ToughButterCup

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 .?

You and your builder have a professional relationship, not a theraputic one. I'm almost (but not quite) sure the remark was made out of kindness - but '...cannot let (you) live .... ' is inappropriate. Pay, Wave. Move on.

And yet , currently, you can't get a 'White-Van-Man' for love or money. @nod , in our sector , are individual traders (White-van-man) safe? Or are they similarly exposed?

The one time you don't want a swearword filter because - after seeing that - swearing is entirely appropriate. Fekkin ' ell. Poor owners. I bet they feel like they've had the stuffing knocked out of them.

Thats quite hard to achieve. Topsoil is often too 'rich' Keep back some poor soil and small crushed stone as a topping. We've had poor results so far, so I'm hoarding clean stone and remnants of sharp sand in an effort to duplicate the poor soil in which many wild flowers grow. Anyway, best of luck! Before and after photos would be good ?

For us, on 'Made Ground' , (spoil from an old clay quarry) , the answer is yes, its OK. A 4m high bank over a little more than 100 meters length. No geotextile , but far too many nettles, brambles rampant, some builders' rubble mixed in, trees at the bottom of the bank . I suspect the trees drain the bank a good bit. Where our children used to scramble up the bank - or badgers burrowed into it (and now rats have taken over) , we 'got rid of' a few telegraph poles and let the animal excavations collapse in their own good time. The bank is now a Great Crested Newt reserve: we let it go wild most of the year. Then knock it back a bit at back-end: or not if I forget .....? Pinning it pro tem with geotextile and getting some ground ivy in quickly might just be what you need.

Smarting yes, but sensible it seems. In this case (above), a good dose of Emotional Literacy all round might well have reduced the issue to more manageable proportions.

The number 20,000 hours is a research-based number. Expert status - irrespective of discipline - is usually achieved within that time . I'll dig out the reference if you want. Charge like this (our architect's charging schema)

Emotional intelligence The earned respect of your peers The ability to work well with tradesfolk The habit of listening first Technical flair based on no less than 10 years practice (20,000 hours: includes postgraduate level study) Clear pricing structure : one that does not refer to percentages of a nebulous value (eg. 'contract value')

A very warm welcome.... Yours is the most asked question on BH. The question of cost underpins almost every post here, even the technical ones.So the very best advice we could give is to suggest you waste an complete week or perhaps more reading BH. If you do it in a focused way it really - honestly - will repay the effort. In the first year of reading BH , we avoided bills for at least £17k ( by changing the pile design for our house based on advice and links included on BH) Please though, do always do your own Due Diligence. We are not experts, just hard-bitten , nosey little tinkers ..... Best of luck Ian

Go on - gizza clue ... for the non-card playing BildHubbers

As to number of blocks, I couldn't tell you. But I can attest to the value of a timelapse camera installed on site. Incontrovertable evidence is worth a lot of money.

I got the same type of response from a the builders of some flats in Lancaster: right on the riverside by a main road to Morecambe. I told them that, if the builder hadn't got the issue sorted within the week, I'd have an advertising-type banner made up so that all the commuters passing by could see what sh1te service the company was giving. Monday morning the banner was up for thousands of people to see: the local press were due to come round later that day. Lunchtime Monday work started on the repair. Banner cost me £50. The best £50 I ever spent.