ProDave

One thing you have not mentioned yet is the ring beam around the perimiter. This joins all the joist ends together. So it has the effect of spreading the load on one beam to adjacent beams. So someone jumping on the floor at the edge, the load won't be placed on one beam, but shared by several. Likewise a high static load on one will be shared by adjacent beams. Our static caravan which is much the same construction, though with a shorter cantilever is made of timbers that look more like 3" by 2" I think it has something like 2" steel angle around the edge as a "ring beam"

What you need is to get on and restore those Capri's. That should keep you busy for a few weeks. God I hope the lockdown won't last until you have finished them........

We had a bit of a guess as we did not know exactly what flooring we would use other than it would be "wood" As it happened, the engineered oak we chose was at the thin end of the spectrum at 20mm, so to make it work, I needed 30mm battens, which of course are not readily available so I ended up using 25mm plus a sheet of 6mm ply ripped into strips. Re door mats. The two main doors are tiled with slate so we built in mat wells when tiling for a decent thickness door mat. The other doors have an ultra slim mat as @Jeremy Harris has.

Did you not notice the door frame is not plumb to the wall?

Previous house was a cold roof with trusses. That had a habit of making some loud creaks and cracks when the roof heated up on a warm day. The NO1 thing I would say is make a warm roof with a ridge beam. SO much easier to make air tight and so much better use of space.

UFH downstairs from ASHP. No heating needed upstairs.

Twin wall pretty smooth on the inside. Total cost £1072 from BPC for all ducting, terminal vents, plenum boxes etc but not the large duct from the plenum boxes to the mvhr unit, they came from another self builder left over from his job. BPC did not do the design, I am not sure what they would have charged if they did,

It's a semi rigid plastic ducting, in my case two ducts in parallel to each vent. And they all lead back to two plenum boxes next to the mvhr unit

Slightly smaller house, £400 for mvhr unit from ebay. Design done by house designer, Pipework, semi rigid 75mm radial system a little over £1000 from BPC, self installed in a couple of days. Dead easy.

Still got next years firewood to chop and stack. A shed to tidy up and reoorganise. A deck to finish (until I run out of wood for that) and some work to do in the garden. Then there is starting on the VAT claim. Not completely bored yet. but mustn't rush things.

Ours is a 195mm frame (filled with Frametherm 35) and 100mm wood fibre board on the outside then render. The house with 3g Rationel windows is extremely quiet. It does not creak or groan in strong wind, No steelwork in ours. The SE specified two layers of OSB on the frame as the racking layer with staggered joints. Same 100mm wood fibre used as the roof sarking and same frametherm insulation making a warm roof supported on a ridge beam. We have 25mm service void, that and 12mm plasterboard is a perfect fit for 35mm back boxes for the electrics. 15mm (soldered copper) pipework fits in the 25mm gap. The utility room is the only place we have any 22mm pipes in the wall and that has a 45mm service void. Our bathroom was tight on space, so the outside wall there has no pipes or cables and the plasterboard goes straight on the frame with no service void. No difference in accoustics noticed.

@gwebstech what is the exact issue that you have?

Most of us self building are using more modern building methods. e.g. we are timber frame and between the frame and the plasterboard is a battened "service void" for all pipes and cables. Cables must follow "safe zones" as defined in the wiring regulations, I am not aware of any such regs for water pipes but I suspect there are for gas pipes.

I cut and oiled the last 3 bits of skirting today. When they are fitted in a few days that's that finished until I can get some more materials. That's not the skirting finished, just used up all I have,

It's like being retired but permanently stuck on a Sunday on the outer Hebredies (about the only place where most shops still shut on a Sunday) No thank you. Retirement where you can't buy anything or go anywhere would not be much fun.

And lots of pressure on the screw so it does not cam out and chew up the head.

No problem installing a cistern in a stud wall and no issue with the socket position. The regs only concern where the face of the socket is, and that is not going in a special location. The only issue might be when the loo is flushed, the noise of it re filling may be an issue in the living room.

Even of the frame of the HL is fixed by steels, you could still raise it by 50mm to even up the flight. Is that worth looking at?

What worries me about this is the TOTAL load. You estimate the total load of the outbuildings to be 75A. That only leaves 25A for the house it is all fed from, so not much at all.

My bargain basement firestick arrived today and i have just set it up. Setup wasn't too painful. All the iplayer etc apps had to be downloaded. The only one that gave grief was My5. It told me to go and register, When i entered the URL to register I got a 404. Eventually I figured you can use My5 without registering. It all seems to work okay even playing okay on our slow broadband. And just as i thought, the commercial channels disable the fast forward when the adverts are on. I might have mentioned that irritates me (my PVR lets me FF through the ads) I suspect I will be using it only for stuff I have missed or the PVR crashed. The web browser built in would be far too clumsy to use without a keyboard to use with it.

I bought one from Screwfix for the static caravan but it was more expensive than the BES one that Peter linked to above.

The main issue is that timber (looks like softwood loglap planks) is desperately crying out to be sanded back to bare wood and re coated with a good outdoor wood preservative. That would be my No 1 priority job. It is always going to suffer from rain bounce wetting the bottom planks unless you raised the whole thing on a brick dwarf wall. fitting some guttering to the roof would reduce that a lot and would be my No 2 job. Notice the back, where there is no run off from the roof, is looking a lot better. It's difficult to see what base it is on. I think it might just be gravel? Digging around the outside and filling with stones to make a French drain would help keep the ground dry and there looks to be plenty of room to do that with the building in place.

Score and snap works for a straight line that goes all the way across the board. Score the plasterboard side for a clean cut where it matters. For anything else use a panel saw and cut it. Beware, plasterboard blunts a saw quickly, so I have an old already blunt saw kept especially for cutting plasterboard.

I was meaning when at the last minute SWMBO changed the layout of our en-suite. And before that, changed the layout of the main bathroom. By the time I got to solvent welding the bath and basin waste, the layout was set in stone (or set in welded PVC)

One advantage of push fit 110mm is when "someone" changes the position of the toilet, it's easy to undo it and move it.