Conor

You need to know the heat loss from each room, as they have pointed out. LoopCAD will do this for you. This will tell you the optimum pipe spacing and flow rates. I designed ours this way and seems to have worked well. You don't need floor probes or actuators. You set the flow rates as prescribed by LoopCAD and then fine tune as you get to know the realities.

Was thinking the same. Ours was 115m² L shaped, no expansion joints. Two layers of mesh and then a ring beam with more steel. Go by your SE's drawings / spec

Our joiners installed 2 stairs in one day - £440. I did the balustrading myself, was a real pain and took a couple more days. is yours largely pre-assembled? Does the price include painting/staining/oiling etc as well? Deffo a two man job, done in a day and a half, two max if there are complexities. Do you have a second fit joiner you've used for your doors, skirting etc? It's not a specialised job.

Dig it all out, level the ground with blinding, install whatever insulation thickness you need to get to floor level with 50mm liquid screed. Not putting insulation would be madness. if you are doing a complete renovation, building control will require you do do it anyway.

In practical terms, no issue if designed correctly. 50% of our main roof drainage goes via our balcony (basically a paved flat roof). Are you worried more in terms of planning / building control in regards to keeping the systems separate?

Deffo stick an inspection chamber downstream of the rest bend. You'll need to cover the pipe in concrete to keep BC happy.

Very happy with my reolink argus eco cameras. I've the WiFi version and during the build I setup a WiFi network with a 4g router. Worked well.

Two options really. One, get them professionally sanded down to eliminate the raised edges (the boards have cupped over time with changes in temperature and humidity) and stained, varnished. Second, and better long term options, is to lift the lot and put down some good quality laminate. Any gaps are trivial to deal with.

Is that pic of the scaffold /mess on a public footpath road?! Unacceptable. When you say the steel valley was "not in any SE plans or similar", do you mean the beam or the modification? It does look like everything has been cobbled together with very little planning, care, skill or thought.

No just a light rub over with something like 180 grit paper. Just take the shine off the existing coat and something for the next coat to key to. I use a random orbital sander with 180 paper in it and only takes a few mins.

Rub down and another layer of topcoat along the affected area. Assuming the lead has stopped leaching. Guessing some parts not fully coated in oil.

"Depends" Need more details. key thing will be how the digging of the new footings would interact with the existing wall and how you will be managing draining. What is the existing retaining arrangement? What condition in the existing wall in? Photos? Who is designing this? Are you able to excavate the new one without damaging the existing? Edit: Sounds like the existing wall will be removed and you are building a new retaining wall and then a facing wall? You'd normally just build it as one wall and face the block wall with bricks.

What's your overall insulation strategy and budget? Insulating a floor is rarely the the most cost effective option. Loft? Walls? Windows? Need to look at the building as a whole.

I took all our timber to local recycling centre in the trailer. Not too onerous. If you've not got one already, get yourself the largest single axel trailer you can find and make use of your local recycling centre. Mine is 7ft and can get a fair whack in. I'm less than a mile to my HRC, frequent visitor!!! Also put a load up on Freecycle, people came and took it. I'd say somebody would make sure of the shingles from that old outhouse

Yes. 4.5pkW. no batteries as does not make payback threshold for us. We're on economy 7 and do bulk of our hot water, heating and car charging off peak. Car is quite small, just a leaf that's charged a handful of times a month. Maybe a fifth of the overall consumption. Solar saves us about £1k a year. Cost £6k to install so halfway to payback already. When doing the M&E design five years ago, I calculated our annual bills to be £1200 before car charging. Obviously electricity going from 15p a unit to 25p, has accounted for the higher than expected costs.

Don't get a gas boiler. Just don't. Especially lpg. Our 250m² new build total electric bill for a year is about £2k, and that's heating, hot water, washing, cooking, car charging. If you have a limited budget for these kind of things, ditch the batteries and get the ASHP. I got guys from the North coast to install ours, only took a couple of days and it's been absolutely perfect for three years now. Love it. And remember, can't cool your house with a gas boiler....

Ours is 4m, enough for a 8wheeler to get though at an oblique angle. Tho it was tight and driver said I should have installed a removable post at the far end to get another metre 🤦‍♂️

I sold my leftover main sheets and gave the offcuts as free. Don't bury it, you'll create unknown contamination issues.

Agree with Jenki, you need to sort that arrangement is it breaks all sorts of good practices, not to mention building regs.

Jobs will crawl to a near stop. We did that, due to financial reasons. Don't regret it, but we're still trying to finish of stuff three years later. Get it fully finished then move in. Sell your current house to release the funds, and find somewhere to rent for a few months.

The ultimate method would be a crane. Crane to lift in a small excavator, a skip bucket then fitted to the crane to lift material out and dump it in to waiting tipper trucks. You'd probably be done in two days, including the footings and concrete for the extension. And the crane could lift in all your materials for the extension while it was there. Other than that, a micro excavator might be able to make it's way through the house to dig and load up into barrows. But going the the description of the layout, I don't think that would be possible. I'd rethink your whole approach and hold off any internal renovations until you've a full plan, and attack it in the right sequence. Speak to an architect.

Thinking back to a concrete pour I helped a mate with, I think four guys moved 7tonnes of concrete in about an hour. That's about 100 wheelbarrow loads, though a house and into the garden. Theres no point doing anything until you have a full design done. Could be wasted effort. Fyi that builder is taking the beeswax.

Where are the steels? If they've been waterproofed, then they are either embedded in masonry or on the outer leaf. In that case you wouldn't need to fire proof them. It would only be exposed steels within the building, that you wouldn't have painted. Pink boarding is completely acceptable, if the steels are fully covered by them. You won't be able to paint intumescent paint over the steels you've already painted with bituminous paint.

We got ours from Lithuania. Half the price of the UK or Ireland. Jonas something. I can look it up.

Lots of people do this. We had one contractor do the foundation, walls and steel structure. We then hunted down individual contractors for the rest. You save about 25% on a turn key service but you take on more risk.