is still on." BT: "Thank you for calling BT. First, could you please check that the router is plugged in." Me: "AAAaaaaarrrghh!!"

Were these recently installed connections he was re-making? The difficulty with Openreach is that they are focused on business to business transactions. While they should in theory be able to work with self-builders, they're fundamentally focused on phone/internet providers, and large scale development. Self-builders are such a small group relative to their normal activity that they just don't seem to be able to make it work for them. Also, it was explained to me that if you already have a phone line (as we did, since we knocked down and rebuilt), you shouldn't be directly in contact with Openreach anyway. Reconnection of an existing line should be arranged via your phone/internet provider, who will get Openreach involved themselves. The problem with this is that if you can't speak to Openreach, you can't ask questions about how they want you to set things up for them, and lord knows most phone company people wouldn't have a clue. We had the ridiculous situation of having the get an Openreach guy onsite to do the installation when we knew very well it wasn't ready, because we just couldn't get BT to relay a simple question to Openreach. Got there in the end, but it was a stretch. I found Sky Broadband worse during this period. It turned out that my wife accidentally didn't disconnect our broadband, so we were paying for a year despite not having a phone line. When I rang them to discuss this, they agreed that they could see we hadn't had a connection for over a year, but refused to refund a penny of what we'd paid. Apparently we were paying for the "right" to use the broadband, and if we chose not to use it that was our fault. I get their point legally, but this seemed hugely short-sighted from a customer retention point of view (especially given that acquisition is the hardest part of the process for broadband providers). I will never under any circumstances consider using them again.