Bramco

chronic sorting version Come on - someone can do better than that!!

I posted this one the materials price thread. 40% drop in timber prices in the US in June -> https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/30/lumber-prices-dive-more-than-40percent-in-june-biggest-monthly-drop-on-record.html So patience may be needed. All being well our TF goes up in August - just hope the wood is already in stock at the manufacturers.....

Speaking of which... I'm sure lots of you have seen this a while ago but...

Patience..... 40% drop in timber prices in the US in June -> https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/30/lumber-prices-dive-more-than-40percent-in-june-biggest-monthly-drop-on-record.html Not sure where you are in the planning stages but I'd guess that next year prices will be back where they were. So get the quote when you're ready not before. Look at what happened to plaster and plasterboard - you couldn't get it for love nor money last year (the factory is in the next village to us and was off-line for 3 months or so). Production has restarted, scaled up and caught up on the backlog. Simon

Interesting, we also have a not too brilliant ground report and thought we may need piles but MBC have now said that we'll be OK with hardcore but a LOT of it! During the discussions, they sent us a couple of examples of piling design on which their insulated slab could fit.

Where are you? I'm sure that's not on our the list prescribed by our LPA - hawthorn, blackthorn, cherry..... nothing eleagnus..... sounds iffy to me, foreign.... irony from a remain voter...

Might take a while as you'd have to have enough like minded people to stand for election and elections are every few years. Sadly most PCs are inhabited by exactly the kind of people on that Zoom call that went viral - that's the norm, not anything reasonable But back to planning, the current legislation allows for Neighbourhood Plans - basically a refinement of the LPA Local Plan at Parish level (or areas bigger than that). There's a chance of course that these will disappear when the current mob drive through their planning changes but at the moment a Parish can have a Neighbourhood Plan and when an application is being dealt with, the LPA has to take into account what is written in the Parish NP. So if flat roofs were not liked by the PC and it was in their NP, then the LPA shouldn't really give permission. NPs are not easy to write - it took us nearly 3 years to get ours adopted. Ours was done in parallel to the LPA Local Plan and should have fed into that in terms of preference for allocation of development sites - of course the LPA went their own way and allocated a large site which we wanted designated as local green space (effectively Green Belt in planning terms). We're now going to be saddled with one of those executive ghettos with expensive tiny twee houses instead of the gradual building on a series of smaller infill plots. Self build was one of the concepts built into the plan - although it's almost impossible to get it dealt with properly. However we built into the plan that for every site to be developed the PC should create a design brief - this allowed us to challenge the developer of the big site to change a number of things, including having more 1/2/3 bungalows and more affordable housing (although affordability is a joke). The design brief concept could have allowed us to create a design brief for a plot that had a certain %age of self build. I'm not on the PC and couldn't get them to demand this of the large developer though. A lot of land around the village is owned by the church - much like a lot of villages I guess. We managed to build into the plan a Rural Exception Scheme - these are great for affordable housing as they are developed by housing associations, the LPA has to keep a register of local people interested in a house on the scheme and there are various options for renting and part purchasing - and the housing remains in perpetuity for local people. You need to have a lot of time on your hands to get involved in this though, so I'd still advise looking for housing that will in all likelihood be coming on the market in the next few years and making sure you are ready if and when one comes up. Simon

The registers are simply a way of assessing demand for plots - no LPA is going to allocate a plot afaik. What they do with the info is to run it into their 5 yearly planning policy exercises where they create or revise their Local Plans - Local Plans should have enough land allocated to meet projected demand. LPAs don't put land forward, land owners do and it's registered in the SHLAA strategic land availability something or other. When it comes to the Local Plan 5 yearly revisions, LPAs should use this as the source of land for allocation but of course it's a free for all when the Local Plan is being updated... He who shouts loudest, has friends in the right places etc. So if you are holding your breath waiting for a plot allocation from the LPA stop now! You could look at your Local Plan and see if there are any land allocations for self build and then you'd have to approach the land owner/agent but in all likelihood all of the plots will have gone almost as soon as the plan is adopted or even before. A more productive way maybe of finding a plot in the local area is to drive round areas you like looking for badly maintained bungalows (the owners may be on their last legs) and keep an eye out for them coming on the market. It would likely be a (nearly) demolish and build of course. It's also worth putting a nicely worded letter through these doors to say you are a couple looking for a new home in the area and see the property has lots of potential etc. etc. And keep doing the lottery - one line a week - you never know!! And GOOD LUCK!! Simon

Don't think councils can make pre-app advice public as I think it would be against GDPR regs. I've never seen a pre-app advice on an LPA planning site. If you do ask for one and then go for outline or full, then the fact that pre-app advice was sought should be mentioned on the delegated report that goes (or should go) alongside the decision notice. Some of the info from the pre-app advice can then be made public in the report. Simon

@Roundtuit So did you have to show that soakaways wouldn't work based on permeability tests? Or did you simply point out that the site drained into the watercourse anyway. I'm assuming that as you are in Cambridgeshire that the site was pretty flat? It would save us a lot of cash if we didn't have to put soakaways in. Simon

Tell that to Apple and many other electronics suppliers that manipulate prices and always have done... Simon

We were told that we had to use soakaways for surface water even though there is a dyke in front of the property and I seem to recollect that came from the Trent Valley Internal Drainage Board even though they don't manage our dyke, they still have a say into what goes into dykes as they eventually meet up with one of their managed watercourses. Have you spoken to your local Drainage Board because they might have more skin in the game than the EA? Simon

@ToughButterCupIndeed - we read everything we could lay our hands on and worked out that a) they were wrong and b) we'd probably have to go to appeal but we'd try to get them to see sense first - stupid idea...... we should simply have let the application fail and gone straight to appeal! @JohnnytYep - this is where, if anywhere, consistency is applied. LPAs aren't consistent across the country and within LPAs, officers aren't consistent. Anyone wanting chapter and verse on case law on the NPPF should consult -> https://www.amazon.co.uk/Interpreting-NPPF-National-Planning-Framework/dp/1916431526 Excellent book and worth every penny if you want to find the relevant case law. Simon

Wish I'd known about this a few years ago!! Our 1st application was recommended for refusal by the case officer based on the pre-app report written by another officer. The plot is in the Green Belt but in-between a row of houses, so should have been recommended for permission to be granted based on the exception in the green belt for infill in villages. During discussions prior to the application going to committee, we pointed out that at the same time as the pre-app case officer was stating that 30m was too large a gap for the plot to be infill, she recommended granting permission for another application (also for infill in a village in the Green Belt) where the plot width was 100m. Permission was granted We couldn't get our case officer to make any concessions about consistency - he would always state that each application must be examined on its merits and this was repeated ad nauseum in the planning ctte meeting by the chief officer in answer to questions from ctte members about consistency. In the end the ctte was split 6-6 and the chairman voted against granting permission, we reapplied and had the exact same result the 2nd time. The appeal inspector though, essentially told the LPA they were 'WRONG' and permission should have been granted. We used all the various legal decisions about Green Belt and infill in our submission but I wish we'd known about this one as it would have backed up our request for consistency. And now due to that first officer in the pre-app report, we're 3 years down the line, should already have been living in the new house and are now faced with all the escalating costs due to Covid, Brexit etc. as we're only now about to break ground. If only we could make them accountable. Simon

Ok cheers.

So are you saying that you can put the mini consumer unit in the meter box if there is room? Western Power will provide our connection part way to the new house and rather than having the meter box stuck on the side of the house, we were planning to have a freestanding one in the base of a hedge part way up the drive. We'd then needs feeds to the garage and house CUs. We'd need power in the meter box to power an energy monitoring device to drive PV diversion, so I was hoping we could install a large enough meter box that could also house a mini CU. Simon

You need an expert on that - have you tried Gavin Williamson?! ?

Take a look at the naked solar site -> https://nakedsolar.co.uk/storage/ There's a table lower down the page with installed costs as well as cost per kWh - Tesla come out surprisingly competitively priced as well as having better specs. They have a similar pricing table for PV as well. Simon

Take a look at the open energy monitor site -> https://openenergymonitor.org/ You could do this with an emonTH -> https://shop.openenergymonitor.com/emonth-temperature-humidity-node/ and DS18B20 one wire sensors which connects to an emonBase -> https://shop.openenergymonitor.com/emonbase-web-connected-base-station/ if you have a Pi, then you can just buy the RFM69Pi add on board which is cheaper than the base station which is a Pi with the RF card. Not sure how many DS18B20s the s/w in the emonTH supports but there are plenty of instructions on how to reprogram the emonTH to support more sensors. Simon

We have vaulted ceiling and a balcony designed on our master bedroom - but have definitely not gone for triangular windows. These might look great from the outside - but - just take a look around at some that are in your neighbourhood - it's almost impossible to find a good solution to making the room dark at night. You'll see curtains drawn to the side and all sorts of weird stuff...... Simon

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PulseAudio and https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Audio/Alsamixer seeing as you're a s/w person I use these on a Pi that takes line input from a deck - having said that I haven't the faintest how to really get them working - I just followed some home brew instructions.... Simon

It's better and worse in other countries. Holland is great at proper town planning - we used to live there. Belgium is weird, you can do a lot without permission but on some sites you must leave the sides of your house blank (no windows) in case someone wants to build alongside you, if you look, you'll see these houses with nothing either side but they have blank walls.... Odd Simon

I should add, we've done 2 requests for pre-application advice. The first officer got it wrong and we had to go to appeal and they completely dissed the LPA as not knowing what they were doing. And the officer came to different conclusions about infill in the Green Belt on ours and another application at the same time in a different village. For ours, 32m frontage was too large to be infill (there's no size regulation of course). For the other a frontage of 100m was fine.... Their application was fronted by a local architect, ours was from us - go figure. The 2nd was on the actual application after we'd won the appeal. They'd brought in a contractor and she really screwed us over, it's too tall, it's too deep, couldn't you flip it side to side, which caused many iterations of the plan and resulted in something sub optimal in terms of space.... and on top of that, the original outline application and appeal are invalid because they don't show the red line all the way to the public highway!!!!!! In the end we thought screw this pre-app business for a lark, put in the application and it was granted permission - I wonder if we'd just not wasted the money and 6 months of time on the pre-app if we'd have got what we really wanted by just submitting the plans we wanted. And through all these pre-apps, the best we got were curt emails with their decisions about our plans - absolutely NO discussion. Simon

Yes it's in the NPPF - although it's not exactly in the form of LPA's shall.... Amusingly the decision making section starts off: 38. Local planning authorities should approach decisions on proposed development in a positive and creative way..... It then continues under the heading 'Pre-application engagement and front-loading' 39. Early engagement has significant potential to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the planning application system for all parties. Good quality preapplication discussion enables better coordination between public and private resources and improved outcomes for the community. You might like to send a copy of that to your local councillor and the leader of the council and ask the questions you've posed here. You can read the rest of the decision making section of the NPPF at https://bit.ly/3vN0Pjt Simon

Off topic but not true - we have 3 semis in our village and a city flat. They all turn a decent profit and they are all well maintained with all the relevant certificates, gas, electric etc. It's still a great way to invest for the future/pension. The recent rise in values is also nice ? Simon