Jilly

I think I’ve read about raptor shaped garden ornaments helping a bit. Or actual raptors. Might not fit with your garden aesthetics tho’… To be fair, I’d rather the pigeons sat on the bushes than pooped on my car. Stoping them nesting nearby can help, however, as someone said, they can be determined and quite fearless. Sorry Joe, I didn't follow your link!

It's quite easy to do, there are instructions on line. Why not ask your BC officer if he will accept your/builder's word for it and your proposed location for the soakaway? Sandy soil should give a good result.

The brick work inside (and I suspect outside too) is so characterful, it’s a shame to clad it with insulation. Can you mitigate by more elsewhere?

Lift one up and look at the other side? Should be obvious.

OOh what gorgeous little buildings.

I worried about this too and had them make tile sized access holes with the magnet things. It caused a lot of huffing and the builder insisted on making a ply backboard to take the magnets, when the instructions said use a tile only. It's too heavy, and doesn't work well, so I think a tile alone would have worked, but I'm not quite up to sorting it out myself. I would try to design a door in somehow as it's a nightmare if you get a leak.

Price?

Eek, a dissenting voice here. If the trees screen the neighbours, both you and they will wish they remain. Give me the maturity of trees and shrubs in a garden any day over ‘building site chic’.

Maybe share the details in a new post (without identifying yourself)? Also real the ‘How a planner got planning permission’ to see where you might have tripped up.

Ain’t that so. There could be plenty more curveballs to come, so try to stay focussed and always protect the downsides in any decisions you are forced to make. Resilience is essential as self building can really test your mental health.

I'm sure if you are a meticulous type, it's doable. You might go down a lot of rabbit holes, but it will definitely help. I learn the hard way that I had to research and challenge, when something didn't look right, and do my homework retrospectively. It would be worth borrowing a similar successful set of plans as a starting point

Apparently those lap vent things don’t work brilliantly. Have you got soffit vents? could you add more? Or ask a roofer for advice and add tile vents? Also worth double checking that your bathroom or kitchen extractor fan pipes aren’t leaking into the loft, they’re often flimsy.

He needs to learn about ‘no-till’ farming which is becoming all the rage. Groundswell try to educate farmers away from this type of farming which depletes the soil and is not sustainable in the long term.

I tried to match ours to the marble veining with a silver grey.

Yes pastiche, fake stuff can look ok in photos on Instagram etc but in real life you have to be careful. Sometimes print blocks of eg planks and bricks can trick the eye if you aren’t too close and a lot of flooring is made of prints of the wood or stone. You could find a printer or signage firm to print photos onto some kind of non flammable board for you, but I would test a sheet thoroughly to make sure it really works before spending too much. For me the exterior of a building and the interior have to have congruence and if there is too much dissonance it doesn’t look/feel right (and might put future buyers off, if that’s a consideration).

What a difficult situation for you. Is this because the stroke happened below a particular age? Could you get a lodger to help pay the bills and keep your home? Sorry overlapped with Ferdinand but had similar ideas.

Is that 90% of people who self build…?

Also look out for asbestos. Have anything suspect tested, it wasn’t expensive last time I did it with small double bagged samples of some unidentified grey stuff.

Back to the patio door ventilation question, is there a way to securely partly open a French door as Pat asked? The Spanish grille thing seems a bit drastic. There are little wires for Juliet balconies and other things, but they don't look like they would stand up to a crow bar.

I think it doesn’t much matter who owns the strip, highways or not, unless an owner is not the adjacent land owner and is trying to block the creation of an entrance. Highways would only do that for safety reasons, I think.

Are you planning to build a house in your garden and need access? If so, the entrance details would have to be included in that application anyway. However, assuming you just want another entrance: you might need the Certificate of Lawfulness route. It is used when, for example, doing an extension, which you think doesn’t need planning permission but you want to be sure before you spend. If they’ve already told you you need planning, that hardly seems worth it though. Some planning depts seem less forthcoming with free advice than they used to be.

Those plastic plants can get a bit dusty and start to look fake…

Get together with the neighbours and buy it? Check the planning situation with the council to see if he’s bluffing? Nb Devaluing your property isn’t a proper planning objection

Other options: 1 Try to buy the land yourself. 2 Prove that the farm track is a Right of Way by previous use (Ramblers and British Horse Society have good resources). If it was ever an old right of way (look on old maps) then ‘Once a highway, always a highway’ can sometimes apply, but there have been some recent changes/deadlines to submit ‘evidence of use’ forms