ProDave

What is the wall made of? Can you cut into it, e.g to recess the soil pipe into the wall? If so the solution would probably be a back to the wall pan with the soil pipe run recessed into the wall, but that might be a lot of engineering. Or still work on a back to wall pan, built out on some studwork, with the soil pipe part recessed into the wall, part within the studwork, and a slimline cistern behind the studwork.

It depends. My tiler, for the tiles I was using, prefered an hourly rate as it was too hard to estimate the time it would take.

Do EV's have the same standard "automatic" gear shift, i.e. Park, Reverse, Neutral, Drive.... ?

Simply done by adding a key to all the symbols used in the corner of a drawing. But are you SURE putting it all on a drawing is really the best? I find walking around the site with the customer and a big black marker pen and deciding in reality with the customer where everything should go makes more sense than trying to imagine on a drawing. Often they can't visualise until they see it in reality, where they want to put the tv etc, and what rooms need 2 or 3 way light switching and from where.

Hi and welcome A lot of these bulging floor problems were the type of concrete used that swelled, often a lot of fly ash used in them. Take the opportunity to dig much deeper and put plenty of under floor insulation. Often the hardest thing to do in a renovation so being forced to dig it up gives you that opportunity.

There is a flaw in your plan. While building regs don't stipulate specific ventilation requirements for a single garage (they do for a double garage) they do say you should not attempt to make a garage air tight. But even if you tried, you will not find an air tight garage door. All you can do is make ALL the walls and ceilings between the house and the garage your insulation and air tightness envelope and fit an air tight door between the house and garage. And there is another problem, it has to be a fire door. So you are looking for an air tight, insulated fire door between the house and garage. I admitted defeat on that, and just fitted an internal fire door and added extra draught proofing and accept there will be some heat loss and a bit of a compromise to the air tightness. You have to be realistic. My total annual heating bill is just over £200. Even if I could shave £50 off that by having a completely sealed air tight insulated door between the house and garage (unlikely the saving would be that much) , with such a door costing over £1000, it would have a payback time of 20 years.

2 very distinctive styles. The Honda looks (to me) a dated design and over cluttered with far too many displays. By contrast the Tesla looks pared to the bone minimalism, not even any visbile door handles.

It is a looooong time since I have had to use a plunger. Not in the last 2 houses (that I built) It was only something I had to do in my old 1930's house with a very long very shallow drain run that was not done very well. If the plunger makes it leak under the sink, you have a problem with the trap not sealing at one of it's joints.

I am not sure I like the pretend wood. It reminds me of an old Ford Granada.

I thought they had two pedals, and the brake pedal always works as a brake pedal. It's just that they can be set into single pedal mode where lifting the throttle causes regenerative braking.

I am sure the brake pedal still works just the same with cruise control on an EV.

Re the wood store idea, make horizontal shelves with the pallets so you don't just have one great big stack.

If the planet warms meaningfully it swings it in favour of ASHP (partly or even completely eliminates the need for defrosting in cold weather) If GSHP's become more efficient, then so too will ASHP's in all probability, but you would need to buy a new one to get that increase in efficiency. If you want to install a GSHP later it will trash a large part of your garden. Install collector pipes now even if you don't use them, just in case?

It would be interesting to hear an MOT testers view of EV's and hybrids. e.g our Toyota hybrid. Drive it onto the ramps and stop it and the engine will stop, if it hadn't already stopped before you even got to the ramp, with no obvious manual way to force the engine to run. how do you test the emissions? With the brake light behaviour on the Tesla that @Jeremy Harris describes, how do you test the brake lights? There must be lots of other subtle things that don't fit the conventional testing wisdom of an MOT?

Slab is not always cheaper. We had a sloping site. FFL needed to be somewhat above original site level. Then add there was a very thick level of organic soil that had to be stripped off. The result would have been an awful lot of infill to build up the levels back to what would be needed to lay a slab. A suspended timber floor was cheaper. Then add our peculiar cashflow issues, a slab would have meant paying for the floor insulation at shell build time, and laying the UFH pipes then as well A suspended timber floor let us buy the floor insulation a bit later in the build and the UFH even later.

Whenever I have been house hunting, having my own off road parking (and preferably a garage or space to build one) has been a must have. Indeed it was my primary reason for moving up from my first 1 bedroom rabbit hutch. When I was in Oxfordshire, that ruled out about 90% of the houses that I could afford. One estate agent even branded me as a time waster and refused to give me any more viewings because in spite of me telling them my requirements, they kept sending me to see houses that either only had on street parking, or parking in a communal car park away from the house. Before it was just so I had somewhere to work on a car, or just for better security. Now it would be even more important. It was made even more stupid by the fact at the cheaper end of the market, it was stupid house builders that made these ridiculous housing estate layouts that denied you an "on plot" parking space, when with a bit of thought they could have done that, and still built the same number of houses.

To buffer or not to buffer can only work when you have real time pricing. i.e. your smart meter has to communicate to you what the price is right now, in a way that can be read by devices, so they can choose to charge or discharge your batteries, shut off heating loads or turn them on etc. I don't see anything like that built into the present smart meters, They are just a way to charge at different rates in arrears with no automatic way to tell loads when is the best (cheapest) time to run. This is one of the reasons why I won't have a smart meter just yet, I don't see the present offerings as the solution.

Tedious in the extreme to do was my thought on that, but very neatly done. Very glad the average house does not have that much networked stuff.

I generally champion this free country that we live in. There is an awful lot you are allowed to do here without "qualifications" compared to most other countries. Take my relatives in Australia, they could not get a building permit to renovate a derelict old Queenslander, until they had both attended college to get a self builders permit. It is a shame that courses like that are not run here on a voluntary basis though.

Get agreement from the neighbour for scaffold over their walkway? If you are even considering anything else must mean they have said no already?

Just replacing the wood if you don't fix the "why" might be a short term fix, e.g if the wall the wood rests on is saturated.

If the buyer wants to be sure, you do need a look under the floor, which is not a trivial job with laminate flooring fitted. It probably now hinges on whether the mortgage company get worried if they see the words "dry rot"

Why do you cut them so short / thin? You are just making more work for the saw. I usually cut logs like that to 12" lengths, then get busy swinging the axe.

Nobody can tell anything without lifting floorboards or otherwise gaining access to the under floor area. So I hope he has made it CLEAR he did not SEE dry rot, but has just made an assumption that may be one possible cause. A more likely cause (and easier to fix) is wet rot. Or nothing at all. I had exactly the same in a 1930's house. Some wood had warped (as wood does) meaning the wall plate on a sleeper wall had lifted a few mm off it's wall, and as you put weight on it, it went back down. nothing "wrong" not even wet rot.

On the granite worktop it is about a metre from a window. On the wooden worktop it is about in the middle of the room. But the point is, the butter used to live on a wooden worktop exactly where the granite is now, and it remained spreadable.