ToughButterCup

My day is getting better. Thanks you lot. Feeling better by the minute. And if - in addition - Sue Grey kicks Boris' Botty really hard tonight, I'll have a wee dram I think. PS Just had a look at the cost of Suplux and Glasroc fireboard. Suitably expensive. Serves me right. So there.....?

Gottcha.

Been sucking my teeth for a good while about this one - bit embarrassed to admit it - but I need to bite the bullet sometime and now's as good as any. Be gentle with me , I've had an 'interesting' weekend ..... ? I should have boxed (fire-boarded) this steel in before the stairs were fitted. Now look what I've gone and done. I need 12.5mm and I have just over 6 between stringer and beam. Getting my excuses in first, when you're doing a DIY MAX, and help (in the form of an ex-Army mate AKA wall of muscle) arrives unexpectedly, you grab the chance. The stairs had been assembled a week or so earlier and everyone was peed_off walking past them but having to use the ladder. The stairs seemed to be whispering fit-me, fit-me, fit me if you can you weakling...... So when my mate walked in he was press-ganged into helping me: this is the result 6mm doesn't divide by 12.5mm all that easily ... What's that phrase about repenting at leisure? Look on the bright side Ian: the stairs work well. Any bright ideas on how to box the steel in (in 6mm) so that it conforms to the fire regs? Or do I have to knock the house down and start again? (Told you I've had a bad weekend....)

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Store them at my place Gary. Serious offer, loads of space, easy access for Class 1 wagon. PM me if you want Ian

Cheap inspection camera - the ones that you can hitch to a mobile phone?

Want a Planning Officer on your side? Do ask asked.

Written in jest, I hope ... On the other hand, if not, ?, duct one or more of your drainpipes into a rain garden .... that'll more than cope with the problem.

At this remove, I sense the answer could well be No. '... Considering...' means (to me anyway) that Yes - mad as a Hatter is as useful an answer as No (not crazy). We started older than you (60+) , both of us with multiple comorbidities; two of them now each burning brighter than they did back then. The key thing is: in terms of building a house, how well-organised are you ? Errors and crises are the norm for this sector. How resilient are you? I see you're considering a Turn-Key approach. Then it's more of a numbers game. We've now built our home, and each day, we are glad we JustBloodyDidIt . We can see the house we lived in before this one. So I can easily visualise the difference our new house makes: the access issues, the stability of internal temperature, the light, the ease with which we can clean stuff. This self build has cost a good deal more than we anticipated in mental wear and tear, but that needs to be seen in the context of the privilege of being lucky enough to be able to self-build in the first place. You need to be able to take a joke. However unpleasant that joke is at the time.

Morning. What are you planning to do? Planning Permission? Sketches? Plans? Photos? Experience? So much stuff to post. We're as nosey as a herd of cats. Most of us are tame. One or two wild cats ..... Any need for walk-on glass (I'm on a 5% commission)

Wha ? '... the rest glued only ...' ? Glued only? Advice coming three years too late shouldn't be allowed . Mine are glued and, every 400, screwed. A couple of people have mentioned that I tend to over-engineer stuff. Hmmmmm ...

Welcome . A glutton for punishment, I see. Yer in good company here then.....

And there's the exception that proves the rule. With a bit of luck that comment will prompt a deluge of responses showing how wrong I am. Bring it on.

There's lots of good news for me about building. For me it's about the connections made between all those involved.. Over the last five years because I've been outside ' ... doin' stoof ...' as our grandchild says, some people walking past the build have stopped for a chat. Many have expressed interest in passivhaus construction and took the time to come in and look around. Often people had no idea about about ICF - so I have left a few blocks by the side of the road for them to look at. I try to mention the names of the trades folk who have helped us - oil local wheels as it were. Its good news to know the actual difference between what some people in the sector say and what they do. Planners who say one thing in private conversation and write another on official documentation, local councillors who criticise housing development and then a few months later sell their land for building, trades who while smiling in public, behave abominably in private. Its good to know stuff like that. The process of building is so high-stakes that it flushes out both the good and the bad. Most often, I choose to remember the good. Good news, therefore!

A diagram would help ..... There is more than one way of visualising your description.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: dat's reeely coool man, cooool. We have internal blinds throughout. And our tomcat has taken to drawing attention to his many needs by twanging a few blades and waiting for the irritated attention the behaviour attracts. At 3am. he's ...... A set of blinds outside would mean a has-been-tomcat for us, I think.

Hello, welcome. Derelict, we like that. Dereliction means contributors can all furiously disagree and bitch at one another's suggestions, while you take what you want from the answers and do what you wanted to do in the first place anyway. Photos please - oh and what's the water-table like where you are? And what about foul drainage?

Completely normal for a bathroom with no heat in - or a warmish bathroom where the cleaner (me) consistently misses a bit . Dilute bleach and a scrub once a week will do fine.

Thanks everyone. It's finding websites that tell you up front whether Festool stuff is In Stock ..... The opposite is more common. The time taken to select stuff and then find its on Back Order (that mendacious phrase) is what raises blood pressure even more efficiently than reading about Alexander Johnson's latest puerile attempt to keep the keys of No 11.

More in hope than expectation - I'm trying to buy genuine Festool replacement parts; sand paper, polishing sponges and the like. Anyone know of a UK supplier that has any stock of Festool stuff? Wasted hours on Tinternet trying to source them....

That , Ian, is too cool, too cool. Apart from that you can even keep your 16tonne digger in a spare bedroom, it would seem. Hmmmm... Too cool.

Not what you want to hear, but the answer is likely: No. You have worked out that the answer is likely to be based on guess work: I agree. Years of dealing with complaints about student noise (in student houses and their Lancastrian neighbours), and working with both parties to try and resolve the issues raised makes me very sympathetic ideed to your problem. People - on both sides of a dividing wall - often simply don't realise how the noise they make transmits into their neighbours' properties. One thing I did that seemed to help was to get one person from each house / room/ flat / to visit the others' home and listen. Not an easy task to co-ordinate, but it worked - sometimes. Students would realise how noisy they sometimes were, and ordinary folk who happened to live next door would be surprised at the way (for example) a baby's cries were easily picked up in the student abode. In other words noise - if there is any- travels both ways. Its people's reaction to the same noise that differs - greatly. Lancaster has some large hospitals : night shift nurses need their sleep during the day. According to some nurses, students by all accounts being reasonably quiet were not seen as quiet by the nurses. The key thing to do is to keep working together to solve the problem. And that is very a challenging thing to do. Good luck. Ian

Yep: every morning (now on just over the 24,867th ) I wake up and call that a success. Late 20s @thefoxesmaltings eh? Excellent. The first of many builds then, maybe?

Just Bloody Do It (JBDI) There is a clear rationale for your decision and - most importantly - why you are not doing what you might reasonably be expected to do. You are not taking the path of least resistance. Very few people understand how much self-building exposes the owner to random insult. No matter, you just have to keep going. Head Down @rse Up Go.

Excellent phrase that '... slum it a bit ...' @Jilly If - as is the case with us - your other half is deeply immersed in a job and not involved in the day to day stuff, slumming it a bit in the house before completion is a useful phase. It helps to have time for both of you to sit and cogitate - imagineering is what SWMBO calls it. I call it doing-as-I'm-told .?