ProDave

A lot of us on here found buying our own min digger, using it for the job then selling it was the best way. You have the digger on hand whenever you want it not constrained by hire deadlines etc so you often find you are using it for small jobs, just moving stuff about site etc that you would not have considered hiring for. And it's fun. Your garage is as big as my house so it definitely sounds like it is worth it. As a novice digger driver I found the easiest way to get the final bit level when stripping an area was do the final scrape with the dozer blade on the digger rather than try and scrape it level with the bucket.

To make it easier for readers, here is a link to the original article, rather than just a picture of a screen grab https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/homeowner-who-built-house-drive-29107023

Mot familliar with Forma Plus, anyone care to explain? Mine are Aura Plus.

The blue wall that is clearly out of square at the bottom of the door frame. What is is like at the top of the door? My second house, was much worse than that but only upstairs. It was a set of over stressed joists due to an upstairs load bearing wall not being above the downstairs one. The process of alterations to the house the wonky door frame upstairs got moved and re built and it never moved again, at least in the time I owned it.

This is not advice but..... It has been reported here before that OR are difficult to deal with and at least one member was told by an OR employee to accidentally pull the wire down, report the fault then the men come and fix it with no fuss. It would be very easy to accidentally damage the phone cable while removing the redundant power cables if you were not very careful. And then the (obviously rotten) pole fell down. That would be when the issue of the (now missing of course) private pole can be discussed. Offer then the chance to run the cable underground around the perimiter of your plot.

If the wall is leaning it will have been a gradual process and the foundations will be leaning as well. If you push it back upright with brute force, you will likely just break the wall so when you remove the force it might all just fall over. Then who do you expect will be expected to pay to repair it?

Yes that is loop at switch. the blues in the Wago are the neutral, so if your smart switch needs a neutral that is where it connects to.

When our pump failed we got a soggy lawn. I learned early on to keep a (cheap) spare pump to swap over if the main (expensive) one failed.

If there is literally a 2 core cable connected to the switch then you have "loop at light" wiring. I assume this is one of your HMO's? Most people wire new builds loop at switch now.

Mine (LG 5kW) is nosiest heating DHW then usually nearing the end as the tank water approaches it's 48 degree target and the HP is having to deliver water at 55 degrees to make any meaningful input to the tank. If you are not using up surplus solar PV could you time it where possible to do the DHW heating at night when people are not likely to be outside? Just heating the house it is very quiet.

You put the treatment plant at the bottom near the house so it drains by gravity. Then the outflow from the treatment plant drains to a holding tank where that is pumped up to the drainage field. FAR easier pumping grey water than foul water and only 50mm mdpe pipe needed. We had this system at out last house. Some treatment plants can be bought with the holding tank and pump built in.

That was last week when the wind was not blowng. No shortage of wind today, it is probably the transmission network that is the bottleneck today.

If they are sliding doors, does it matter is the tiles are slightly higher than the sliding door threshold?

It's funny what some peoples idea of "insulated" is. No point removing what is there, that is just a horrible, messy job and creates the waste to dispose of. I would leave it there and add more on top, taking care to keep all the wiring on top of the insulation not buried between layers. Re the old loft room. Line it with PIR with the joints taped leaving a gap between the PIR and the actual roof for ventilation then plasterboard over.

That's sad yet again to hear or poor service from the "professionals" I know @Nickfromwales is in the south but I wonder if he knows anyone that covers North Wales?

If I recall correctly, they did not put the trusses on the porch until the blockwork and the lintel was built up the front of the house.

We built one similar. The timber frame incorporated the porch and a concrete lintel spanned the porch opening built from the blockwork skin to support the blockwork above the porch. Obviously if you want to build the interior of the porch to have a vaulted roof that would make things a lot more complicated. We just had a flat ceiling at the same height as the rest of the ceilings.

The only issue I am aware you may find depending on your BC inspector is the height of the banister. For domestic stairs and a "landing" it is 900mm, but at a previous house we had a disagreement with the BC inspector that the banister around a gallery was not a "landing" and so came under "other" and required an 1100mm banister. Discuss this with BC before ordering your glass.

The immediate bottleneck appears to be the England / Scotland interconnects. If heavy industry was encouraged by cheaper fuel costs to locate in Scotland rather than England, that would relieve a lot of the pressure on that interconnect.

Pictures? First thing to establish is the ground floor entirely flat or is that sagging in the middle, if so likely to be subsidence. If ground floor is flat but parts of upstairs sagging and given your description, likely to be inadequate (probably) timber lintels or joists sagging.

Lots of wise words in that article. Particularly trying to encourage more generation down south and more usage up north. It shows the lack of joined up planning lets build renewable generation as fast as we can in Scotland, even if that is faster than we can build the infrastructure to actually enable us to use that new capacity Will we finally see proper variable pricing, where electricity for Scottish customers is actually cheaper than for south England customers? (at the moment we perversely have the opposite)

My first question is why? Give that render a good clean with a pressure washer and re paint it, job done, low maintenance external finish. Cladding would make sense if it was part of an external wall insulation system to improve the performance of the building.

I did very similar. What you have to remember is the battens follow the vertical lines of the wall studs. When mounting the tv you screw through the battens and into the studs behind them. I used a wide tv bracket, the sort you screw a wide plate to the wall and a pair of brackets fix to the back of the tv and hang on the wide plate. Mine has been holding up our old 50" plasma tv that is a 2 man lift for a few years now, way heavier than any modern tv you will buy now.

I am not disputing they are generally sensible, just curious how you appear to be complying only just with little room for a minor alteration. A floorplan might explain it?

If your door positions are that tight that you can't move it over 50mm to make the architrave work, then you must be stretching every mm of the access space requirements? Not that I have ever known them measure for compliance.