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Ah, GDPR nonsense. Shame we didn’t leave the EU before that was forced upon us.

Really? As long as one isn’t trespassing or deliberately harassing somebody or breaching their right to privacy by continuously recording them, why would it be illegal? A path or road is not a private place, so no right to privacy there. The outside of someone’s property might be different.

No, wood burning stoves. Dik Guerts Bora in particular.

I've settled on a DG Bora stove, found a seller with a good price, but not so keen on his flue prices which are pretty high, though appealing it's a one stop shop that will supply and install everything. About a week ago he told me stove prices were going up at the end of the month and i should get my order in quickly. Is that just a sales trick, or are stoves really increasing in price? I know timber prices and insulation prices are being pushed up, but Stoves? Thought @Trw144 might know.

Yeah, that’s the plan.

Our house will be kettle-free. Takes up too much worktop space.

I think my present supply is 60A. Today the builder said for an extended house I should “really upgrade to 100A”. I wasn’t sure, but we do want to have an electric car in the future, so presumably that, combined with all the mod cons might mean I need more than we have at the mo, although we are not presently planning on having an electric shower, so after the car, the highest use would be the induction hob and the oven I imagine. Not sure, really out of my depth, though the new house should also be much more efficient as we will have much more efficient LED lighting.

Further update. Another 11 days have passed. You probably will have picked up that much of that time I have been stressing about this. So doors are in, I guess (!). The first floor roof has been tiled beautifully and first floor walls have been rendered and painted. Scaffolding went up to do the loft conversion. Apart from that, I'm not sure much has happened. There has been a lot of trench digging for the drainage, but I really can't see progress. I feel like they are never ending. Builder discovered that UK Power Networks cable has a tear in the sheathing and needs replacing because some wire is exposed. He also thinks it's not long enough which makes little sense to me, so he is going to ask the UK PN guy if he can lengthen it when they replace it, hopefully tomorrow. Just found out my power supply isn't enough for my requirements, so we are upgrading to 100A, hopefully on 11 August when a different division of UKPN will attend to do that. Still so much to do.

Yeah, door company has come back to say frame can actually be compressed by up to 3mm without affecting the performance. Apparently this is a tolerance designed into the frame. I will double check with the manufacturer, but if that’s the case, I think it should be okay.

Hmmm. I need to work out what proportion of the maximal load we have already put on. Anybody know what the weight of a breeze block cavity wall is per m2?

You were so right.

Update: there is only 4mm of space available in the middle for further deflection before there is contact between the lintel and door frame. We measured the defection so far again but with a better tool, and it has deflected about 3mm. So we are 1mm short if the beam deflects fully to the SE’s spec of 8mm (which according to the SE should only happen in heavy snow). Surely the frame can take a bit of compression? Particularly as it is not a top hung slider. My architect also wondered how the frame design accounts for the fact that it is actually screwed into the lintel (at least abusing to the installation instructions). Wouldn’t that suggest that any deflection transfers to the doorframe via the screws, regardless of how much of a gap there is between the lintel and the frame, or are the fixing points on some sort of sprung mechanism?

Some species of bamboo can grow 4m - 5m high. You can plant them within thick and deep plastic containers that you almost entirely conceal within the ground, with just a couple of inches of the container sticking above the ground (which you can camouflage by choosing the container to be black or dark green). In this way, you control the bamboo's spread. My parents did this and it has worked fairly well, but you really need rather large and deep containers.

The concrete is water retaining to an extent in that whilst it is just a foundation for a ground floor extension, the external side of that foundation is exposed to london clay soil which really gets wet. In the recent heavy rain we've had, water has pooled in the gaps between the clay and the concrete, the concrete has got wet and as a result the water bar has swollen as it has absorbed / reacted with the water. We are in the process of digging and installing french drains along the perimeter of the extension which will somewhat deal with this, but I wonder if this is the reason the structural engineer specified it?

I'm having an issue with the installation of some sliding doors which you can read about here. I'd be really interested in hearing from sliding door installers/manufacturers on your thoughts about Steel deflection and how much of an issue it is for a door which has the sliding mechanism on the bottom rather than the top. If you work in this industry, please PM me.

Agent electric matts expensive to run, even the low wattage ones?

Sunflex SVG30 with 2G windows and PAS24 security upgrades.

We can probably make it work. There are about 4mm of packers underneath. What are those for?

Yes, and I was not concerned because door company has been clearly briefed about deflection risk and knew the tolerance. Obviously if I knew everyone was going to cock up like this, I would have done things differently

Yeah. Ridiculous. Not sure why they prepared drawings which showed a level of accuracy their manufacturer couldn’t keep to. The issue I have now is that it would probably take three days of Labour to take the doors out and reinstall them a couple of mm lower. That is probably not cheap, but much cheaper than ripping them out in 6-12 months time when all the adjacent wall and floor finishes (which are all pretty expensive) are in. Their contract will exclude all consequential loss, so even if I go back to them in the future and force them to reinstall, they will say they can’t be liable for the cost to make good those floor and wall finishes. I wasn’t going to install the Seedum for a few months as we still have a lot of dusty work to do above the Seedum and thought it would be better to install it after the dust has gone. But now I’m thinking it should go in now so we can give the doors a bit more of a real world test before installing the adjacent finishes.

Not great to be honest. Door company called me from site about 30 min after arriving to say aperture was too short. Builder then threw his toys out the pram saying “I told you we shouldn’t have raised the floor under the opening”. Builder’s foreman then measured the door and spotted it was 4mm higher than specified by the door company’s own surveyor as confirmed in drawings. Builder agrees to shave off some of the extra cement he had put down. We had asked him to put down 8mm. For reasons unknown to me, he had put down about 18mm (wtf?!?). Door company is then apparently happy and installs the door. I send architect to inspect. He calls me up and says “I don’t wish to alarm you, but the gap above the door/below the steel is only 3mm to 4mm and SE specified 8mm max deflection.” Lots of swearing and shouting. Lots. i tell door company they need to take the door out and reinstall it 4mm lower. They say architect is wrong and there is 8mm of space. Architect then measures again and discovers some “concealed space”. Foreman and architect get laser level out to measure current deflection (about 75% of the load on the roof has been on for a few months already) of the beam. turns out the beam has only deflected by “just less than a mm” and that taking into account the “concealed space” whatever that is, there is 6.5mm of space at one end, about 7mm of space in the middle and about 8.5 or 9mm at the other end. The reason for this is that the steel isn’t perfectly level. Architect speaks to SE to ask him what he thinks. He asks if the door is top hung or bottom hung. Architect confirms it bottom. Engineer says it should be fine and that there isn’t much load on that beam anyway and 8mm would be the absolute limit and only in extreme conditions like 20cm of snowfall on the roof. I’m really not happy. This is a really expensive door (£11k including installation) we still have 26 square metres of seedum to lay on the roof. It’s maximum weight when fully saturated with water is 55kg per m2. There are also a couple of skylights still to go in which will add a bit of weight. In total, close to 2 tonnes when seedum is fully saturated. Architect points out that because of the loading, not much of that extra weight will bear on the beam. He is right about that, but it still freaks me out. He also says that as most of the weight has already been on it for a few months, I can take comfort from the fact that there is only “at most, 1mm of current deflection at the middle”. All extremely stressful and completely avoidable had everyone just done as asked and agreed on the drawings.

I was so naive and hopeful. Been chasing this insani24 company for a couple of weeks and after prevaricating a bit they eventually admitted that despite me ordering the damn things on 10th June, they still have no clue when they will receive them, let alone when I will receive them. 6 weeks have passed since ordering and nothing...

Update: the builder has finally fixed it. Doors going in today, hopefully the 8mm of concrete will have set in time as it couldn’t have been poured more than 40 hours ago.

A slot drain.

You are making the same mistake I made, which is to assume the bricklayer lays rows of bricks which were identical in height. I haven’t got the link to hand, but there is a video on a thread here of my rear elevation which shows the brickwork, and somebody commented that they were really impressed with it. It really is a thing of beauty. But three amount of mortar between each row is not identical. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter because the brickwork was finished before the door company attended to do the survey. At the point the aperture was measured and some changes were required, and he has only partially done the change, which is what has reported in the 8mm discrepancy. i agree with @Temp’s observation.