Declan52

Replace the doors with one piece of 25mm ply/MDF. Glue some 100mm pir insulation onto the back. Attach a frame of 2*2 around the edge of the opening. Drill 4 holes in the corners for screws. Use some foam draught tape around the inside edge of the 2*2. You will need screw cups and 70mm screws. Insert these in the 2*2 and then screw from the outside so it pulls the ply/MDF board tight against the draught tape so it forms an airtight seal. You will need a handle on the ply/ MDF to allow you to position it and pull it in close enough to attach the screws.

Yes labour costs would be much less here. Another thing is materials cost vary massively depending on where you are. We have easy access to sand and gravel here in northern Ireland so things like hardcore, building and plastering sand, blocks , concrete, concrete tiles, concrete lintels etc are much cheaper. Plus you have plastic manufacturers like Brett martin, polypipe,wavin and radius all set up here so you can get plenty of good prices with all your drainage materials. Quite a few insulation companies are also based here as well. All of these things all add up.

Can be done but will depend very much on your location. No chance around London but in Scotland and Northern Ireland you could do it. A simple square box not much more than 100sqm of a footprint with a basic finish. A 2 storey 3 bedroom, 1 main bathroom and maybe a toilet under the stairs. Brick and block would be maybe the easiest material to work with. Much will depend on what skills you can bring to the party though. Your going to have to do a lot of work yourselves to get it under this budget.

The depth of your concrete will be determined by the ground make up. If it has to go 1m because the ground is poor then that's how deep it has to go. If you don't then you risk the concrete cracking and walls and floors cracking. If you go for a timber build you wouldn't need any proper concrete foundations due to the lighter weight of the structure. You can build it like a deck resting on a few concrete blocks sitting on some concrete pads. Would be a hell of a lot cheaper. 4*2 timber for the frame with 100mm insulation on the inside of the studs would mean a larger internal space. Easy to insulate the floor as well. You can clad the building in everything from shiplap to slate lath to Siberian larch. All depends on the budget.

All the render off and see what is really going on. Not much point in fixing one section and then cracks appear else where. Let them do all the remaining work and put the first coat of render on and let it sit a year and watch to see it's all good. If it's good then put the top coat on. If it's not then they fix it until your happy. Will depend on if the dpc is folded up to the inside skin. Only option is to burst a hole and have a look and then take it from there.

With no caps how do you go full on John Wayne with it. The caps are the best part of using a hilti gun. If you drop a block on a few caps from a fair height it doesn't half make a bang.

Used to be very hard to get here but now where not killing each other as much it's easier. There is a hilti shop in duncrue a few doors down from Screwfix.

Hilti gun is your best bet. Will fire into whatever material you need with the right cap and nail. Plus they are a lot of fun!!

Do you have local football clubs/ golf courses nearby that could use it to help drainage???

Option A Take up the bricks and dig out the sand. Relay the bricks length ways so you have a gap of 100mm ish to the wall. Fill this gap with clean decorative stone so it acts like a drain. Option B Or paint it with something like Thompson water seal to see if that works. If it doesn't then option A. Option C Nuclear option. All up and redo.

First of all im a bit puzzled. Your a roofer by trade but need help to design how you would go about this job. I take it that it's a flat roof construction. What did the building drawings say with regards the size of timbers needed?? What is the brown thing on top of the concrete lintel??

The new roof felts are much much stronger. Having them exposed for a month or 2 is fine as well. Do you really want to be getting up onto the roof in 10/15 years to redo motar than has came loose?? Plus if you ever need to remove a few tiles it's only a screw that has to come out and go back in again to expose the top row.

As there has been an insurance claim on it there will be a record of it on file. Where its kept I couldn't tell you but I'm sure they would soon find it if they needed it to fight a claim. As you will have a digger on site to knock the house down a trial pit to 2.2m would take 5 mins extra work. A few of these around the site, not on the actual footprint of the new house will confirm that hopefully rock is at this depth.

As your plot will have a marker beside it due to issues with subsidence your really going to have to push the boat out and be extra careful. A few trial pits to confirm what's down there is a must and maybe some proper boreholes to give a structural engineer real data to design your foundations correctly so you don't suffer the same fate.

So the house has had some issues with subsidence and geobear came in to do some remedial work to improve the ground conditions. The left table is how many blows it took before they started work and then the right after. You can see it's had an improvement, The higher the number the better. The test involves driving a metal probe into the ground and counting the blows it takes to move it 100mm. So more blows means harder ground. Are you having issues with cracks etc??

Basically the probing has confirmed that the ground is decent until you get to over 2m where it becomes rock solid. Any test that takes over 50 blows is when you stop it as that is perceived to be something like rock. But due to the limitations of the test as you can't actually see what you probing you might need to dig trial pits to confirm that it is actually rock and not a large boulder at 2.1m. Did you only get one test done or does the data from a few tests all look pretty similar??

Old fella told me years ago to make sure the chimney is built right. If it doesn't draw smoke it will definitely draw tears was his moto. Ceramic all the way. I thought them metal flue kits are more for relining a ceramic flue. Twin wall is used if your not building an actual chimney.

3 days is the most we keep the water in. After that it's chlorine and a splash of water and you can feel your skin crawl. We went away for a weekend and my young lad and his mates used it. They where only in it for a few hrs each night. When we got home the water was greener than grass and could have made at least one pair of socks from the toe fluff. Power hose, bleach and a lot of elbow grease to get the smell out. They are banned from it now.

Our Lough sand is too clean so it hasn't much larger particles in it so won't hold water. Apparently there is over a mile deep of sand in Lough Neagh, largest lake in the UK, so we will be using it for many many years to come. It's brilliant for concrete and for drainage on football pitches etc but just not great for mortar but it's very cheap so it's used a lot. I can get it a mile from my house at around £10 a tonne if I collect in a trailer and cheaper if I buy it in full lorry load. Also as the same company will do concrete you can make a good saving if you let them supply it as well. Pit sand will have dirt which helps keep it from going like fluff.

Not sure where you are getting your info from but the wind most definitely blows plenty here. Have had quite a few walls blow over. It happens a lot on every site everywhere. The mix strength depends on your sand as well and most of our sand would come from Lough Neagh so its not the best for motar. If you can get it from one of the pits then it's 5 in 1 but it's much more expensive so Lough sand is what's mostly used.

Spt is a the test they will perform that will give them the results to calculate the strength of the ground. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_penetration_test

Nothing to do with the motar or blocks the wall is just a short run so less likely to twist in the wind unless it's a storm which could blow over any wall.

How deep are the borehole as you can get to 4m with handheld kit. Can't do any SPT tests though.

7 course high is normal height as that's how high is comfortable to lift a block up to that height. But it won't make no difference to the wall. It's only a small run with the returning walls so the wind wouldn't move it.

I operated one of those for a few years. Mine had the set of ramps as they where needed to get the rig out of the van. You would need a scaffold on each side of the wall so you go up the ramp onto the scaffold across the wall and then onto the other scaffold and down. I have used Kwikstage and doubled up on the planks as due to the incline it will go up then tip over and land with a fair bang. Get them to take all of the rods and casing that are on the side to reduce the weight. Or if it's workable you can detach the front section that does all the work and use longer hydraulic hoses to attach it to the main unit.