ProDave

This sounds very much like my own site. For strip foundations you would dig through the made up soil down to 3ft or so until you are into original firm sand / gravel. You might have to remove all / some of the made soil under the house as well. The passive slab can probably best be described as an insulated raft foundation. You would have to strip most if not all the made ground and build up in layers of compacted stone before laying the passive slab system. It usually incorporates a perimeter French drain.

so @recoveringacademic have you tried adjusting it?

Fill the crack, paint the whole outside (painting pebbledash is a lousy job) and sell on. It will smarten it up and look a lot less drab.

I would swap lounge and Kitchen / diner. At the moment Kitchen / diner gets the best view and best sun. The curved pantry wall does not work for me.

I'll bet the heater is set for Kerosene and to burn Diesel will need some adjustment, perhaps even different jets.

What is wrong with OSB? Cheap and solid. But our box profile rood sits on top of that on battens and counter battens, not directly onto the OSB.

For just a hand wash basin, how about a low volume storage water heater, typically anything from 10L to 20L and with a 3KW element or similar size. This sort of thing just as an example not a recommendation to buy. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/10L-2kW-Under-sink-Water-Heater-by-ATC-3-sinks/142934692689?epid=2254439348&hash=item2147925351:g:OxYAAOSwnXpbl8P4

Not with me it would not. The first thing I do on a new build is go round with the customer and mark with a marker pen where all the switches and sockets are going. Then change or add any that the want. The electrical stuff shown on the plan is only ever a rough guide and in most cases things change. Sure it might cost a bit more if it ends up with more lights and sockets, but it does not cost more because it is a "variation"

My guess re the PPE is he didn't know what service head he would find. A modern one like you have is usually perfectly safe, but if he had found an old cast iron one, I'll bet the PPE would have been used.

Interesting. What's the betting to be eligible you still have to have it installed my an MCS registered installer?

Likewise I used Ebico's no standing charge tariff that is no longer available. So the principle is sound, you just need o hunt out if anyone is still doing a no standing charge tariff.

There is this one, that has a larger than normal bit on the wall so should stand a better chance of finding a stud to fix to https://cpc.farnell.com/electrovision/a195fe/dual-pivot-tilt-swivel-tv-brkt/dp/ST03901?st=pull out tv bracket

Don't exclude us from your market (couples with child / children) The space you have is big enough for 2 bedrooms As an ex B&B proprietor I certainly would not want to run a B&B into retirement, that is too much work so the idea of the self catering sounds a lot less work. From a trade point of view, we found AirBnB very disappointing. Booking.com gave us (and continues to give our tenants) a steady stream of guests. You could follow the model we have (unintentionally) of just letting the whole thing to someone else that wants to run it. You would not get as much income, but you would not have to do much work either. The "portable building" / no building regs route frees you from some of the accessibility and circulation space requirements so may allow better use of space. You get into a grey area as a portable building can only be single storey. Some may argue being on top of a garage, it is 2 storey. Perhaps a phone call to the duty building control officer to clarify is you can build a portable building (caravan in building regs terms) on top of a concrete garage roof and still be BR exempt.

The latter question, simply get a number of identical freesat boxes so they all function exactly the same. You might need identical televisions as well if you want them to really operate the same.

The obvious questions have to be does the render sound loose or blown either side of the crack? Are there corresponding cracks on the plaster on the inside? and if you can see the often bare courses of brick at ground level below the pebbledash, are there any signs or movement, cracks or steps in those? That window cill does not seem to stick out much or have a drip bead, so chances are water is getting in behind the render.

The problem with swivel, is they tend to fix to one narrow point as the one @jack has shown. Fine if it lines up with a stud but you are lucky if that is the case. You can get tilting brackets that like the flat ones, tend to be wide so span across 2 joists usually. Would just tilt do?

Different heat pumps work in different ways. My LG, you set the hot water tank temperature and it measures that with a probe in a pocket in the tank. I have that set to 47 degrees. You can also set a limit on the "water leaving temperature" in DHW mode, and I have that set for 55 degrees. Another quirk of mine is that it only heats hot water for 30 minute bursts before switching back to space heating for at least another 30 minutes, one of the reasons it can take so long to heat the tank. I can also read from the control unit what the actual HW tank temperature is so I know if it has reached the target temperature or not. The worst temperature point for an ASHP is just above freezing. That is when they are likely to freeze and need to defrost. Once it is well below zero there is usually very little moisture in the air to it tends to run for long periods without icing.

No, not yet. But by accident I do have a spare electricity meter, so I might just consider connecting to log how much energy it uses. There have not been any "multiple ladies showering" incidents since I fitted it, so I am sure it has not saved the day yet.

The issue, is under certain weather conditions (very close to 0 degrees, high humidity) an ASHP may ice up, so it has to stop what it is doing, defrost itself (which will take some heat out of your HW tank) and then start heating again. This has 2 effects, it will take longer, and use more electricity to heat the hot water. I have concluded there is a big issue of understanding. A conventional gas or oil boiler will pump perhaps 20KW of heat into a hot water tank and heat it up very quickly. An ASHP will put perhaps 5KW of heat into the tank and take very much longer. If you have just had a bath or several long showers and used up all the hot water, the recovery time will be much longer than a boiler. If you are not expecting that, you will be disappointed. I have fortified my own system by adding a Steibel Eltron instant water heater in line with the output. This is a modulating electric heater. The output temperature is set for the same as the HW tank temperature. So under normal use, it does very little. But if the tank runs low and the water starts to go cold, it will boost it in real time.

How did you get away fitting windows without trickle vents if you don't have mvhr?

Silly question, what do they want to watch on the tv? If just freeview, then can you get a "simple" remote or a simple programable remote? My (now departed) MIL complained about the complication and number of buttons on a modern tv remote. She just wanted on/off, volume and buttons 1-5. It nearly killed her fighting with a separate remote for a freeview box, until we could get her a digital tv. I had one customer where no matter how many times I showed her and gave written instructions she could just not understand her tv. She ended up leaving it switched on and just turned the volume down hen not watching it. I am convinced there a market for a "simple" no frills tv for the "older person" with most of the fancy functionality hidden.

This vent stack thing does seem very open to interpretation by building control. I argued that the drain run was vented at the far end by a vent stack on the static caravan so we did not need one on the house and a AAV was all we needed. Our BC inspector argued that someone might remove that later and we had to have a vent stack on the house. He would have accepted just a vent pipe going up the end of the house and joining into the drain beyond the house, and then AAV's in the house, but by that point I had concreted the car parking area so had missed the chance to bury a pipe for that, so I did end up fitting a vent stack out of the top of the roof. I can't say I notice it being particularly cold to touch, but I will insulate around it before boxing it in.,

We used Protec VP400 plus for our roofimg membrane, on the advice of the builder that it would survive an extended period before the tiles went on. This seems to have been good advice. I have lined the external walls of the sun room with that, and 3 (or coming up to 4) years later it is still like that, clad in the still exposed VP400 which still seems in good condition. It definitely will have got wet and definitely will have been well below freezing.

Another safe way is to buy on a trade account. My kitchen came from Howdens, booked to the account, and paid for AFTER the whole kitchen was delivered.

The reason I am very cynical about Project management is one previous roll I had, as well as designing the bloody machine I had to keep updating the project plan. Of course things kept changing, the spec kept changing, estimates of timescale kept changing. I was ending up spending more time keep adjusting the project plan than doing any design. Had it not been for the fact I needed to maintain employment and an income, I would have told the managers "just forget this project plan and just let me get on and design and build it, you will get your machine a lot quicker that way"