Conor

Bancroft had it well covered, my view as a self builder and as a project manager as a day job. Avoiding a main contractor and managing the build yourself will save you upto 30% of project cost. BUT... Getting trades will be tough. You take more responsibility and risk. It takes a LOT of time as you have to learn and do at the same time. It's much more satisfying. The key thing is to make sure roles, responsibilities etc are clearly defined. "However, a close friend, who I trust, is a self-employed carpenter and runs a carpentry/renovation business with his business partner. They do not normally operate in my area and they do not have the experience/capacity to take on the whole project, but they do have good experience working on renovation projects. My idea would be for him to take on the elements he is comfortable with and help me coordinate some other packages." I would absolutely not do this. Recipe for disaster. Grey lines. No cost control, you take all the risk. You'll fall out when something goes wrong. Much more to it than this but I've no time to say more right now. Something that you'll soon be familiar with 🤣

Ohhh don't even think about picking up that phone.

I just put a 22mm isolating valve on each of the manifolds. Not the end of the world.

I got stick on fish tank / brewing thermometers. Not the most precise but gives you a good idea of what's going on.

I agree that induction hobs are terrible for woks, but I've seen one of these in action in a restaurant and they are fantastic. Worth considering to save you a lot of hassle. https://www.nisbets.co.uk/buffalo-induction-wok/ja372

More likely a chemical reaction between the wet concrete and the boards.

No, just connect your new supply pipe to the back of the meter box where the builder disconnected the original supply. you'll want 25mm mdpe brought to your plant room. I'm assuming the builder just removed the old pipe to near the meter and stuck in a tempory stand pipe for the build.

Where is it? Garden or at the house?

Yes, I had to cut out a section of our cabinet base as we have a massive sink, water filter and waste disposal unit, just no room for the tank. Looks a right mess but there nothing else in there so door is rarely opened.

Better off having a level sensor that switches the pump off before it runs dry. And you can have a similar for filling the tank from the mains supply, if desired. I'm sure there's also a way to use a shelly relay in the setup so you can have it timed remotely monitored and activated.

Contact them. We had similar, 5 weeks and application still not online. Architect contacted them, and they hadn't verified it as there was a mismatch between some text in the form and a drawing... But they never bothered contacting us to correct it.

Ahh, hadn't thought of that. Yes, go with the aco, and a permeable subbase for good measure.

Pavers on pedestals. Dead easy., no drainage issues. Plenty of topics here about it.

Can you move another 400mm away from your neighbour?! That would simplify things greatly.

Oh, one more thing. We installed 15m of frameless ballustrading. Part of it was to go onto a brick wall. SE was having none of it. So we used a length of RSJ that was secured at each end to stop twisting. You might have that option there- length of steel running along the top of your block work, then encase in your roofing material and ballustrade fixings.