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In some places, that could add over £10k in value to a property!

I’ve done a few chimney breast removals (two in my last place and two in our new place, and also helped my folks with one). First things first, hire a structural engineer to design a solution for you. If the works are notifiable, Building control will ask to see the SE’s drawings and calcs anyway. I would be very surprised if your SE allowed brackets. Brackets are really not best practice anymore, and haven’t been for decades. An RSJ is not expensive. You should be able to conceal the RSJ within the ceiling of the first floor / floor of the loft.

Welcome. I did this. I converted a one bedroom garden flat into a two bed garden flat. The flat was in the ground floor of a Victorian Terrace. Including the basement below us, we had no less than 5 neighbours affected by our structural works and so had to have 5 party wall agreements, as well as a consent to alter from the freehold company. Absolute nightmare, but we got there in the end and was worthwhile as we increased the value of the property significantly, and now rent it out.

No, these are hand made Moroccan Bejmat tiles. They are meant to be irregular and laid like this.

@Carrerahill has a good point (not the sexism). The Marshall setts are supplied with a wax finish, apparently to protect the actual finish during transport. It is meant to naturally wash off within 3-6 months’ use. Well we’ve been using it most days for about 2 months, and clearly it is still not rubbed off. Marshall’s have said I can speed up the process by removing the wax with Lithofin Wax Off. I will do that this weekend. Anyone know what applicator I need to use? Will a mop and bucket do, it do I need a stiff brush?

Well it was either that or ask her to get out of the car (in the rain) and make her watch me do it. Luckily after she tried to accelerate more gradually, she was about to get out (although there was still some sliding about). What a disaster.

By way of update, SWMBO has slowly accepted the steep driveway... or so I thought. Today, she was setting out to do the school run in the pouring rain. Just the wetness on the tires and driveway setts resulted in lots of wheelspin and skidding. It wasn't even cold, maybe 13C. She couldn't get out of the drive without me explaining to her that she needed to depress the clutch slowly or slip it into second to give it less torque. She was eventually able to get out, but it made me realise that this driveway design is an absolute shambles. Come winter the thing will be completely unusable. I think that to lift up the driveway, build a retaining wall, raise the ground level and then fix the driveway alone is maybe 7 to 9 days of work for a two man team, depending how easy it is to remove the marshalls grout from the drivesys setts without damaging the lip on the setts. If they get damaged, I may need to buy more, which is super expensive, although I do have about 180 setts spare. But what I'm more concerned about is that if we build a retaining wall and raise the driveway, the whole design of the front layout will need to be rebuilt. We have brick planters clad in silicone render with lighting on the walls which will mostly be swallowed up by the higher ground level. It won't affect the planters too much, but I won't be able to have the wall lights I have on them at the moment and those are important as they help guide you into the parking space at night, without hitting the planters. We will also need to cut into the planters to create a new place for bin storage, which instead of nicely hidden in a corner of the driveway behind the planters will end up being very prominent. And we will also have to raise the bike shed. That is an off the shelf shed made by Asguard, so can easily be unbolted, but the concrete slab it is sitting on will need to be raised and the new layout may mean there is no longer a constant slope from the opening of the bike shed to the road, which will be very annoying. What a mess. I reckon there might be £6k of work easily, possibly more. I will post some diagrams and images at some point in case anyone has some bright ideas.

Monolithic concrete pours are always stronger than doing three separate pours. Not sure why, but the joins are prone to cracking. I would get a temporary tent or something to store everything outside so you can do the floor in one go.

I had a quick read of those regs and they do Indeed provide that your window cannot open into a “circulation route or space”. So the question is how far do these windows open and does their arc of opening cut into a circulation route or circulation space. I would have thought you can address this by putting a limiter on the window so that it can only open a little: enough to give you adequate ventilation in summer but not so much that you cut into your path. Other option are: 1. forgo the ventilation and insert a fixed (ie unopenable) window 2. make the window smaller 3. make the window so it hinges at the top. If the window is a decent size, this would allow it to open enough to allow a fair bit of ventilation, without creating much of a projection from the building. 4. Move the house to England or Wales, where I don’t believe we have this rule.

In general I agree with this. Only thing I'd say is that an external cavity wall would provide better sound insulation than a typical party wall, so it might be a win-win to just build the party wall as a cavity wall, but instead of filling it with heat insulation, fill it with sound insulation, assuming that passes the regs. The only thing worse than a party wall that is sound permeable, is a party wall that is sound permeable with your relatives living on the other side. I agree that you should try and build a watertight structure at least, even if it means doing things out of step with your life plans. My mum always says there are life plans and there's life. There is little relationship between the two other than life is what happens around your life plans. The other thing the OP, @nextplease could take into account is that building now will save money in the long run. At current inflation, what you spend now will be much cheaper than what you spend in the future. Regs will also become more demanding every few years. Of course you need to off set the inflationary savings against any borrowing costs, but if you are just building the foundations and the structure now, the fit out, which depending on spec can be the really pricy bit, can wait till you've got the cash.

Reminds me of a “thought of the day” I saw on public transport the other day which I associated so much with I decided to photograph it:

not sure i agree with this. The semi detached has a number of advantages, such as cheaper to build and good insulation on party wall. The economies of scale should not be underestimated. Just some examples: Putting up scaffolding and roofing one house probably costs 60% of scaffolding and roofing for two houses. You will get better discounts if you are buying six toilets versus 3 toilets. If the houses are very similar in layout and just mirror images of each other, the project management and design stress is effectively halved as you get two for the price of one in terms of stress being the same, but getting two results for that stress rather than one. To put it a different way, if the OP could persuade his brother to manage the build of his house at the same time, the OP gets a stress free build, albeit brother may have a coronary.

You would get economies of scale and efficiency if you worked together to build both at the same time. The cost of plumbing two houses is slightly less than 2 x the cost of plumbing one house. Same goes for most other work. If you are rendering the outside, you will get a much nicer front and rear elevation if the whole thing is rendered at the same time. If building with exposed brick and mortar, the mortar colour will come out more consistent across the two houses if mixed up and laid at the same time. And also, if many of your features, such as windows, match you will get a much more attractive and cohesive looking outcome. Is there no way he can slow down or you can hurry up?

My only issue would be with this. But that's personal preference; i like my bedroom to be cool whereas I like my bathroom to be warm.

Have you thought about moving abroad?

Well my house is not passive, or anywhere close, but it is airtight and fairly well insulated for a building that is almost 100 years old. The multiple stats work well for us. We have hardly put the heat on this year, but when we have it is usually only in one or two of our multiple zones. I spent over £1000 on 12 smart thermostats and I don’t regret it. But each to their own.

That explains your query. In a fully airtight and insulated house, Solar gain is much more likely to make a difference to ambient temperature, and so rooms on one side of the house might vary by 1.5C to 2C to rooms on the other side of the house. In the depths of winter, you might just switch everything on and treat the whole floor like one zone, but in the shoulder months, it’s likely you would only want heat in the colder rooms. Hence, multiple stats can save money, but most likely only in an airtight and insulated house.

If there are 7 thermostats, one for each room, I think that's okay. We have 12 in my house and I'm really happy with that number. We even have two in one large open plan area, to divide the room into two zones: the kitchen, which has a lot of west facing glazing and the lounge area which has no glazing but is right by a wood burner. Although all one open plan area, zoning those two separately has worked well.

actually, the clay based plaster I've used is is made of Cornwall. So i literally have built my house out of bits of Cornwall.

It's clay based plaster and looks amazing.

this isn't such a bad idea. Would it work though?

If you like Weber & Ducre, have a look at One Light, they have a huge catalogue, but amongst all their stuff, you will find plenty of stuff that you like I think, and it is cheaper than Wever & Ducre and probably just as good quality, if not better: https://toplightco.com/collections/one-light-products?page=6&grid_list

Thank you. Clearly I’m completely useless at searching!

Get better wall lights. E.g. stuff that isn’t boxed in at all:

I just don’t understand this. Good quality high CRI bulbs in a 2700k colour will illuminate whatever you need to see as well as you could ever need to see it, without the harshness of cool lights. 3000k at a stretch, but anything higher than this is not appropriate for a residence.