Carrerahill

We are working with the architect not BMW themselves. I have done quite a few BMW's over the years and largely the architect is given total design responsibility reporting to the BMW estates lot so I never need to deal with them although they are sometimes at the meetings, in fairness those guys are just building/construction/estates managers doing a construction industry job and always seem to be nice guys. I think all car sales involves slime! Probably why I keep my cars in top condition and keep them for a long time to avoid dealing with car sales!

It so happens I am working on a new build BMW showroom right now!!

I like the look of this one, however, my worry about this one would be the small fixing area, fine if you can stick two pieces of threaded rod with resin into a piece of concrete but that just looks like a recipe for disaster, with wind loading I could see that loading up those fixings significantly, the result is then damaged masonry etc. if it lets go. The one Jeremy designed spreads the load a bit down the wall and puts a decent potion of the load into compression on the bottom of the arm with the top fixings in tension giving the clamping force required to lock it into place.

Assuming you have a good substrate to fix to I do not see that being an issue.

Fabricator will want drawings unless they are imaginative. Where are you, one would go on a pallet no bother! If that looks to be helpful let me know. He could send down the metal all powedercoated or galvanised and then have a local glazier supply the toughened or he could ship the lot, we have had projects in London and it made it in one piece and we specified this guy as we felt he knew what we wanted doing and we knew his workmanship.

Our steel chap makes these as customs. We have been involved in the structural design of canopies for commercial properties and I did a lit one, see attached, this is one of ours, I even have photos of it during fabrication somewhere. This one had the impression of it going through the glass in a complete 360° section. Photo is just a grab from Street View.

I am not too keen on that, over your OSB you would have a membrane like Protect TF200 or Dupont Reflex and if you stuff PIR board of the same thickness as the depth of the cavity then you have removed the ventilation over the face of the membrane and this would as I see it create a perfect moisture trap at the OSB layer. We went for render, block, 50mm cavity, breather reflective membrane over 11mm OSB (I wouldn't use anything less than 11 for the cost of it - even 11mm is fairly flimsy), onto 6x2 studs, 100mm of QuinnTherm PIR in-between studs, then plaster and skim - we could have gone for the same makeup but a layer of QuinnTherm over the studs too but we didn't need it, we did however do that on the ceiling. We could have also use 125mm QuinnTherm but that would have reduced our service void too much and to be honest, as it stands the rooms take only the warmth of Henry the hoover running to take the chill of it!

It would not go through the lot to the soil no, it depends on makeup of your slab and all sorts but it could be encased in the concrete, the big house builders tend only to put the bare minimal in the slab like incoming utilities and drainage, then all the wiring and radiator pipes drops from the ceiling level, I don't like this way much but as an example it's what some do. There are so many ways to do this to be honest.

I'd not use poison either, with all the issues our planet has the last thing I want to do is dump poison onto it, but I get it, it's used, and I do sometime deploy it but very very rarely.

This exact point:

Scrape the site and dig out any roots, you don't need to go down deep. When we did ours with a 3' digger bucket I just ran the bucket about 2-3 inches into the ground and removed the whole top layer, most things it just nipped off from roots and left them and bigger things it tore out. The result was a fairly clean site with only minimal amount of holes where things needed a bit more effort - there wasn't really any digging - apart from the big hole, or should I call that "soak-away".

Grab a shovel, a mattock or pick and mark out 1m^2 and clear it down to a scraped clear piece of land. Take a middle of the road piece in terms of bit of old found, old bush etc. and clear it, see how long that takes and multiply by 289 that will give you an idea of time and indeed effort. If you have nothing else to do and want a work out then great, go for it, I'd get a skip though. You can get a Mattock for £20, a wheelbarrow would be good too, good gloves and plenty of other "weapons" to help you! That site will produce a pile of waste about the size of a small caravan.

Having now read this I think it's got to be a site scrape and skip - unless there is somewhere clearly out the of the way of the site you can "lose" the waste.

How big is the site (does the photo show the extent and even if so photos can be deceptive), how much time do you have and how much cash do you want to put into it? Also, what is the ground going to be used for? Where are you going to put the waste? You could do that in a easy day with a mini excavator and a skip to dump all the waste into or bury, or it could take you 3 weekends working flat out and you will still have land that has roots and stubs and residual vegetation. I went down the digger option and it still took me 3 days and a crew of 3-4 of us over the weekend and myself on the Monday and that was with a 1.5ton JCB! Yes I did dig founds and did other stuff but the general site clearance bit took much much longer than planned and I felt the £250 for the excavator to do all that in essentially a long weekend was worth every penny. It also saved us a fortune as I dug a huge hole and basically bulldozed the old garage brick into it, then put in all the vegetation scrapings then backfilled in layers while compacting with the excavator. No skip on site at all and a very well draining lawn now, which in 3 years has not subsided one bit. Obviously don't bury stuff where you may build and only bury garden waste or rock/brick/concrete and deep enough it should never upset anyone in the future.

Utility will install one at the point it comes off of their network and onto the private pipework so it will be there anyway. Utility wouldn't just stick a piece of pipe into their network and directly into his house or he would have no way of disconnecting network water from his pipework.

I think a whole house feed in the garage would be a good idea if that is where you plan on bringing in the services. Looking at it I think I would create a mains feed in, then have a ground and first split off with 2 more separate isolators, for the sake of another say £15 you then have cold water isolation to ground and first - probably come in handy when you start your build maybe getting a bathroom fired up without full plumbing yet being complete or the kitchen sink etc. Another option I quite like is the manifold option, however, it makes sense to have the hot and cold together so I am not sure where you intend on putting your DHW source? If you split it by floor you could have your kitchen, utility and shower room all tied in nicely via fairly simple run, then the first floor feed straight up into the floor void, into the en-suites and baths with another nice simple run across the floor. I would also put in motorised isolation valves for each floor, but that is just me and part of my plan to automate the house with "Holiday Mode" which includes, among heating and electrical and lighting modes the isolation of water systems - may seem mad but I think it makes sense.

This is a fairly good video which shows the whole process (if I recall correctly).

Just thinking, what sort of property are you in? Can you get onto your roof safely enough? Could you do most of the work? In Scotland you can do it yourself anyway, I know it is different for you guys (although if I lived in England and it was my property I would install it myself anyway), I'd do a better job than a "pro" firm that installs stoves around here. Bloody cowboys they are and clueless. Since my stove was installed I have had it out once to sort a cracked board (ended up going for Everbuild 500°C plaster) and reinstalled it all, it's a skoosh to install it and if you understand the principles and best practise you would be fine. I paid a guy as it ticked off a big list of things and saved me going up onto our roof, which I didn't fancy truthfully. If I was going to do it again I would DIY it for sure, only thing I may do is pay someone to pull in the liner. Another option would be to prepare it all and have the guy come in and literally fit the liner and connect it to the stove.

Total rip off. Where are you? Friend had a stove installed for £2200 including the stove, liner the works. Guy is fully HETAS registered pucka guy. My installer took £1500 and I supplied the stove, he had to break out the old fireplace to expose builders box, clean chimney, fit 904-316 liner (around 7.5m of it), line the builders box, fit a register plate, fit sandstone hearth, black metal bezel and a chunky oak mantle, chimney back filled with vermiculite and cowl fitted.

What a mess that is in, paint and dust over it all, bloody hole in the wall with wires shoved through! Madness! If there are bits missing as per the engineers observations and assuming they are from the contractor who supplied/installed this, then I would suggest they should be looking into it. Do you know a neighbour well enough to go and have a look at theirs?

This!

Thank you. As in: https://www.diy-kitchens.com/ Do you have one of these in your house?

You speak of the installer, what about the manufacturer? Would they send out a rep or technical guy to confirm the windows are not right and put that in writing. Why can the installer not fix them? Are they installed out of square or pinched or stretched out of shape causing leaks? Where do they leak from? Can you identify the root cause of the leaks? You speak of an expert but you may be surprised that really you could produce a written document listing all the issues. If I bought a bath tub and it didn't hold water I suspect that a report explaining it didn't hold water from myself would, sorry, hold water! However, if the issue was at a coupling installed by a plumber then you need to ascertain did the plumber stuff it or is the fitting faulty. This may take a bit more knowledge to confirm where the fault lies and yes you may need expert help. I'd write it up like a professional snagging document - just list each issue and give it a number - then write a conclusion listing any possible causes for these leaks, however, do not shoot yourself in the foot, for example, if the windows were squint, don't mention that the windows have been pulled badly out of square, if you did this they might claim your window openings were squint and the installers had to work with the poor openings they had. So make sure if this does appear to be the case, that you word it such that they cannot turn it on you, you could say that packers have been used of incorrect thicknesses or something.

Easy one really, now the kitchen building is ready for a kitchen I am keen to crack on, there is a plethora of manufacturers and I guess I could just go and find a couple of manufactures and get some quotes but I'd like a steer. I have experience of Howdens, Ikea and Wren. I fitted a Howdens kitchen into a garage, we also have Howdens stuff into the office kitchen, seems OK, there is the cheaper end of the range and I get that that stuff isn't great and more of a contractor special, fine, longevity, well from what I have seen so far it seems good, both occasions it was the high gloss slab doors/drawers. I used low rise Ikea cabinets to built a custom home office with oak tops, I have been pleased with this, it looks very smart, custom fitted into the corner of the room, but it's not getting wet (maybe a tea cup ring!) and it's not being clonked and clunked in a kitchen - they seemed OK but not sure if they are up to family kitchen use - the drawers do seem to have a bit more lateral movement that I would like - I don't like the side rail construction of them either, they have a metal lower section then a gap then a metal rail from front to back, I know my kitchen drawers, and realistically, stuff would fall out the sides! Wren, my brother had Wren installed in his kitchen, I was around a lot during the build as he was on holiday when it went in and I was to oversee and PM the joiners in his absence, I liked it, seems like solid stuff, however I believe as a business they are a shower and their own installers are a joke but I would not be using their people. Many people have commented that they are expensive, however, so is a Miele oven, but your buying quality and I like quality. What I am not sure of, is just because they are a good brand with prices which reflect this, or are they overpriced mass produced middle of the road? So - does the above reflect what others think, are they all really much of a muchness and we get too carried away about names, like motor oil!

Anything up to about 3 storey is often TF in Scotland for domestic buildings - they built some flats near our offices last year and when I drove past they brought back memories of Canada as everything out there is just big timber and OSB clad structures wrapped in Tyvek. That is what these looked like, then they rattled up a facing brick skin. If I was building my forever home it would probably be block cavity or something similar. Our extension is TF with external block skin and 19mm dash finish, so the external leaf is the weather protector really. Before the block work was up our extension was fully wind and water tight, windows and doors in etc. the outer skin is just a jacket and offers very little by way of support to the timber structure when it is built. I have no issue with timber frame, if it is done well, TF got bad press mainly from the big house builders who use that matchstick wood in prefab panels. I saw some roof trusses on the back of a wagon just before Christmas and I pointed them out to my wife, our roof spans were smaller yet our timber was 2x8 these things looked to be about a 40mm x 75mm so not quite 2x3 - but it just square sawn stuff - it just looks like matchsticks to me. I assume they buy this timber direct as no merchant or even shed ever stocks the sort of wood they are using or perhaps they self mill - don't know. What I do know is I was in a SIPS factory a year or two ago and they have proper 2x4/6/8/9/10 and the stuff looked bloody solid. They also ensured all timber was below 10% moisture content before they used it, idea being that they wanted all the shrinkage etc. to have taken place before they build. Our brick layer told me about a row of houses he worked on for one of the mid-sized house builders, they rattled the frames up, soaking wet, brick skin went on immediately after and the houses were fitted out and about 3 months later they got a call to say that some lintels had moved, they went in and the timber frame had shrunk so much that the doors and windows had all shifted and doors wouldn't open and close as they were being crushed! So it is practises like this that give a bad name to a construction method. I actually monitored the shrinkage in our TF and even had some allowances calculated into it to allow for shrinkage - all in all I think it worked out very well as after the roof membrane and battens went on, but before it was fully wrapped and windows etc. put in it had time for the whole lot to dry out in the warm summer we had. I understand that most programs would not allow for this but we had other site work to get on with, concrete pours and new walls and things so the TF got a chance to settle and I am hoping this will give it the best start in life.