ProDave

5M from a building or boundary, 10M from a road or watercourse.

I would start at square one, and ask the installer just why he thinks it will need a 24kW boiler to feed one UFH loop and one radiator.

If you have hit hard ground that has the digger "digger shaking like a shittin' dog" do you really have to scrape it any deeper?

It should certainly be touch dry by tomorrow, but still "green" in that it won't be anywhere near full strength. If it were a driveway we would be saying don't drive your car on it for a week. Just take care not to knock the posts while it is curing. Have a few days off to so another job.

Different names. Some call it concrete mix, some call it ballast. I have never seen that sold with the cement already added, that seems unique to postcrete.

There is no such thing as a standard heat loss per square metre. It will be individual to each building depending on insulation levels and air tightness. Once you get to a certain level of insulation, then ventilation heat loss starts to dominate, and that is really where MVHR works best. At this stage in a new build you should be striving for maximum insulation, detailed well, and very good air tightness, and then mvhr will get you a low energy house.

You can buy "concrete mix" already bagged up and ready to use. Just add cement and water. Don't make it harder than it has to be.

Forget postcrete. It's horrible very quick set stuff for fixing fence posts in a hole. Pour it in, add some water and hope. For what you are doing, mix up proper concrete with concrete mix (sand and agregate) and ordinary portland cement. You can mix it and play with it on a board, when happy it is mixed, shovel it into your bucket, lefel it off with a trowel, take time to work it and make it neat, and if you have mixed too much, leave the excess in smalll lumps to set and be disposed of. It will take several hours to go off so just mix it, use it, and come back next day to see how it set.

Places I use metal boxes rather than plastic: Where an accessory has to go right next to a stud. When sinking e.g a light switch into a solid bit of wood. When I want the face of the sockets recessed behind the wall behind a television.

What fills the hole now in place of the gate? On the basis the gate pre existed, I would put the gate back now, and re submit with the plans marked "existing gate" and appeal if they continue to be stupid.

Mostly plastic, there are a few metal boxes when some unique reason made that a better choice.

Which is precicely why I keep recommending Appleby dry lining boxes. Some makes of dry lining box are absolutely dire, and when they fail, people assume all dry lining boxes are equally rubbish.

Then I will say "told you so" if the internet still works.

LAP metal flush boxes are okay. It is the Appleby plastic dry lining boxes that I rave about.

In a way I wish they would shut the bloody thing now and we would refuse to buy anything from Russia. God what a shambles the whole EU energy policy has been, to place ourselves so dependant on potentially unfriendly states.

Has any single commodity ever gone up that much in a year? 150% inflation on the gas price.

Ours never showed a staircase on any drawings, probably because the architect knew no staircase would comply, so we just built to the approved drawings.

BC will sign off when they are satisfied the building is complete and meets building regs. We had a similar situation with a mezanine, the headroom was about 1.6 metres, you could just stand up at the highest point, so there is no way any staircase could ever meet building regs. BC were happy to sign it off as a storage platform, where you put up a ladder to get to it to put anything up there for storage. Of course it now has a staircase and handrails..... I had to cut the plasterboard, but no big deal, make a careful sketch with measurements of where all the joists are and take photographs, so you remember what awaits you when you get the saw out.

Hi and welcome to the forum. You have hit upon what all self builders "down south" find. Building plots and getting planning permission is so hard, the few plots that come onto the market are way over priced. If your motivation for self building is to get a house for less money, forget it. If your motivation for self building is to get a house that is better built than an off the peg developer house, it might be worth paying more to proceed. Re the limited time on the planning permission, some people make a "start" on the development, that may mean installing the foundations or sometimes something more minor counts as "starting" and once you have started the planning is locked in without a time limit. Have you considered doing more work yourself? What skills do you have? And roughly where in Oxfordshire? That's where I came from originally.

That raises an important point. Check with the stove manufacturer before you buy, that both primary and secondary air are drawn from the duct. Not all of them are, so some with a ducting kit are not true room sealed stoves. If there is an air leak from the ducting kit, it is wrongly fitted. That should not be a concern. and once the stove is in, work on fixing some of the other leaks to make the house less draughty.

You don't need any membrane here, lay the pug mix straight on the PIR once you have laid the pipes.

The whole point of the direct air kit is it makes the stove ROOM SEALED so you DO NOT get "a draught from the stove when not in use" It means it draws it's combustion air direct from the outside. Without the direct air kit, the stove will draw it's combustion air from the room, sucking already warm air from the room and likely still sucking some heat from the room when the stove is not lit. The stove will have to get it's air from somewhere so without the direct air kit is where you will get draughts across the room. Just because you are not forced by building regulations to do something, is not a reason not to do it. Most of us on here view building regulations as a minimum standard and strive to make things a lot better than the bare minimum requirements.

Is that the only paperwork they have asked for? Or have they also asked for am MCS certificate?

So clearly the old roof covering needed replacing. So just what did they do to raise it's level so much? did they add a layer of insulation? If that was their plan it would be obvious the issue it would create with the ridge tiles and they should have discussed a plan and alternative way to deal with the ridge. Simply replacing the roof covering, preferably with something better than felt, e.g fibreglass or rubber, would not have cause the ridge tile issue.

It's funny how they won't fit a new meter, but continue to pester me to have a smart meter.......