andyscotland

So this is a good example of the fact that - in the nicest possible way - you are very far into Mr Rumsfeld's "Unknown Unknowns" territory. The simple answer is yes, basically, there are several industry standard dimensions for the skins - governed by the thicknesses of timber and block generally available. However, the choice of which standard dimension to use (or whether to do something bespoke) is based on a host of considerations including: What u-value (insulation level) does the wall need to achieve? What type of blockwork? Different types of block are more / less thermally insulating. What types of breather membrane and vapour control membrane will be used, and where will they sit in the construction? Again these affect thermal insulation. What's on the outside of the blockwork? This affects insulation, weatherproofing and e.g. the cavity required. How exposed is the site / the wall? Is there wind loading? Driving rain? etc. Is there a need for a service cavity on the inside of the room for wiring / socket boxes etc (and if not, how will these be detailed to prevent water vapour getting into the wall and causing condensation)? What level of acoustic separation does the wall need to provide? This may govern the type of insulation - wool or foam board - which will determine the thickness required. What level of fire resistance does the wall need to provide? Again will impact thickness of materials as well as thickness and type of insulation. Is the wall loadbearing, and if so how much load and is it evenly distributed or on concentrated points? Does the wall need to meet up internally or externally with parts of the existing house - this may push you towards a non-standard combination of thicknesses to end up with a wall that fits the space but still achieves the right insulation etc (or is below-target for insulation but balanced by another wall somewhere else being thicker). And that's just the factors that come immediately to mind. If your builder is going to take responsibility for ensuring the whole project complies with building regulations, then your builder needs to consider all of that and decide what he's going to make the wall out of. And then he can tell you how thick the wall will be. It's not possible for you to pick a wall thickness (or for people on the internet to tell you one) without understanding the various factors and calculations that need to go into that decision. That's a surefire route to (best case) designs that don't work and have to be changed on site, at your cost, or (worst case) designs that aren't compliant and have to be changed on site, at your cost. It should also be apparent that unless someone has already gone through that thinking process and specified the type of block, thickness of timber, type of insulation, type of membranes etc you almost certainly only have an estimate. The different types of these products all vary wildly in price. How would your builder be in a position to commit to a quote without knowing which materials he's buying? I honestly think you need to get a professional to walk alongside you on this stage of your project. It will save you an enormous amount of time, worry and money. Designing and specifying the construction details is an order of magnitude more complex than the entirety of the process you've gone through so far. If you want to use the builder as your professional, and you entirely trust him, then you should not provide additional build plans. Instead, get it clear in writing that the planning permission drawings provide the outline dimensions and it's his responsibility to design (in discussion with you) and build a compliant extension that looks like the picture. He may, of course, not be happy to take the job on that basis and he will certainly expect you to pay for his time and expertise.

Does it have to be T&G cladding? I believe you can do board-on-board cladding without counterbattening although you need to chamfer the tops of the horizontal battens to direct water outwards.

@zoothorn I must confess I'm a bit confused too. 3 sheets of A3 with plans and elevations would be fine for planning permission level drawings - showing the basic sizes and shapes of rooms and describing e.g. the materials for outer wall finishes. But it sounds like you already have these from your architectural technician? Construction drawings would generally include thinks like close-up details of the section through a wall showing the exact type/position/thickness of membranes, insulation, fixings etc. Or the way the sides and top of a window meets the walls. Or even just the precise setting out dimensions, which will need to take account of the thickness of materials, fitting gaps around window frames, how bricks/timber will meet at the corners etc, to end up with a building the size and shape you want. My construction drawings for my fairly small extension and garage conversion run to 12 sheets of A3 cross-referenced to an 11 A4 page written specification. Actually drawing those isn't the hard part. The hard part is knowing exactly how the building needs to be built. This is why it's generally done by an architect/technician with years of training, an experienced builder, or a self-builder with a fair bit of practical experience and a loooong time spent researching or borrowing details from manufacturers/neighbours/etc. If your builder is going to figure out all the details, and you trust him to do so, and he just needs to know what size you want it and where the windows should go then I'd have thought the planning drawings should provide what he needs. If he wants you to provide the details then as @the_r_sole says that could open a massive can of worms if you draw something that isn't compliant with regs / doesn't work in practice / isn't quite the right size. The risk and cost impact of errors at this stage is very high. I think you need to get clarity from your builder about exactly what detail he wants you to draw that isn't on the plans you already have. And then take a step back and assess honestly whether you feel you have the knowledge to make those decisions. Or whether the time, cost and risk that would be involved in developing your skills to the point that you could is really worth it compared to paying either the architect or the builder to take responsibility for that part of the process.

Seen quite a lot of networking cupboards, most in commercial premises. I would say make it as shallow as you can get away with - deep enough for the rack & kit but so you have to stand in the corridor with the door open to do anything. Unless you want all the mops / brooms / hoover / linen / camping gear / whatever doesn't fit in the other cupboards piled up against your shiny electronics.... Also, plenty of ventilation.

If the plans are only for your builder, you might be quickest / easiest with a pencil and ruler (scale rule ideally to avoid risk of arithmetic errors on your dimensions). You would of course then need to work out all the dimensions first in "real life" and then draw them, rather than doing the drawing first and measuring things from it. You obviously have the advantage it's an extension rather than new build so a lot of the dimensions can be measured from the existing structure. For some it may even be better to give a nominal dimension (for costing/materials ordering) and instruction to set out on site so it e.g. lines up with / is at right angles to some existing wall of the house. Most simple drawing software would be either time consuming or impossible to get accuracy of dimensions / angles etc so not really suitable for construction drawings. There is free CAD software available, but probably not worth the time it will take you to learn to use it effectively.

Couldn't you run a horizontal drain from the bottom of the soakaway crate to a sealed chamber outside the house and then use a standard submersible pump to pump that out? That can then kick in automatically on a float switch, easy to maintain/replace, no need to prime, no issues with poking something down a pipe and hoping it comes back up etc? I assume the geography of your site rules out just gravity draining the soakaway to run off away from the house, or to your main surface water disposal.

PS if you're pulling from the consumer unit end make sure you have help to ease the cable through holes / round corners otherwise it's very easy to damage the outer sheath (and, if you then keep pulling, the inner insulation).

In the past I've just made a couple of T-shaped legs from scrap timber, then a horizontal length between to keep it rigid and a broomstick / length of conduit across the top secured with the drums on it. Sit something heavy on the legs or just screw them to the floor. A real one looks like this but a T is easier than an A in wood IMO. 

Thanks. I'm planning to use rectangular duct and the fan itself is in the next door utility room so should be fairly easy to fashion some sort of connection into the duct before it goes through the wall. Will have a play about when I get to that point.

Very interested in this for the ensuite in my garage conversion. I won't have an MVHR, do you think it would be feasible to link it into the extract somehow? Planning to fit an inline ducted fan so I could possibly boss into that with some kind of flow restrictor? Or would that risk causing noise/other issues?

That's not how VAT works tho. B&Q or their upstream supplier will have paid UK VAT on the American paint when it arrived in the UK. From that point you are (for VAT purposes) buying UK paint. B&Q charge you UK vat as usual. They then reclaim the VAT they paid, and hand over the VAT they charged. The government ends up with the tax on the difference between the price when it first arrived in the UK and the price you eventually paid. Unless you do a self-build reclaim in which case the government ends up with nothing. All imported goods are charged VAT at the moment, almost always UK VAT. The only real exception is that EU companies exporting a small amount of goods to consumers also in the EU are allowed to charge VAT in their own country instead of registering for and charging VAT in the country it's going to.

Sorry if I was unclear, that's what I'm saying. At the moment from EU small suppliers to consumers charge local VAT in their own country and then there's no UK VAT (and self builders can claim back the foreign VAT). After Brexit, EU suppliers will not charge VAT at their end. But there will be UK VAT at the port. Which again self-build can reclaim. The situation if your order/delivery/reclaim falls either side of Brexit may be trickier. More detail and references in my post here.

After Brexit you shouldn't be charged Belgian VAT (unless we do a deal that keeps the status quo, in which case you won't pay UK VAT). EU suppliers only charge local VAT on goods going to another EU country. Goods leaving the EU (e.g. coming to Britain) are zero rated at point of supply and only taxed at point of arrival.

I actually wouldn't blame the electorate here. AV is not a proportional system and would actually produce less proportional results in the UK than FPTP. It's not worth changing the system to something worse just for the sake of it. The Lib Dems were not originally offering AV, indeed Clegg described it as a "miserable little compromise". In the coalition negotiations the Conservatives rejected proper PR but offered a referendum on AV instead. The Lib Dems should never have accepted that trade : it should have been clear that whichever way the vote went it would almost certainly rule out a change to proportional representation for a very considerable period.

You probably could be, but: * You'd need to be very clear that your company was charging you properly (+VAT) for what it did to make sure the work is visibly part of your company's trading. You can't claim VAT back on things that don't relate to a taxable supply made by your business * Your company would have to be providing (and charging for) the labour as the reduced vat rate is not available if supplying materials only. Nothing to stop you paying the company for your time but you'd have to think about the tax implications of how to get the money back out of the company. * It would probably trigger various other compliance things - safety regulations (CDM), insurance, possibly construction industry employer registration - which might well attract costs and/or hassle * If the amounts involved were substantial compared to your normal trading, the one-off bump might well trigger HMRC to come and have a look so you would want to have everything very carefully documented to be able to show it was all being done on an "arm's length" basis * You may have less comeback on some supplies of materials as the regulations covering selling to the general public don't usually apply to business-to-business sales (one reason some places are trade only). Could be an issue with warranties / returns / etc from some suppliers. So in principle yes, especially if your firm is already in the construction trade as some things may already be covered. In practice, exercise caution and probably speak to your accountant.

I hope you've fitted the house with the required CCTV / data protection warning signs.

To clarify, I think you're asking about the ceilings between e.g. ground and first floor? If so, is your heating zoned - will you be heating rooms downstairs separately to rooms upstairs? If not then there is probably not much value in over-insulating the intermediate ceilings. If the rooms are around the same temperature then not much heat will travel through them and any that does will just reduce the heating demand for the upstairs rooms. The external walls/floors/ceilings are much more of a priority for your money & effort.

Might also depend if the size / nature of the garage means it would need a building warrant? I know I put a couple of somewhat unrelated minor things from our "at some point" list on my extension warrant to save having to pay a separate warrant fee later. The advice I had was that would of course mean I'd have to do them before I could get completion for the extension. If the garage would be outside warrant requirements they might be less concerned. Presumably if left on the planning permission but removed from the building warrant that wouldn't matter, or do HMRC look at both?

Have they tried changing the file type association in Internet Explorer itself, as well as the system-level default? As I recall, IE (like chrome) can be separately configured to open files in a different app to the one the system uses when opening a local file.

Ahh that makes sense.

What operating system / browser do you use? Does it only happen when you open from SharePoint? Should be fairly straightforward to find and fix the file-type association but the precise steps vary by platform.

Whoops! And I'd not been aware of the actual vat treatment on conversions, just went with the OP on that. Just had a look now, seems weird that they still end up VAT free but the contractor has to charge at 5% for you to reclaim, rather than the 0% new-build rate... I guess there'll be some esoteric reason that makes sense to HMRC.

Good point. Although I would have thought ultimately the main contractor would be pricing on the basis they'd want to cover their overheads and make a reasonable profit on the job as a whole? So if they don't get to mark up the materials they'd perhaps just uplift the labour rates instead? Other factor of course is a main contractor might be able to get better pricing from suppliers - that might cover some / all of their own markup. Conversely they might just go to their normal merchant and you might be able to do better (at significant time cost) by shopping around for each item.

The main contractor will pay 20% VAT on the materials, but assuming he is VAT registered he will then reclaim that 20% from the government. He will then charge you 5% VAT, which he will pay on to the government. (This isn't a special process BTW, it's the same thing that happens if buying and selling at 20%. In practice once a quarter he will be adding up all the VAT on purchases and sales and just paying/reclaiming the difference). Therefore overall it won't make a difference to the main contractor's figures. However he may be out of pocket for a short period. That will depend on when you pay him, when he has to pay the supplier, and how those two dates fit with the timing of his quarterly VAT returns. If the main contractor is not VAT registered (fairly unlikely unless a tiny firm) then he won't charge you VAT at all. However he will have paid 20% VAT on the materials, which neither he nor you will be able to reclaim - so in that case you would definitely be better getting them yourself.

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