Gone West

Our local farmer took our excess top soil for no cost. He left a 3m3 bucket in our drive which we filled with a wheelbarrow and he took away with a telehandler. We did this six times. A while back we gave him all our excess crushed concrete using the same method. He also did a lot of our early rubble removal and digging out for the sewage treatment plant for which we paid him. Having a friendly local farmer can make life easier when doing building work.

We have the same situation with our toilets. I noticed it when I fitted the seats, but didn't see it as a problem because unless in use the lid is always down. I don't understand how the overall function of the toilet is impaired.

Another fan of Sonos. We like KISS.

Sorry, yes I meant bedroom not kitchen.

It looks like the doors are quite narrow in the kitchen. At 1810mm opening I would have two doors only. We have a 1650mm opening in our kitchen with a pair of doors. They are tilt and turn though, so can be windows or doors.

I fitted downlights in my soffits and clipped the cable to the rafters.

We filled our hedgehog home with hay but he still took in mouthfulls of leaves. They're never happy unless they can tweak things a bit, must be catching.

Great news. Do you have a time line for the construction or will it take as long as it takes.

Well done. It's good your draught proving is working well, it's a really good way to save energy. We also like warm air heating although ours doesn't come on a lot. Looks like there's still plenty to keep you busy .

Possibly, or something is quickly soaking up all that water.

Shame, a pile of skulls would have been a good 3D printer project.

We haven't hand washed any dishes or anything for years. Unless you've only got two plates put them in the dishwasher and when it's full switch it on, much more economical.

It will not make a huge difference but the hot water will take a bit longer to reach the tap, the house will be a bit hotter inside in the summer.

A week ago or so I finally made an abode for our hedgehog. I made it a similar design to yours but used old wooden gravel boards. A hedgehog went into it the first night to investigate and last night spent an hour or so taking dried leaves in. At 6.23 this morning it went in and hasn't come out yet so I guess it's content. I'll put the camera out early this evening to see what time it comes out.

I didn't have any problems at all fitting them, very straightforward.

Just to be different I fitted Kidde mains with rechargeable lithium backup for smoke and heat alarms.

It's surprising that changing from a Secoh pump to a Hiblow has reduced the noise level. Your Hiblow is quieter than my Secoh but mine is rated at 100l/min and is their old design, the new Secoh JDK models are less noisy than the old Secoh EL series. As I said earlier it looks as though the air is diverted for one minute in an hour so it wouldn't be a good idea to turn it off for some of the time.

The Klargester BioFicient+ system is a lot more sophisticated than my 10 year old WPL system. The air pump spec. indicates it's rated at 58W for 80l/min which is much better than mine and that it produces 36dBA which is lower than mine. I can't hear mine unless I'm very close to it, but mine is in a semi-buried housing. It could be that yours is noisy because of something else vibrating inside the pump housing. Looking at their video I was wondering whether the air is diverted at intervals to different parts of the system.

It might be that they are wanting all black panels or inset roof panels, both of which would affect the look of the build.

We only used hawthorn and blackthorn so it would be easy to keep them in check. We were lucky and nearly all of our bare rooted whips took well and we only needed to replace two from our heeled in replacement stock. It's amazing how quickly the heeled in spares rooted. It took a lot of digging to remove them after a year.

I used Buttonfix type 2 to fix a small panel in our kitchen. It worked fine but it was a small panel with only two fixings.

Do the existing clay pipes go under the foundations or through them. I had a quote for moling 4m under a lane which was quite cheap with me digging a big hole both sides of the lane.

Our neighbours have a Nibe ASHP against their North facing house wall 2m from our fence. It isn't possible to hear it running when we're in our garden, but when it shuts down it makes a whirring noise for a few seconds. I guess that's normal for all ASHPs.

Is there a problem these days with most straw bales being much larger than years ago when they could be picked up by hand. Do you have to ask the farmer to use old equipment for baling.

Hi, welcome to the forum and good luck with the building work. You might find this thread enlightening.