ProDave

Moving soil with the dozer blade When I was doing my groundwork I wanted to clear all the topsoil and pile it up at the edge of the site. I did not find a cheap enough dumper close enough so was doing it all with my 3t digger. So I used the dozer blade. Piled up a load of soil in front and pushed it. After a few runs, what spilled out from the sides formed a trench and thereafter not much escaped. Once pushed to the edge, used the digger bucket again to pile it up into one big pile. So it can be done. Beware once you get up to about 6 ton not all diggers have a dozer blade.

I would expect a modern 5 year old HW cylinder to be well insulated. I would be looking at the pipework to make sure that is also well insulated. Pictures? Our airing cupboard is perhaps 2 or 3 degrees above the room it is partitioned from, not much at all.

For moving soil I would be looking for a JCB 3CX etc not tracked digger. You can pick up a front bucket of soil drive to where you want it and tip it. A 360 excavator is pretty poor at moving soil, that would be a bucket load at a time, or using the dozer blade to push it around. Unless you want to buy a dumper as well?

You are not buying the right house for you. You are planning to buy a house that needs alteration and know access for tha alteration is going to be difficult. Can you not find a semi detached house with side access or at least a terrace house with access to the back garden other than through the house. Direct access to the rear garden was always one of my non negotiable requirements, for simple practicalities like I don't want to have to transport the lawnmower through the house and back again every week in the summer.

No help in an existing building, but this is just one of the many reasons I think all new roofs should be built at a 45 degree angle.

I suspect those walls are supporting the roof purlins at either side. So treat them as structural. The only way to get enough headroom for taller doors, is move them towards the centre a bit. The headroom at the edge is what made them put small doors there.

In your dreams. It would put some people off. A friend of swmbo was house hunting, they had the chance of a semi detached house with solar PV at the original FIT rate, and also had a paddock behind it. They withdrew from the purchase after the surveyor warned the PV panels may affect the integrity of the roof, and the paddock was outwith the village boundary and in green belt so they could "never do anything with it"

I would have lost patience by now and told them I will be serving eviction notices and marketing the property.

Perhaps you could post the quotes you have got? Just because there is for example a cable right outside your plot does not mean it has sufficient spare capacity to connect another house for instance.

The pipes are probably okay, lazy plumber did not wipe flux off after soldering and it is corrosive.

Aren't FD door liners supposed to have recessed grooves for over size door stops? (mine did) I always fit door stops at door hanging time, one less thing to line the doors up to. Instead line the door stops to the door.

The first house I bought was like that. The rear fence stopped about 5 feed from the roadside footpath and some rough shrubs had been planted. But in our case the house deeds clearly showed that the land we owned went right to the path edge including the bit beyond the fence. So collectively we submitted a planning application to move the fence which was granted so we moved it. When your garden is only 30ft long and extra 5ft is a lot, some of the houses only had a 25ft garden so even more useful to them.

There are some public rights of way in Scotland, but nowhere near as many as you would expect. As you rightly say the Right to Roam covers the vast majority of paths in open countryside and the paths have evolved where people want to go, not where they are allowed to go. When we go back to England or Wales is seems so restrictive that I can't just walk across a field, or over open moorland, unless there is a little green sign or a red dotted line on a map to say I can. Talking of maps, an OS map is of less use in Scotland as it fails to show most of the commonly used paths. Open Street map viewed on an app like Trekarta makes up for that, showing just about every path that exists.

Not necessarily a smaller gap at the bottom, but I saw no point fitting a top door stop. But I was making my own door liners in Oak, and it saved on the amount of planed Oak I needed to buy for door stops.

For a house with mvhr I don't fit top door stops, just the two down the sides, so the question does not arise (except fire doors where they must be fitted)

Was it really a "fuse" that went when it got wet? Or an RCD?

The wind on caps were called Screwits here and were made of porcelain. I used to still find some in use on old houses. But don't even think of using them today.

Yes the Quinetic is the way to go, So I would replace the 3G existing switch with a 2G, linking the L out to outside light to live so that cable is now always on. Fit the outside Quinetic switch in line with that existing outside cable, and then find a location for the inside Quinetic which can be anywhere convenient.

Without proper wiring alterations, proper 2 way switching won't work. What you could do without tearing your house apart, is put an outside switch in series with the inside switch. So IF the inside switch is on, then you could turn the outside light on and off from the outside switch. But if the inside switch is off, then the outside switch would do nothing. If that compromise was okay then yes you could continue using the cable going through the house and down the wall.

The left hand switch is definitely wired for 2 way, Red, yellow blue of one cable. That may well be on a different circuit. The middle and right switch are on the same circuit and connected to the second cable. Red is live feed looped to middle and right switches, blue is switched output from middle switch, yellow is switched output from right switch. The complexity of your alteration has just gone up somewhat. There are no junctions at the switch so it is either wired "loop at light" or quite likely spider fashion where everything goes to one great big junction box often in an unknown location. Apart from locating that junction box, your biggest issue is no spare cores in the existing cables to use for the 2 way switching of the outside light. At this point I suggest you find an electrician, this might be beyond remote diagnosis on a forum. Somehow you are going to have to get an extra cable to that switch and it looks to be plastered brick or block so that means chasing a new cable into the wall and the re plastering and decorating afterwards. If you choose to proceed I would install a new cable and wire the entire outside light as a complete new circuit.

The cable up the wall needs to be in trunking, conduit or why not just continue the SWA up into the loft and just have one junction box in the loft. Yes the terminology is very confusing estpecially as "gang" has 2 different uses for 2 different things. So Gang. You can have 1 gang and 2 gang back boxes. 1 gang is square for a light switch or single socket, 2 gang is rectangular for a double socket or 4 way light switch. You can have 1 2 3 or 4 gang light switches meaning the number of switches, where a 1,2 and 3 gang light switch fit in a 1 gang back box and a 4 gang light switch fits in a 2 gang back box. Clear? Switches, a simple on off switch is often referred to as 1 way. It can turn a single light on and off from one place and has 2 terminals. 2 changeover switch has 3 terminals and is often referred to as 2 way. It can be used just like a 1 way for a single light, or a pair of them can be used for 2 way switching. Why anyone makes or anyone bithers to buy a 1 way switch beats me, a 2 way does everything and only costs a few pence more. Then there is the intermediate light switch that confuses most people even more.

The bit inside the house does not need to be SWA. But you WILL need 3 core plus earth from the light switch to the junction box where it connects to the SWA for the remainder of it's journey. Ideally could you unscrew that switch and post some pictures of the wiring inside? What I have describes is the simplest wiring possible but it may be this house is wired differently so it could be more complicated. The inside switch almost certainly will be suitable, it would be very unusual to find a 3 gang switch that is not 2 way. (3 gang means 3 switches on the one plate, 2 gang means it is a changeover switch with 3 contacts and not a simple on off switch with just 2 contacts) There is no single way to wire light switching so lets start with finding out from those pictures how this is connected.

The above post is good, but it does come back to how good the trades are, and were they recommended? Our builders first built the foundation to the plans. Then they built the timber frame. But they did not just build the frame from the plans, they came and measured the foundations, even though they had just built them, to make sure the frame was built to the size of the foundations. Later we employed the same builder to supply and fit the windows. Again they had built the frame to the drawings, but before ordering the windows they came and measured each window and door opening. We had no nasty surprises because they checked and re checked everything.

So you will want a 3 core 1mm Steel wire armoured cable from the house switch to the outside switch which will need to be a waterproof 1 gang 2 way switch. These are usually in a back box with knock outs for the SWA cable gland. Then from the switch 2 the light you only need 2 core but might as well use the same 3 core SWA to save buying 2 different lots. Likely you will need a junction box by the light as few outside lights can directly take SWA glands.

Are you prepared to change the cable between the indoor switch and the outdoor switch? If not you probably won't be able to achieve proper 2 way switching. Do you know how many cores are in the cable to the light? Post a picture of the wiring to the indoor light switch if you can and the cable where you want to add the outdoor switch.