ProDave

Also, when the stone supplier came to template for the stone, they took the sink away with them to size up for the hole. Yes they cut the tap hole, and don't forget draining board grooves.

I guess (they did not give a reason) if the sink was in place and fixed first, then getting the hole in exactly the right place is one more thing to get exactly right. Basically they said they would not do it that way, and as they were the only stone supplier and fitter in town, I could not just go somewhere else who would fit it a different way. They threw away the silly clips supplied with the sink, and epoxied on some different fittings that they supplied. If your stone supplier is happy then I see nothing wrong with fitting it as you suggest, I am just saying check with your stone supplier.

Speak to your worktop supplier before you do anything. Some are happy to have the sink mounted to the unit and then sit the worktop over it. Ours were not. Ours the sink is hung from the worktop without getting any support from the unit, which of course means it is in a sink unit large enough to do that. Your sink unit is not. +1 to cut the back out of the sink unit for access to the taps, this is what i did:

I was going to post this question. If my claim pack got lost in the post, that's over £7K gone west. What courier is going to insure a package of paperwork for £7K and how much would they charge to do so? I could photograph or scan every invoice in case it got lost, would that then be accepted for a subsequent VAT claim if the originals had got lost?

Everyone was telling me to expect plank tiles to be bent, even the people in the shops (so they would say "told you so" when you tried to take them back because they were bent. Hence everyone saying just a very small bond to stop lipping from showing. We have engineered oak in the kitchen and so far standing up well. We have a sacrificial mat in front of the hob, that is all.

In a similar situation I ended up with a hybrid. I had a Flopast pan connector where the bit on the pan fell apart. I replaced it with the McAlpine, which has a much better pan part, but was too long, so I cut it and used the rubber finned part from the dud flopast connector.

It came from flue-pipes.com

There is a fundamental design flaw here. They have tried (whether successful or not is another matter) to run the insulation following the profile of the room, but then made cupboard door openings into the cold and ventilated eaves space. And of course the door is not insulated and lets in cold draughts. The proper way to do this would have been to run the insulation following the roof line all the way up both sides so that when it is sealed and taped, the eaves cupboards would be inside the warm envelope and there would be no draughts and no heat loss to worry about. You would expect this if it had been done a long time ago. But just 2 years? Just WHEN are builders going to start learning something about properly insulating and draught proofing buildings?

This is the insulated sleeve I mentioned, being prepared before passing this bit of pipe through the roof. The roof structure can then be sealed to the outside of the insulated sleeve ensuring no cold air enters the house. Even of you replaced the ceiling grill for a solid one, you would still have the cold air getting in through the roof, and into the void behind where the flue pipe is hidden, and it would still be cooling the house only it would not be so obvious. You do need it solved either where it goes into a cold loft, or where it exits the roof. This is the BIG problem with the UK building industry, very few people understand problems like this or take the care to avoid them happening.

The "issue" will be further up. A flue pipe like that cannot touch flamable materials, typically it must be kept 50mm away from anything flamable, so that grille is covering an over size hole in the ceiling. At some point, the flue will pass into a cold loft, or straight out through the roof. The same applies. You cannot let any flamable material touch the flue. What i suspect has been done here is the installer has just left big gaps so cold air from the loft or outside the roof can get in and down the space around the flue and down into your room. There is a solution. the manufacturer of my flue make an insulating sleeve to go around the flue pipe which is a tight fit to the flue pipe. It is obviously made of a non flamable material. With that you can then make the opening through a celing or roof sealed and air tight and no cold air will get in. Who built the house and when or who installed the stove? EDIT: reading the above, I very much doubt this is the intended air intake. It might be doing that by accident, but the intentional air intake is usually low down near the stove.

Those are some pretty poor energy use figures, mine is a lot lower than that.

That kind of proves what my tiler said. Yours are laid with a short bond so any bend in the tiles would not show up as they would all pretty much bend the same, and they are all uniform length.

So the one in the showroom is flat. What happens when the ones you order arrive bent?

We considered "wooden tiles" for our kitchen. It was the tiler that put me off. He was telling me most of them come bent, they are very hard to lay without a step between tiles because of that, so best way to lay them is with only a slight bond. They are all uniform length so the joints will all all line up, unlike real wood supplied in random lengths with random joints. The tiler did a good job of putting us off them.

That will have the plain English society spitting feathers. Don't they mean "loosen the adjusting cover" ?

Building control fee for a start. And not having to comply with building regs may make your layout more creative, e.g not having to comply with all the somewhat overbearing accessibility regs? Freedom to not have anyone inspecting what you do and criticising. Simpler cheaper foundations.

They have to be moveable which includes being lifted by a crane onto a low loader. There is no requirement to be on wheels. It is accepted to just build a timber structure on pads or a concrete raft complies, as long as it has sufficient rigidity that you could lift in by crane without it self destructing.

You could do a lot worse than build a single storey timber building within the definition of a "caravan" Which will get you to just over 100 square metres free of building control and can be set on simple pad foundations.

Yes, certainly in Scotland Building control will want to see the percolation tests and calculations. It is possible to have ground that drains too quick, as well as too slow.

Many of us are self building for £1000 per square metre or even less if you do enough of the work, so a simple no frills 100 square metre, square, 2 storey house should be possible. There was a tv program a few years back, that house that £100K built, but very few actually built a house for £100K

The outside looks to be clad in plywood that is delaminating. Strip all the old cladding check the frame and re clad in something more durable. But why would you spend money on a rented property?

Why do the phrases "gravy train" and "unnecessary red tape" pop into my mind?

Upstairs landing is vast. Shrink it a bit and make bedrooms 1 and 2 bigger.

And in Scotland there is also a Certificate of Temporary Habitation which you can get when the house is part built to allow you to legally occupy it. That can also be used for a VAT claim.

I know our local network is near capacity. We were only offered a 12KVA supply for the new house. I knew if I wanted more than 3.68kW of PV there would be an upgrade charge. This was confirmed when I registered my 3.68kW system, they mistakenly took the "4000" in the inverters model number to mean it was a 4KW inverter and instructed me to disconnect it and they would prepare a quote for the network upgrade. That was resolved when I supplied them the manufacturers specifications showing the inverter output was limited to 3.68KW So it was not so much of would there be a charge for more than 3.68KW, it was just a question of how much of a charge. I suspect the transformer at the top of our road would need upgrading and I doubt it would be a cheap upgrade. I did not want to be the one paying to upgrade a struggling network.