Carrerahill

I would just notch that back bar, in reality is is serving very little purpose other than to tie the sides together at the back and stop them flapping in the wind. Now the cabinet is installed they are almost redundant. If you were worried you could remove the section to allow the pipes to clear comfortably, then screw a batten of real wood to the back plate to reinforce it. I doubt the chipboard being damaged by moisture is much of an issue (from seeing it survive well in a bathroom on the back of a damaged cabinet), if concerned check it then apply some paint/varnish/silicone to the exposed chipboard.

Hi guys, Got a question I think one of you guys might be able to answer albeit not really a build related question: Do I need this cold water tank in my commercial property? Here is the background... I have a business premises which is basically a commercial unit that has had offices/kitchen/storage built into it, so when it was built in the early 00's it was just an open plan unit with a male and female WC, above this "toilet block" is a cold water tank, it must be about 200/250litres (based on it's size compared to an oil drum which is 205litres). We would like to develop the area above the toilet block to tie it into the mezz storage level we already have but the tank is bang smack in the middle for weight loading reasons and it really makes the space useless. All that is fed from this tank is the two toilets. It would be a simple case of cutting the two pipes that go to the tank and join them somewhere downstairs thus making the toilets mains fed. Apart from the obvious issue of if the water supply is cutoff we would only have a cistern full of water for each toilet to flush is there any reason why we could not remove this tank? I can think of no logical engineering reason other than that the valves in the cistern might not take mains pressure (although they should) but I am fitting a PRV to the system due to a new 15litre Ariston water heater we have installed which requires the incoming pressure to be no higher than 3bar so I can reduce the supply to the whole property with the Honeywall valve I have already purchased. The reason I am asking and not just doing, is because this is a commercial property and occasionally Scottish Water do make system checks of our water system to ensure we are in compliance (non-return valves before water heaters and so on). If anything I see a tank as a liability for many reasons. Is this tank a throwback to an older plumbing code?

Concrete was placed today... 6.2 x 5 - 200mm slab C35

Update: Just off the phone to my ground works man. The concrete has been booked for next Saturday 08:00. The shuttering is 3/4 built, but only about 2/3 rakers have been set, so this weekend I must fit all the rakers, lay in the gulley and T branch for the waste, lay in a piece of electrical conduit to get my SWA in via the floor, lay in a piece of conduit for the water, and a 4 inch conduit for data or control cables or whatever and haunch it all. Then I need to do a final level of the hardcore and the ground work man will be round on Sunday to whack it (just the final 75/100mm cover). Then I have next week to roll out the DPC and lay and tie the rebar. All seems quite doable, although I really only have this Saturday and evenings next week. I am looking forward to getting this stage done as I feel as if I have had a hole in the ground for some time and it will then let me strip all the shuttering and have a major tidy up of all the wood I have been amassing to build the supporting structure of the shuttering. I can also start getting the ground levels up to the slab more or less worked out. I will post photos, promise - I just might not do it soon!

Well I had rented one but it went back after the excavations, in retrospect I should have kept the digger for another couple of days and got my recycled aggregate and Type 1 delivered the following day. Anyway I did what I described above and now the site is rock solid and fairly level. It took a fair bit of effort to move double handle most of the Type 1 but in the end it was all worth it. The concrete was meant to be being poured today however I had a shuttering issue at the weekend, it should be built this weekend and the pour completed next week.

So, the plan above didn't really, well, go to plan! I have only just received the last load of type 1. Whacker is coming tomorrow. With any luck I can post some images of a site ready for shuttering by the end of the weekend.

Hi all. Quick question, I had 8 tons of 6F2 recycled aggregate dumped on my garage site about 4 months ago, this contained some pretty big stuff - 3/4 bricks and lumps of concrete, fine it was just to get the base fill and once spread over 30m sq it was not that deep so the first layer of type 1 filled all the small voids, this first fill was just about perfect for running a vibrator plate over (less than 150mm rise in fact) and would have been the perfect plan at the time but that didn't work out. I then got another load type 1 delivered and decided to place that round the perimeter of the area to build it up as some will run off into a lower area, at this stage it was still within first compaction limits. I was then on the phone to my merchant who was looking at my account and said he would do me a better rate on the type 1 going forward because I was not being given the full trade price and had bought a lot, so I just jumped at the chance and ordered another load. This load was carefully tipped at one end of the site so my plan was to compact the area that is about level and then shovel all the new stuff out then compact it again, the issue is the area the stuff was dumped on, I am going to need to dig it back down to a suitable depth for first compaction then whack it all, then pull the type 1 back over the area. This just sounds like a lot of extra work, my fault I know but what are peoples thoughts on whacking say a 250mm depth of type 1? By the way, this stuff was compacted to an extent as it went down as I continue to park my Defender on the hardcore and the area that would need dug up has been run over with the Landy about 100 times and feels like concrete now. The loose stuff now sits on top of this. I am going to get the whacker tomorrow morning so could get a fairly big one, I was thinking of the 400mm 12kN or if it would help with my depth issues I could get the 500mm with 15kN but at the same time I have been advised by my structural engineer that using too big a plate could cause issues with surrounding buildings foundations and could also damage my rear retaining wall. So, what are peoples thoughts here, any similar stories or issues?

Here are some photos of the progress. I got 5.8 tons of 6F2 (recycled aggregate) delivered on Tuesday, whacker is coming next week (Friday I think) and on the same afternoon loads of MOT are due to arrive, so plan is whack the site, get a load in and levelled, whack it then get another load.

Hi guys. I have building warrant and planning now so I can think about starting very soon. I am trying to sort out the timber frame aspect of it just now and note the warrant drawings call for Tyvek Reflex and 2.0mm breather membrane to BS4016 - so I guess I just wrap the frame with something like Tyvek housewrap then wrap it in the Tyvek Relfex. I am tempted to send the commencement letter ASAP so I can just start firing up the frame but want to make sure I can get it wrapped ASAP so need the right stuff.

Well the digging is all done, the lawn has been raised and the garage site cleared and dug out. I need to go in and sort out bricks and stuff which I piled up then I can start with the hardcore going in. I am pleased with the result, the lawn site needs graded properly as it was just roughly graded with the excavator as we ran out of time! I opted not to do the front lawn scrape as I didn't want to have too many mud pits! Photos on soon once I get them from my camera/phone.

Well first thing is what software do you have access to? I am sitting with ACAD 2017 in front of me at the moment and have 2015 on other machines. What you propose to do requires very basic CAD skills to be honest, I reckon you could do it with the commands L for line tool, CO for copying stuff, select and Delete key to delete stuff select and M to move stuff and if you don't worry about colours and layers and just draw everything in lines and print it in black and white no one will know you've not got everything all properly layered etc. But this means having ACAD - the licence I have on this machine is £1500 I did have a ummm. "trail" version I used at one point too, it was a long trail. However, you can download and install ACAD on trail for 30 days. If I was you I would just get hold of it and start messing about tonight, loads of guides and it's pretty easy once you get to grips with the, well grips and commands! Just how much work is involved? Mean are we moving a few lines or are there curbs and soft verges and general civils to add and all sorts? I would offer to do it for you but if you read my other posts this is a big weekend for me, excavator rolls in tomorrow! I could maybe find you a CAD tech would would do it for a small fee.

When I help on my friends farm we often build bonfires to get rid of large quantities of hawthorn which is a pig to handle in fact considered a hazardous waste (bacterial infections, allergic reactions and can be fatal). We need to phone the local fire control, they can also advise you don't burn if it is considered too high a risk that due to hot weather the fire could spread etc. and give them details of the site of the fire and rough timings, this helps to reduce people reporting it and the FB responding - such as the summers night we had 3 appliances stuck down a farm road - the FB actually commended us on our burn pile and the safety measures we had employed including firefighting equipment on site in case it got out of control, mind you, the fire was 20 feet high and about 1000sq feet in area! Re. planning department, I would assume it is just notifying them of planning destruction of materials by fire - I would also cite the issues regarding the nails making it difficult to cut up safely and that it would not recycle well owing to the fact the chippers would hate all the nails. Also don't burn anything that is going to generate acrid smoke like plastics and things.

Me too!

Honda are always good - I know the owner of a plant hire place and he only buys equipment that can withstand hire use - basically mainly a bunch of monkeys with no care in the world for the poor machines. Which is why I look at what he and take his advice on which tools are hire-proof therefore will last me a long long time! He uses Honda and John Deere or kit with Briggs and Stratton engines - I also know the national trust almost always buy Honda mowers. The thing to bear in mind is that the engine and self drive gearbox is the critical bit really - If the deck seems well made and a good engine sits atop then the chances are it is a decent mower. All the good ones last well if maintained and used with care. I would probably not opt to straighten the shaft, is the shaft in fact the crankshaft that drops down via the drive gear for the self drive? or is it a second shaft after a "gearbox"? If it is the main crankshaft then it will probably be cast iron on a small engine like that, it has probably already fractured and could let go, trying to straighten it will almost certainly guarantee it will fail possibly with fatal consequences. If it is a shaft from an intermediary gearbox then it could be machined steel in which case there is a chance it could be fixed but unless you can get it onto a lathe it is almost certainly going to destroy a bearing and tear itself apart as you will never get it straight enough. Post some images. I notice you can get Ryobi mowers with Subaru engines!!!

Update: planning officer has just left after doing her site visit, she says I can call on Friday and get a verbal with the letter going out soon after. The garage has had half the roof removed so half of it can be demolished this weekend - I will slice the walls down with the angle grinder and a diamond blade where the temporary stud/OSB wall is and pull it over with the excavator which shall be delivered on Saturday morning. I have ordered some hardcore for the garage slab area, top soil, fence posts and rails to build some "edging" which I will then fill up to the top of with good excavated soil to make the new level of the lawn - don't worry it will only be 200mm high. I was just going to form a little slope off at the end of the garden but I decided I would just edge it and finish it off square, I will then fill the other side with some bark around the trunks of the tree's there and that should look smart. By Sunday night I would like to have completed the following stages: 1. Edge lawn on 3 sides with posts and rails to raise it to current patio height. 2. Dig a hole in the middle of the lawn about 3m x 3m down to about clay layer. 3. Pull half of the side wall of garage down and the two small sections of wall either side of the car door. 4. Scrape garage site of poor gravelly top soil. 5. Chuck the wall and poor gravel contaminated top soil into the hole in the lawn (should I lay some pipe down to this area to create a soakaway of sorts?) 6. Fill in the hole compacting as we go. 7. Scrape the whole lawn site of all grass and turn it over and roughly level it. 8. Scrape the garage site of all the good top soil (and it is good stuff) using all or some of it to back fill the lawn site up to the edge of the new edging. 9. I may go right down to clay on the garage site if it's not just going to be an excessive depth and vast amounts of hardcore but on this site I think clay is only 300mm down. 10. Level the lawn site. At this point I will go and get a cold beer and with any luck light the BBQ for my *cough* workers *cough* - ahem family/friends. Probably a lot to try and do in a day but I think we can do it. Sunday morning assuming I have done all the above in a day I will scrape the front drive nearest the house of all the pebbles and a thin layer of poor soil in prep for a new front lawn. To get rid of this gravel I will maybe chuck it on the garage site. Spread the hardcore over the garage site. At that I think I am done. Additional work I may do if time and spare soil permits is remove a row of slabs adjacent to the new lawn to make it a little longer, if I have even more time and there is plenty of soil I may even move 3/4 columns of slabs and churn that up a bit, dig a trench for a small retaining wall to make a small raised bed along the side of the garden and then a strip of lawn. Wish me luck - will I post photos?

Thanks for your reply Mike. The girl from planning has just left after doing her site visit and said that I can send her an email with the skylights shown on the roof in a drawing and she will OK them as she saw no reason they would cause an issue - overlooking issues etc. Anyway, good news is she says I can call on Friday and should have my answer with the official letter (paper? digital?) following soon after, she says what I am doing is pretty clear-cut and I can expect to be granted permission. Pretty pleased with this as the neighbour consultation only ended on Monday! Good news, as the excavator rolls in on Saturday morning!

Did you reply to the right post? My post was confirming water board will not want anyone "pumping" from the network after Craig confirmed it was Scottish Water who had the concerns and the builder then removed the pumps.

Not always, you would be surprised at the complete lack of logic applied between planning, BC, and utility boards. Some of the examples of total incompetence I witness with regard to this sort of thing would have you in tears.

Ah got you, I thought they were just removed for some reason - the water board won't want the pump creating a vacuum on their system for many reasons, for example damage can occur to seals which need pressure to seal and another is negative pressure in the network can lead to ingress of contaminants.

I have inside information on this one, not that it will be very surprising to many of you I am sure but the issue is caused primarily by new estates getting planning permission without proper consultation with the water board, so up goes another 500 homes in an area they never thought would be developed and there you have it a water main (and sewer for that matter) designed to cope with X number of homes now has to cope with X + 500. What do you expect, simple fluid dynamics. They wanted to build a new distillery in Edinburgh a couple of years ago, everything was about to get approved when someone said to the client what were they going to do about water, well, they needed a supply from the local Scottish Water network... So they went away and spoke to Scottish Water about a 3 inch main for the distillery, not a chance was Scottish Waters reply, turned out the network in the area was now running at 150% of designed capacity as it was and the network could not be renewed for about another 10 years. Result - entire project was scrapped - yet the full design was there, everything was done, but no one thought to simply ask - where will the water come from.

Why was the pump removed after a year?

Well today was a bit of a milestone for my extension project as the structural engineer has approved the existing foundations and walls which is great, I guess in a way that's us now out of the ground albeit the next stages are demolition. So here is the story, you may know from my other post there is a garage being built, well it will once planning comes through, planning is joint with this extension - planning didn't assign our application to an officer and well that was 10 weeks ago! It will be with me in 4 to 5 weeks I am told! Oh good! So the build is an existing sunroom being converted into a proper room which will become the kitchen - our back garden is about 1500 below floor level so the sunroom was obviously built up to match FFL in the existing house, so there are decent founds and a good going block cavity wall, so my plan was to reuse all of this. My architect put in my building control application at the same time as the planning and it seems to be going slightly more smoothly. The BCO came back and asked for a certification for the founds, the SE visited tonight and has confirmed he will be happy to write to BC and confirm they are suitable for my proposed build and gave me some good tips and advice on how to do some bits and pieces - one of them was based on a suspicion that the existing floor joists are held up by joist hangers fixed to the inner block wall - this leaf will be demolished to top of joist level anyway as the timber frame will sit partially on the block and the rest on the timber frame, if hangers have been used he advised for the sake of 15 or so joists I should demolish the inner block wall down an additional block and run new joists over the top of the wall so it sits on it rather than hangs from it so that the loading is not such that it is trying to tip the block inwards. Made sense to me and is something I can easily do myself and I don't mind having to remove the joists because they will work perfectly as studs if they are OK or if a bit rough in the garage build. So I am expecting BC approval very soon and hopefully the build can commence mid to late August once planning consent is granted. So I am starting to think about the build and how I will do it, my plan is to get the existing Sun Room removed and get the walls demoed to the various heights etc. myself, and make good any bits and pieces, I will also then be able to either confirm the joists are fine or run in new ones. Then I was going to build the timber frame myself, I am very confident about the actual building, but my issue is experience of BC approved practises and accepted methods, once I am happy with these through talking to you guys, my architect and my structural engineer it won't be an issue, I just need to check and double check all my dims and make sure it's all spot on, so herein the first question, the frame will sit against the original house in two places, do I run a piece of DPM between the house and the first stud then fasten the stud to the house with the same fixings as speced for the roof beam? I cannot actually see a detail for this anywhere, I assume it gets tied into the existing wall? Once I build the frame I assume I can then just fix my wall plate and lay in my joists - now here is the second question, I asked for 2 skylights in the roof, I looked at the drawings at the time on a mobile as I was on business and said yeah looks fine, mistake! My architect didn't include the skylights, so how can I get these in now that the BCO is about to approve the drawings... Can I email him after approval and discuss - I would say I will sister the beams either side and affix the tie beam in with all the correct metalwork. Do you think he will accept it at that and let me go for it? What is the script with variations with BC. Thanks

Well, I have an update from planning. They didn't allocate my application so it's been sat unassigned to a planning officer! The council say they have a statutory 2 months to give you planning, well that's us into the 10th week, so I could not technically appeal but I don't want to start upsetting them because I am sure you all know what they can be like. They will now fast track it but need a minimum of 21 days for neighbour objections, I don't see a letter on the lamppost yet so I hope they back-date it! I am annoyed at myself though because I knew a letter would be attached to the lamppost outside, I was even waiting for it about a month ago, but sort of forgot about it recently with all the other things happening at the moment. I am just going to let it all happen then tear a shred off them once I have my consent and also try and at least get my money back.

Been back to the engineer and discussed the wall, he is happy with what has been built and confirmed it was all as planned, the back wall is not going to be doing a hell of a lot apparently. I think I just had an overactive imagination of the slab slipping slightly, but it won't due to the ground prep planned etc. So I am happy, I did however build engineering brick buttresses and finished the wall. Looks good. I am happy with it. It looks a bit German Bunker now actually. I mentioned the no fines concrete back-fill and he said if I wanted to, it would do no harm and would mean we didn't need to ensure he back-fill was whacked.

Hi - we just posted at the same time. Noted the shear key comments but see my reply above - this is OK. I am interested in your calcs spreadsheet. That could be a goer to get me some figures. Thanks!