Russell griffiths

I’m a bit baffled by a lot of this class Q stuff. Can you iron out a few things for me. I applied for full planning and had a site meeting with the planners, 3 months later we had planning, since that day I have not seen a single person from the planning dept. The next man on site was building control to inspect our foundations. So bear with me here. You get the foundation design you want passed by building control, you then take down the steel frame completely, excavate out pour the foundation you want and put the frame back up. I bet the building regs guy wouldn't give a hoot the frame wasn’t there. Am I missing something.

They look good, is the program easy to use, I’m a bit thick you see. I like diggers and nailing things together i noticed it said trial version, any pointers to getting this, do I need to tell a few porkies as I fill in registration forms or anything.

I fully understand that, but common sense will tell you that a leaky old cottage is not going to be heated by ASHP, not unless he has a big row of them.

As others have said, shore it up now before it comes down, get the outer leaf up. You wouldn't normally build higher than a lift, so basically as high as you can reach then the scaffold co come in, to go 3.5m you must be on some scaffolding of some sort. As it’s still up now I think you have dodged a bullet.

How about those concrete Lego blocks somebody did a wall recently in them, not very pretty but if it’s not that visible

@SteamyTea I don’t think there is any point in heat loss calcs, as you know the answer already. Stone built cottage on 3 sides, standard building regs extension on 4th side, house beside a stream in Wales even I can work that one out. Soloution big AGA.

I think my build will now slow down a bit if yours is done, it’s your funny little mishaps that keep me jolly, as I’m walking across those joists I often picture you stuck in the gap and feel all warm inside. Oh my life is pointless now. ?

As peter said, steel supplier does a mesh support that is shaped like a z, you can squish them down a bit if needed. I would also use mars bars wherever you can as the plastic spacers crush if stood on by a fat concreter.

I have a kubota 1-5 tonne machine, but I bought a high spec one so it punches well above its weight it has has a wide track base so is very stable, but the tracks retract in so it will fit through a 1m opening it has zero tail swing so I can work up against a wall without knocking it down i never use it without it impressing me, I have pulled things and pushed things that others have said I would never do.

Never, I have both, the excavator got used nearly every day for probably the first 8-10 weeks, the telehandler gets used for an hour a fortnight and now the shell is up it won’t be used again.

Look at a 3 tonne plus machine

Well done old boy amazing what you can achieve with only 8 fingers. ??

As Tony said, you buy a 600mm wide dpc and put this under the frame, leave it draping onto the block n beam, then later on you install the dpm and join the two with tape. Of more concern is what he has drawn to stop the sole plate getting cold, you mention a row of bricks, this should be improved to prevent the cold causing the sill to rot out.

Oh god, made a cock up read your post to quickly, i had assumed your insulation was a rockwool type fluffy bat when it is actually pir board. In that case I would change that duct to the oval stuff and chop it into the second layer of pir under the plasterboard. Having removed 50mm of insulation in a small strip will not make any difference to heat loss. Its the lack of vapour control that is the issue.

Having thought a bit more, you wouldn’t need to cut out the pir to fit the duct, just push the duct into the other insulation. I would still up the other insulation to 200mm and check what you are doing for a vapour control layer.

Can anybody explain how they get rockwool out from a cavity.

I’ve owned a number of diggers over the years but they have all been shiny and new. This time I needed an older one as it would only be for personal use, I found that there was a couple of sweet spots for pricing £10-12 grand will hold a great deal of money and you will sell them without losing a huge amount if you kept it for two years. £7-8 grand exactly the same as above still good and will have a good re sale below £5 grand was just trouble, getting old and tired, still loads of life but more problems starting to appear. I would stick to kubota, yanmar, hitachi you might find the re sale on the Chinese one is a lot less and you will take a big hit as the first owner. Remember the vat, you cannot claim this back unless you obviously buy it through a vat registered company.

I’m not 100% sold on your roof build up. 1.. I don’t believe you need to leave the 50mm void between insulation and your sarking board. As you have a ventilation gap above the boards. I’m happy to be told I’m wrong. 2. What is providing your vapour control layer ? so why not use standard pir under the rafters instead of insulated plaster in the area of the duct and bring the duct closer to the surface so it has full insulation behind it and only a strip of pir missing where the duct is.

Hammer and chisel, lots of damage. No more damage than 50 holes, if you screwed them on.

There are very few materials shortages, just people using it as an excuse. Just use 50mm pir, then tape it then plasterboard, it will be cheaper, that insulated plasterboard is very expensive.

this is a picture of mine, ignore the junk we where trying to plan our kitchen. You can just see the ceiling. Thats 70mm of pir board on the underside of my joists, then a batten, plasterboard is fitted to this batten if you can see the boards are taped together and sealed to the wall with an air sealing paste, you will just tape it to your pir in the walls. I noticed you have a few cables running along the sides of joists, is it to late to move them inside the thermal envelope of the building, every penetration through the vapour layer will need sealing.

You can fix this easily ditch the insulated plasterboard, it’s very expensive and only does half a job. Instead change it into two different products doing the same and a better job fit pir board on the inside taped and joined to each other to make a complete flat silver surface, then add a batten to form a gap to run services through and so no lights or other things penetrate this silver vapour control layer, then add plasterboard. You need in theory to make a fully sealed up tinfoil box, any water moisture will find any gaps and go inside the structure, it then turns into condensation as it hits a cold surface, if you stop it getting there by keeping it inside your box then that’s what you want.

I think you need to find something else to worry about 10-15mm out of plumb would hardly show up on the chippies level if you can still see the bubble it’s fine.

It’s gone mate, Jeremy has joined a traveling circus. Blog has gone. Somebody must have peed him off.

So you don’t have an airtight membrane at all then, boards between studs or rafters will not form an airtight seal. So you either turn what you have into a membrane or install a separate membrane over the top of what you have. Version 1 all boards need fitting tightly to the studs rafters, squirty foam everything, then silver aluminium tape every join, join each board to each stud then the next until you have an entire room that is silver, there won’t be a bit of timber on show. A bloke on here recently did a very good job zoothorn look up his extension questions it’s in there somewhere, it will basically look like a cannabis grow room. Version 2. buy a roll of air tight bembrane and tape it over the face of all walls, ceilings, taping all joins and taping walls to ceiling and walls to floor including void under the first floor ceiling. Look on youtube, loads of product videos showing procedure poinless having lots of insulation if it’s air leaky.