ToughButterCup

Well, you at least will understand when I say : "How do I know what a Gallic Shrug is....?"

Hello, welcome. The title of your post leads me to caution : are you sure you're going to get Planning Permission? I ask because it would be horrible to put a lot of effort into the details of the build , only to be refused permission.

From bitter experience I offer the following. Context is important. Couple of quick questions. Do any officials or planners or ecologists have dated documentary evidence of the property - especially, are there any photographs? How well do you know the ecologists involved? How arsey or co-operative is the LPA's ecologist (not yours) ? Let me describe what happens locally. A year before any official gets to a site where there is a hint of wild-life, and the owners live out-of-the-way (on a farm or behind screening trees) site owners kill the protected species in that location. (I've described how a few times on this board - but across a wide range of locations, pig manure works a treat it seems). IF there is no documentary evidence of your site after examination by the ecologist AND your site is 'out-of-sight', then locally, owners would just get on and do it. I'm not suggesting that that is what I would do, nor suggesting you should, but on my build, since I did not follow local tradition, I spent about £6000 more than needed, and the project was delayed by 9 months. The micropolitics of this type of issue is extremely important. Tread lightly.

Welcome. Thats the kind of post that's really appreciated here : offering help rather than a long description of a knotty problem. Photo of the silver trowel please..... ☺️

... neatly describing why builders call architects eejits and architects say that builders never follow their drawings anyway Another way of putting the same thing is : two groups of Competent People (CDM 2015) - for whose services we pay - do what the Hell they want and blame the other when things go breasts up Which is why - for us paymasters - a sense of humour is compulsory.

Exactly right.

Clearer display than the Bosch .................

Look for @Jeremy Harris recommendation on this board. I agree with the point above: you're looking for relative temperature difference. In a fit of lust, I bought the Bosch colour thermometer a couple of years ago. Works a treat. It's good enough to act as a thermal imager to identify rats 20 meters away. Yes, @SteamyTea, yes, I know.

I needed 64 - cost £6,500. Town And Country Vibro John Ashton is yer man 01772322044 • Work 07885673213 • Mobile

Unlucky @markocosic : very often rats regard their dead brethren as lunch. Waste not want not.

Their teeth never stop growing. They have to gnaw. They'll gnaw through thin metal mesh.

Mice? Mice? Try our rats. Since we live next to what has recently become a pig-farm, we have some right cocky fewkers. Once they'd eaten through the rodent mesh, they were into our roof space (all 80mm of it) like , well, rats up a drain. Here's the kicker : they continued to gnaw in the roof space immediately above our bed head. Sciffle scuffle scuffle. Sleep impossible. As luck would have it, when the rats struck, I hadn't taken the scaffolding down. So - in my Jim-Jams at 10:30 of a freezing evening - flip-flops frozen to my feet, I'm up the scaff ladder like a homesick angel. Pitch black outside. Nuts somewhere in my throat Grab a spare scaff pole which was lying on the boards. Using that pole, bang really hard on the barge board - hard. Hard enough to warm me up a bit. I wuz furious. SWMBO shouts from inside - "What da Fekkety Fek's that - - - sweetheart? " ( a bit late that endearment - sweetheart) "Lesser-spotted pole-rat darlin" "Well it's still nibblin' " Bollerks; Bang very hard, start to slip on the frozen scaff boarding. From up there, I look down at the lane next to our house: pitch black except for a red-flashing set of lights and a dim haze reflected from a hi-viz jacket . - No street lights - Ooooops: my near neighbour walking her dog. It had stopped to look at the eejit up a scaff this late of an evening. "Hi Ian, howzit goin' ? Cold up there is it? " "Can you tell from down there [.... name redacted ...] . I'm amazed." Only then did I notice that my legs and withers (but not my rippling-muscled torso) were illuminated by the light from our bedroom window. Its amazing what tremendous night-vision women have. I thought it was cold enough for it to be invisible. But no, apparently . Anyway, local Rat Man came and sorted it all out. And I ordered a new night-sight for my gun. Worthy opponents, rats. Worthy opponents.

Whats needed now is to get her back out there grafting while you have a well earned rest Good luck (with that) Ian 😉

' ... the wife was struck down with Cellulitis that turned into necrotising fasciitis, which could have led to sepsis....' And what you don't say is that she could therefore easily have died. I really deeply , from bitter personal experience, hope she is on the mend. Really. deeply .... In my case, a cat bit me. A favourite, much loved playful cat. Cant take a joke? Dont keep a cat

I realised somewhat later than I should have done, that setting up for making routine operations easy is very important . Cutting a 4" pipe is easy - but it's not easy when you're wet and tired in the bottom of a trench have dirty hands on your own not sure you measured the pipe correctly haven't got the right tools easily to hand I found that a super-jaws clamp is almost exactly the same working height as a scaffold end-step : that means you can handle long pieces of pipe on your own, and focus on making the cut accurately. You can comfortably apply washing up liquid, and then clean your hands off before you jump back into the ditch. A simple clean sheet of board lying next to you in the ditch so you can place and retrieve tools without clogging them up with clay is worth 10 times its cost.

Ah, the delights of slip couplers. It was yet another fight with a slip coupling - on my own - in the wet - that I lost my temper. And when I had done the necessary war dance to calm myself down, I realised that an oil-filter grabber was the thing to use to grab the washing-up-slathered-snake of a pipe. Worked like a charm. Next time, I'll use two. Did I say '...next time ... ' Phhhhhhhhhh..... Must be time to go down the pub. Coming?

...and if you can, take the top layer of soil off, put that on one side of the trench, then dig down to the required level placing that spoil on the other side of the trench, like this

It was following your tip (Test bung above) that caused the explosion in the photo further up this thread. Thanks, mate. On a more positive note, I found this really helpful when working on your own .... Oil filter grip re-imagined

You asked, I delivered.

I moved in as soon as there was water to our shower, and the toilet worked properly. Moving in early has some advantages. It lets you see things from an internal perspective rather than looking at a set of plans or imagining what the space might look like if and when you have finished one particular room. SWMBO moved in a few weeks later.( We built in our garden) . I must confess though that we still managed to put electric sockets in the wrong places. Light switches in the wrong places. And make other niggly little errors. If you keep your HERAS up for as long as you can, that will tend to delay any visits by the local valuation officer. Be sure to put a notice on the HERAS making it clear that permission needs to be sought before getting onto the site.

Rats are worthy foes. Gun to be oiled this afternoon, off to the range later, make sure it's still zeroed properly. New batteries for the scope and image intensifier. Wind is shifting just right for a quiet dusk-time sit down and commune with the enemy. Thanks for the tip about flood valves @nod - missed that .

Forgot that...... good point.

R4 Today talking about using Diesel generators for power generation. What price does the KwH have to be in order for us make it worth our while to use a Diesel genny? @SteamyTea ?

I looked at your image and gulped. Looking at the plan, is there any other way of getting close enough? We had to knock down a fence to put our foul drainage in : a few years later what was a decrepit old hedge is now full of new life ....

Excellent stuff. You will keep the HERAS in place won't you: I'm thinking of the recent VAT threads ....