Alex C

The chance of getting that stop bead in accurate enough to get a decent square door is zero and how do you neatly fit it around the top of the door. These sorts of details are always much harder to build than to draw and more often than not end up with the plaster cracking around the door any way and looking bad. I have used a shadow gap detail in this sort of situation dozens of times in commercial jobs. Use the detail above but with a qic trim d12. Job done. Also use a 3d adjustable hinge as you will make life even harder with a soss hinge.

Sheet material such as habito board gets much cheaper if you can buy it by the pallet load direct rather than being delivered by your builders merchant from their store. Resilient bar is a good call and not expensive. for our 150m2 ground floor it was about £400 in materials and 2 man days to fit it. Just make sure you use the correct length screws as fixing the plasterboard with too long screws that go into timer just defeats the whole point of it isolating from them. If you do use habito you don't need any other ply or osb behind unless it is in the kitchen. In bathroom use green plasterboard with ply behind or work out exactly where fixings will be and nog locally. Dont forget bog roll holder and bathroom cabinets.

Fill it with expanding foam. Maybe put some tape on the window board to stop any overspill sticking to it. Neatly trim it back when dry and put the trim back.

Is that a little trim at bottom of window on the window board? If so I bet it is hiding a bloody great big hole at the bottom of the frame. You could remove the window board and refit with some thin celotex underneath and a the back edge. Or just put up some heavy curtains.

https://myenergi.com/product/zappi/

Yes, Fit the window in to a properly sized opening in an insulated wall and in line with the insulation not in front or behind it. (not always easy in a retrofit) Foam carefully around the window when it is installed put a strip of insulation as a break at the rear of the window board You can also fit foam backed plasterboard around the opening on the inside part covering the edge of the frame to reduce any bridging.

Cutting in to what? I have used both a router and track saw in timber. Very easy.Some LED strips are top hat shaped so the edge of the slot can be a bid dodgy but it gets covered up.

Our ground floor is largely open plan but with a separate snug. I knew i wanted this as a quiet escape from my kids so got mbc to build a separated twin stud on these walls that was filled with sound insulation and then double skinned both sides with sound bloc and habito and fitted a fd 60 heavy door. I am really pleased with the result, but has ended up being the room my kids watch movies and play Fornite with the surround sound turned right up and you can hardly hear it in the rest of the house.

I have used fermacell as well before. Habito is denser and takes a fixing better.

I would also go for resilient bar and double skin on your ground floor ceilings, It makes a big differnence.

If you want to put up heavy stuff 12mm ply will be better as it holds a fixing well. I used habito plasterboard which allows you to get a fixing in and also is very dense and has good acoustic properties. I doubled this up with sound bloc plasterboard in rooms that I wanted to keep quiet and then put ply behind in the kitchen/ utility and also on the stairway so I could get a really secure fixing into it. The habito is a bugger to cut as you cant score and break it, but as a reccomendation the guy that owned the dry lining firm said he was so impressed he would use it in his own house. It also needs specialist screws and has to be fixed with an impact driver.

You cant really compare two 6 inch lengths of timber and expect a truck load of it to be the same as your samples, there is going to be a lot of variation. Buy FSC certified from a reputable supplier and find out where the timber comes from. Scottish Larch is wider grained and more knotty, also cheaper, and it is possible that is what your sample on the right is.

1. Somewhere between 1200 and 2500 m2. varying from doing lots to not very much yourself. People idea of high spec varies a lot. 2. Depends so much on site and groundworks. You could be spending 30-50k on windows on a high spec build. 3. Not many people get done within a year. If you are doing lots yourself then who knows. You have watched grand designs where self builds go on for years havn't you?

This Riba winner from 2018 was originally burned larch but it had nearly all washed off by the time it entered the competition and now just looks streaky grey. It actually looks pretty good but I think you would be dissapointed if you spent a fortune on black timber and ended up with this. https://www.architecture.com/knowledge-and-resources/knowledge-landing-page/house-of-the-year-winner-2018

I looked in to this but a supplier talked me out of it as he said the charring all washes off over time unless it is regularly oiled. To prove the point he sent me to look at some jobs they had supplied a couple of years earlier and they looked total crap.

I know the advice above is right but there are also quite a few variables that effect internal movement and cracking, such as type of timber frame, if it goes up wet/dry and then stays wet/dry for a while, when the frame is loaded up etc. I have been pretty surprised to have no cracks in plasterboard whatsoever from movement or shrinkage after 2 years in my MBC build. My frame went up dry and did not get rained on for a long time. The tiles went on straight after the frame went up but then plasterboard not fixed for several months so had time to settle first.

Some people just like asking the same question over and over again expecting a different answer, unwilling to take advice that members have spent time giving. I seem to remember several threads about building a house for 1000m2 that went nowhere for weeks.

You would need a battery big enough to last you about 5 months. Solar pv generates half of bugger all over the winter.

In my experience I wouldn't rely on having one easy point of contact for issues if you use Ecohause Internorm. I had to deal with every man and his dog and chase up the european tech expert from Internorm, who was particularly uninterested in helping out. Most issues I had were to do with installation, but also had a nightmare trying to sort out control of the external blinds, which should have been really easy but ecohause did not know anything about the product they were selling. I had countless revisits from so called experts to fix problems as well as 3 visits from plastic surgeon and magic man. None of the people that came to fix issues from Ecohause had been briefed on what needed doing and a number of them turned up with wrong parts or caused further problems. If I was doing it again I would firstly find a recommended installer and then approach a supplier. Ask around on the forum for good installers in your area who are able to problem solve not cause problems. It seems any idiot can fit a window, but it takes another level of skill and knowledge to sort out on site issues that may arise.

Avoid Ecohause Internorm at all cost

I did my own design SAP but my assessor refused to use my model for the final SAP as he had no idea if it had been done properly and was not willing to sign off someones elses work. He only charged £180 which seemed reasonable. For me creating the SAP model was really worthwhile as I could play with the variables and it showed me what changes would make the biggest impact. I was needing to score over 100 for my mortgage application.

I think the issue is chargers that don't have any circuitry to control the charge of dodgy batteries. It is the batteries that then burst in to flames. When powerful cheap led bike lights first started coming out of china I know there were quite a few instances of this happening. The battery packs tended to be several used 18650 cells from old laptops made in to a battery pack.

I have worked on the design and roll out of a lot of commercial interior jobs including high street fashion and banking. This sort of thing came up all the time and 100% why you cant rely on other peoples drawings.

I have played this sort of game a lot over the years. I suspect the new architects want nothing to do with the converted files even though they can read them as they are likely to cause endless pain over the coming months of being worked on. They might look right when printed but could cause problems with inaccuracies and errors that will make working on them very slow and cause further potential mistakes. I hate working on drawings that have been started by someone else and I am sure I am not alone in that. Just re read your post. If it is a basic survey drawing not construction drawings it may be easiest to just trace over the drawing in the cad file so all lines are created from scratch, rather than try and modify existing vector lines that may have glitches in them. That wouldn't be a massive job. There hopefully is a scale bar or dimensioned line somewhere that can be used to check the scale is right.

We have a black granite with a matt 'leathered' finish. It was a great choice and has not picked up any obvious marks at all in 2 years of heavy use. The leathered finish is created by thousands of tiny scratches so just hides any other marks that may happen.