vivienz

It's £85k now. Inflation is a terrible thing!

Thanks, Jeremy. My plasterer is an excellent fellow and rang me earlier. He is coming back to finish a couple of areas and will take whatever remedial action is necessary. The lateral movement makes sense as I had the posijoists put in at 400mm rathet than 600mm centres to reduce bounce. All will become clear in a few weeks.

I initially thought that my plumbers, who are working upstairs, had come through the floor to the hallway ceiling below in their enthusiasm, but it seems that some of my ceiling plasterboard fixings are popping. There's one in the hallway but a run of 4 along the snug/hallway ceiling join. I'm waiting to hear back from the plasterer (his crew did the boarding) but what's the best way to deal with this? I assume that I need to dug out and re-attach as I don't fancy having unsecured boards on the ceiling and I imagine it will only get worse once the house is occupied and has more movement inside.

If you have enough spiders, you won't get many other bugs. Spiders are a plant's friend!

Nice idea. I guess that if you want to autowatet, you would need plants with similar water requirements, too, as some are far thirstier than others. We're going for large specimen plants that have outgrown us at our old house but will be good in the new one. This yucca started out as a very small one in a trough - several years in a stairwell dormer window and occasional TLC did this to it.

Dirty loos - yuk. I shouted at one of the plumbing crew last week after the portaloo was left in an unacceptably filthy state. It was cleaned very promptly and not by me, but just who did they think was going to clean it, if not themselves?! Anyhow, I've chosen rimless toilets for the new place - fewer hiding places and easier to clean.

After my slab was poured all of the load bearing stuff (sole plate upwards) was inward of the eps upstand and laid according to a line marked from one end of the slab to the other. The thin edge of the EPS just has the membranes draped over it once everthing is done, so I don't think the damage to yours will make any difference. Where our lift and slide doors are located, the upstand was cut away there and a void shuttered out so that the windows would have a level threshold when they went in. We wouldn't have been able to do this if the thickness at the top of the EPS had to remain uniform. Deep breaths, Russell, in and out.

Our decision against bi-folds was for a rather different reason. Our site is quite exposed and windy and we know from experience at work where we have the factory roller door up in the summer just how much stuff blows in, even when there is only a light breeze. Bi folds would replicate this and I would prefer our bew build to have less housework, not more.

Here's my original post from earlier in this thread.

I had quotes from these people but even though they say they don't charge extra for bespoke sizes, they were incredibly expensive and I didn't use them.

We have vertical slate cladding on our place. We used the Marley corner trims, but not the slates due to the incredibly long lead time - they aren't used much in the UK and so need to be made to order in France. We used SVK slates which are almost identical but easier to get hold of and a bit cheaper. We're sorting out the window trims this week - I'll post on the blog once we've decided on the final finish, but it's likely to be powder coated aluminium to match the frames.

What area is your plot in, Marten? Have you decided what and how to build? Have you got your planning permission? Have you considered starting a blog? With lots of photos? We love lots of photos. In any event, welcome! And remember those opening words so you can reflect in them in a couple of years.

If you store it now, it may well need new upholstery by the time you bring it home as moths are voracious and this is getting to their busy season. The eggs will be nicely embedded in the fabric now with little chance of removing them. I treated my carpets at home with thorough vacuuming and spraying with flea spray. It worked for a while but I wasn't persistent enough and the moths won in the end.

Ours dumped it next to our small bit of hard standing and it did a good job of expanding the vehicle access until it finally started to crumble.

I wonder if it got clogged by all that Saharan sand that came up with the warm weather at easter. Either way, all that stuff is better off in the filter than your lungs, Lizzie.

Do you think that your filter life is shorter because your MVHR was blasting at a high rate until recently? It would be logical to see how this would clog them more quickly.

We did a loft conversion at our current house and it has a road facing velux. No pp required for the conversion, only building regs. It also has a side dormer and velux on the other side and rear.

Well, I've just made a load of beeswax cotton wraps to cut out the need for clingfilm. A very small contribution but a positive one, nonetheless.

Well, after years of resistance OH finally bought a pressure washer a couple of years back. The drains regularly block at his parents' house (waste from other houses) and the old drain rods finally gave way, as did he with them. Besides doing a good job on the drains, he has relectantly admitted that cleaning the car with it is so much easier than by hand having damned them as the work of the devil for many years. How age changes one's view!

They haven't fulfilled their contractual obligations, it's as simple as that. Proposing a half cocked unsatisfactory solution that will never be as good as what you have ordered and paid for. Far less painful to put right now, at the supplier's expense, as they have made the error. Hard to fathom why they didnt figure out the error until the entire floor was laid. Did no one read the spec?

Where are you located? Perhaps visit some real world examples to get a feel for things. I'm in north Dorset if that's any help, and at the tail end of second fix with most of the decorating done - things look different again when they've been painted. I should add that we have a contemporary open plan build and 2700 ceiling height downstairs.

Gosh, what a fabulous house! Amazing attention to detail.

Ah, if only. MIL won't have him back.

My aged mother in law has a problem with the loo in her house. A plumber visited recently to replace all new innards inside the tank, including float, arm, etc, and it now has a dual flush mechanism. Since replacement, the cistern in filling continuously. OH has tried the adjustment screws and raised the float height to no avail and the tank is still running. Unfortunately, the instruction booklet that came with the new assembly has already been lost. Can anyone give us some pointers as to what we should look at in the tank?

Hubby and I want to use quite a few large rectangular concrete planters around the place, typically 50cm deep and about 80 x 50cm area, as a minimum. We've looked online and once you get to large sizes, they're very expensive and we probably couldn't afford any plants to go in them once we'd bought the planters. How difficult would it be to make these ourselves? We've looked at some utube videos with what seem like varying of competence. Making a mould of the right dimensions is simple enough, but then it's a question of ensuring being able to remove the mould and the robustness of the planter itself. Any thoughts, anyone?