Carrerahill

Snowcrete is just white cement, it is also stronger, but I understand that is a function of the manufacturing process of a white cement rather than intended. If you google render mixes you get literally 10's of options. I am going to go for 5:1 but may add lime to and go 6:1:1. I just did a scratch coat last night using: https://www.enewall.co.uk/surerend-base-coat/ It was ODD stuff to mix, the water literally just ran over the powder and it took some mixing until it started to blend up - it was like the powder was coated in wax! I am therefore assuming there is some sort of silicone waterproofer or something in it. Worked well, oddly although a fine powder it had some 2-3mm bits of grit through it which just made a nucence of itself. Checked it this morning and seem solid and I'll get the final coat on to it this weekend with some luck - not sure what though! I think it will be their magnoila top coat with a white/off-white chip. For the back of this same garage I am going to do as @ProDave says and use a sand cement (snowcrete) finish as I will never see the back of the garage and I just need a good solid surface with no maintenance.

I am a partner of an engineering consultancy so I have access to CAD etc. Autocad LT (light version) is about £300 per annum and the full version is £1350.00 per annum. It takes a while to learn, I think the easiest way to learn it to use it and find all the problems and then discover the solution. CAD is one of the most powerful pieces of software I can think of and I reckon most people only use about 10% of it's capabilities. The thing with CAD is that although it has lots of pretty buttons, everything is command driven, hammer in a couple of letters or a word and you have a tool or function that there isn't even a button for. Ideally you need a mentor. Everything you learn from guides is great, until you load a drawing that comes in with UCS on a 18.3° rotation and a wonky looking cross-hair! It's at time like this you need someone next to you to help. I was lucky that when I started out in consultancy I sat next to our teams CAD technician - on day one I knew how to draw a line and a circle and a rectangle! By pestering him for about a year while on the job learning I reckon I became an above average CAD user for an engineer. Mainly because everyone just sent stuff to the CAD department, but I used to do all my own drawings and publish my own drawing packages as I saw it as a faster process - i.e. direct from my mind and straight onto the screen, others would mark drawings up on paper and issue them to him... didn't see the point. It paid dividends too, when I moved firm it transpired their CAD knowledge was very poor. I was able to help take that business from being CAD newbies with very basic drawing templates and no automatic data take-off or legends to fully automated CAD drawings and standard auto fill title-blocks etc. An option for you would be to pay a 1st year architectural student or something to provide basic draughtsman services. As I say, if it's a 10min job then I will do it.

You are entirely correct - and they certainly do do this sometimes. I would say, in all honesty, I rarely find a locked-down drawing. A long term project we do for a major UK retailer involves getting drawings of all their sites, we probably get drawings in from scanned line drawings dating back 30-40 years to PDFed CAD drawings from whatever the facilities team can find for us and drawings are from all sorts of sources - I think so far I have maybe come across 2 or 3 out of around 800 sties. The layers are almost always flattened when PDFed but they only help the person working on the drawing, by the time they are printed off or PDFed again it makes no difference to the appearance of the drawing if the whole thing sits on a single layer 0. It just makes editing difficult if it is major.

Health and Safety has gone mad, but health and safety around the erection and use of scaffolding is very serious and much be adhered to. That is not mad H&S, mad H&S is the BS we need to put up with with so some idiot can stand and tell us how to walk into a plant room and then issue us with a certificate while extracting £200 for the privilege!

Are we talking a couple of walls and a window - 10 minutes work or multiple walls and windows and taking into consideration all the relevant details that may need tweaked - couple of hours? If it's a 10 min tweak, then mark up your paper copy, send me that and the PDF (or if you have the DWG file even better), and assuming it converts OK I will change them.

How minor are the changes you need done?

I hate to tell you this, but I bet the architect just took the original PDF's and just converted them to CAD format - tweaked some line-weights and added their own title-blocks and charged you for the privilege.

Just full the ".dwg" format drawings for CAD or whatever software they may have used. Assume just standard CAD drawings and not 3D models etc.? Also, do you have the drawings in PDF format? If it was me I would just take the PDF's and convert them to CAD and not bother paying them for them. Assuming you have already paid for their services they are now just being thiefs and making you pay a premium as the realise you are going elsewhere now.

Can you not use foil backed plasterboard?

Thanks. Next question. I know Dave, you used wooden flooring over yours, I would like tile in the kitchen, but may use a laminate product - if I go tile - how do you make up the floor above without the tile grout cracking and tiles lifting from expansion cycles? I am setting the joist height this weekend (i.e. building the dwarf walls etc.) so I need to bottom out my full makeup or I may end up higher than the rest of the house.

What clips did you use to attach UFH pipe to the OSB? The ones in the kit I am about to order look like they are designed to be pushed into PIR.

I think I would still use something like an 80x80 - 40mm is a little narrow. 2mm to 3.2mm wall thickness would do well. Being from a farming family I have seen fences come and go, from 3x3 stobs to 10x10" posts and telegraph pole strainers and there is a knack to installing a good fence that lasts. The best ones are well planned and prepared and can last 60 years. If you cap the post top and bottom it will sweat in the cold with nowhere for the moisture to go, let's say you welded the caps on today, humid, warm (read able to hold more moisture) summer air trapped in the tube, and let's even say you have the caps welded on to pressure vessel standard - by the time the cooler nights approach the moisture will fall out the air and condensate on the inside of your post - rot starts and this moisture will just cycle as the temperatures change - hot day it will rise to the top, then condensates at the top and runs down the tube, so the rot goes on and on. Now let's say the same scenario as above, but the caps are welded on with gaps and pinholes through the welds that air can be sucked in through on a cold day it will do exactly the same as above, only difference is the moisture may drive out in the hotter months bringing in fresh cool air loaded with more moisture every night. It is like our roofs and solumns and cavity's: ventilate well and have plenty air movement. So what you do is set the post on top of a decent layer of hardcore, this means that the moisture can drain out and have vent holes top and bottom - if you order the steel and do this yourself I would just take a stepped drill through them to make about a 20mm hole - personally I would have a fab shop make them up, weld and galvanise them. Paint is fine if done well - but the inside walls always remain a weak point as they are difficult to coat. If you want to paint, then give them a really decent de-grease with thinners or pre-paint wipes, scotch the steel then degrease again before hitting it with a good primer, zinc chromate stuff (they use that on the subs) then I'd use a 2K sprayed paint or a single pack industrial paint, I have tins of shipping container paint which is really good stuff. Tough as nails. Powdercoat is OK but powdercoat forms a film over the metal it doesn't actually "stick" that well - a single scratch or knock and the whole coating is compromised. Chemically bonded paint is far better which is why cars a painted with a wet paint system.

Right perfect. I will have a look. Thanks!

What was your skim product(s)?

I am going to do some wood stove down time maintenance and I want to sort the inglenook - it is currently done in board which has cracked and looks a mess. I am going to pull the stove out, remove all the board and render it. There also appears to be a draught through one of the boards so I am not sure what that is about (chimney is full of vermiculite around the liner so cannot see if being a chimney draught - but maybe). So the render will also act as a better seal around everything. Been looking at options and have come up with a lime render as a good choice. I am thinking 1:2:9 portland/lime/plastering sand - or just lime and sand - I was also tempted to add a dose of black tinter to it, if it drys a dark grey or black that would be fine - maintenance free. Can anyone who has done this sort of thing before please comment - the good thing is that the render will have until probably late September until it is intermittently used, then full time by mid to end of October so the render is going to get to dry out well if I do this soon. Another option is tile - anyone know about this option? Thanks.

How did this pan out? I will be in Taynuilt end of the month.

He is bang on - 60A - 48A = 12A - you could draw that 12A through your oven alone - so that is your service maxed out. He is probably the only electrician out of all of them I would now trust - he is clued up. This is why a move away from natural gas over the next couple of decades and electric car charging is going to be problematic, the grid is not ready!

2mm wall would be fine. If you actually go and see this steel you are talking about, stare it in the eye, you will see what I mean. I recently did a project with 2.77mm wall steel tube - I needed it for cantilever strength in my situation but it was solid - like seriously solid. Compared to 4x4 timber a 80x80x2 would be stronger. Get the posts capped with a welded plate on the top and galvanised and set them in stone for drainage with a ring of concrete around them further up. They must be allowed to fully breath right through - have a decent hole circa 20mm around 75-100mm above ground level and another about 100mm from the top. You need holes for galv anyway. Alternatively - flange mount bolted to concrete. Pads with J bolts sticking out would work well. Same breather holes apply and make sure it can drain out at the base via the flange.

It sounds like I am spoiled then! There are 2 tips I can go to, 1 where they would not let me in with the Land Rover, as mentioned earlier in this thread; and I only went there because the other was closed for renovations, and another one not far from my house. I have never so much as seen a queue and the guys really don't give a hoot about anything - their attitude is just dump the rubbish and go. If you show up with anything remotely valuable looking, like bits of twin and earth, they will "help" you. I have so far, during this build, dumped my entire sunroom there - from the roof to the skirting boards, PB the lot.

Yeah, you mist it while you drink icy beers.

Well done!

The insulation is nearly done on the extension so the next stage will be to run in services and the floor make up impacts how I do this. The plan was suspended timber frame, I even have C24 joists sitting temporarily on treated plates on top of block dwarf walls, all I really need to do is clean out the solumn, lay in any services that will go under the floor then fix the joists, fit PIR and away we go. However I am thinking that to be honest I could probably get it filled up fairly easily, 150mmPIR then 100mm concrete slab and it's got me thinking. Option would be to get some more hardcore down there, run waste pipes in with appropriate clean-outs etc. and then do a 75mm channel in the concrete across kitchen floor with a lip so I can have a 18mm panel sit back in - other option would be just to chuck in some 75mm corrugated duct that I can push 15mm pipes through. I could probably have the solemn filled by the weekend and order concrete next week. I am installing UFH so this sort of goes hand in hand. I think I would need to duct 3-4 vents to the original house but I have plenty 4 inch soil pipe and will buy the vent adaptors. I also have a lot of old concrete block, I could "lay" these like mono-block as infill, and then grout around them with a sharp sand/cement slurry, then 100mm of hard core, sand, DPC, PIR, conc... It lets me get rid of some used but clean and otherwise OK concrete blocks - it would just take too long to remove all the mortar to make them viable for anything else - I feel like this is an environmentally good option too. The rafters I have will not be wasted, mezz floor in garage? use them for building bulkheads in the kitchen etc.

I wanted this sort of install too - but every time I spoke to glaziers and window manufacturers they seemed a bit disinterested. I have a window "splashback" to one elevation of my kitchen - basically from just above counter to just below cabinets there is a 300mm x 2800mm window. I wanted it to just disappear into the reveal with no real frame as such. The closest I got to this was a glazing channel set into the timber frame that the double glazed unit could be fixed into. I could then simply render/plaster up to it but this created issues such as drainage, I would need to have drainage outlets on the outside, I would need the frame watertight at the bottom corners so seep-past could not run out the end of the channel, then I would have a frozen piece of aluminium channel in the winter which would condensate. I then decided to buy a double glazed unit and make a timber frame myself but for time I decided not to. In the end we just bought normal windows and will take the finishes up to as close to the bead as possible so you just have a little piece of frame, then the bead then the glass. If someone had been a bit more interested in what I had to say I think they could have done something for me but I was losing momentum and the window order helped me regain momentum so it was a time/speed thing in the end.

I would say 1-2mm is going to be fine, the man will want to put a 2-3mm skim on the wall anyway - a good plastered can do a lot to sort issues - bear mind every trade before a plasterer claims "the plasterer can fix it" going all the way back to how level a stud is! Although this is a bit lazy, there is some truth. If you want you could chip, drill, etc. some of the brick down to get the box in further - the further the box goes in, by the time you add skim, you end up with a few more mm of wriggle room for wires.

No it didn't really make any sense. It is like wearing some heavy rubber boots to do electrical work then putting an earth bond down the side. I don't really get too carried away with earthing things in my house. I let the electrical system take care of it all and don't fuss with pipes and whatnot.