ProDave

Hi and welcome to the forum. You are in good company here.

The danger is, it is someone elses water from further up a hill that was just draining through your land. Now it is draining into your land.

This is mine. I used 2 meter boxes side by side because I wanted to accommodate more stuff. Basically the left hand box is "theirs" for the supply head and meter, and the right hand box is "mine" In the right hand box the consumer unit feeds the outdoor socket, the static caravan, and a shed. The switch fuses at the bottom feed to the house. If all you want is the meter and a feed tot he house, you can get away with a single meter box and just put the switch fuse over to the bottom right

Ah that's a hill walkers rite of passage that one. I never managed to visit the Clachaig as a passenger, always the driver.

More important than "how to make the most of the budget" is "make sure you HAVE the budget you think you have. We started our build with enough money to get started, and the rest to come from the sale of our old house. Which then failed to sell. So we have struggled along very slowly "finding" money as we go instead, which is why I am doing just about all of it myself so we only have to spend on materials, not labour.

You are missing some of the plastic "push to release" buttons from terminals Com, 1, 3 and 4 If you need to release a cable you could try pushing a screwdriver down into the hole where the plastic bit should be

Hi and welcome to the forum. I am right up at the other end of the Great Glen north of Inverness. Look forward to helping you along the journey

Why? What benefit do you believe it will give you? Highly unlikely. More likely to short the supply cable making a very big bang.

It is important to have a dew point analysis done. This was ours with the wood fibre and render This is the reason the OSB racking layers are on the inside of the frame (I lost count of how many times a passer by told us they had put the frame up inside out during construction) u-wert-berechnung (10).pdf

Why not do as we have done, 100mm thick wood fibre board and render direct onto that like shown here Described here https://www.ecomerchant.co.uk/exterior/insulation/wood-fibre-rigid/steico-protect-9611.html

Ask your local planners. In my case condition 1 of the planning permission was we must form the entrance from the highway onto the plot first. When I queried this with the planners, they told me that creating the entrance counted as "commencing" the development, so in theory that will have locked in the planning permission. It was irelevant for us because the actual house was started very soon after that.

I would raise this with the manager at your home branch, and make it clear if they won't do the same price at the other branch you will be taking your custom elsewhere.

I used the "brackets" I linked to a few posts ago. Here is the "pocket" already in the wall and the pins screwed in place. As I guessed, the bit that goes into the wall is an M6 thread, that screws nice and snug into a 5.5mm hole drilled into the wood. The shelf slides onto those pins. I drilled 9.5mm holes to make it a less snug fit. It is important to drill these carefully, I used the pillar drill. Not much room for error drilling a 9.5mm hole into a 19mm thick shelf. And this it what is it for. The surround sound unit and the front speakers. The tv will be mounted on the wall immediately above, and as near to touching (but not quite) the front centre speaker as I can get it.

The No 1 thing has to be insulate as much as possible to reduce heating load. I chose an ASHP for my heating. I did not want oil again and be subject to hugely varying and unpredictable prices. You can see from the graph above, filling my oil tank in 2005, or even 2006/7 at twice the cost of when the system was installed in 2003 was painful. Electricity by comparison has slowly increased, but not with the huge volatility that oil has. And if you install solar PV so at least some of your consumption can be self generated, that has to be a sound proposition.

I had a similar situation when I wanted to build a garage at a previous house on a corner plot. The planners wanted me to keep within the building line of the existing house, which would have put the garage in the back garden right outside the back door. I didn't want that so U submitted planning for where I wanted it and it was refused, so I appealed. The appeal gave a very long description of the locality, noting that the older houses, in particular one the other side of the road, was built right up to the road, but the modern houses were all set back. He noted that my house formed a link between the old and the new, and concluded the garage being set back part way served to connect the old to the new and permission was granted. It sounds a very similar situation that you want to build in between the building line of 2 properties so I would submit your plans and see.

I find a 60cm desk perfectly acceptable. Long gone are the days of big fat CRT screens that took up half your desk and demanded a very deep desk.

That looks totally wrong to me. The lead should go on before the stone. They look to have put the lead over the face of the stone, and water will run into that gap. That is the way you do it if you are then going to cover it with render.

That is £803 per square metre. Not a huge saving over the £1000 per square metre I am building my house for. I would want to see a lot more saving than that to justify a cabin rather than a full spec house.

Yep that's the way I feel about wholesalers and avoid for that reason. BES, screwey's, Toolstation, CPC, Shop4Electrical, TLC direct etc provide most of my needs in a much more predictable and timely fashion.

Treatment plant discharging to a burn is a delightfully simple system. You will need a discharge permit from SEPA and they don't like giving them unless this is the only option. We had to prove, buy proposing 2 other schemes first, that discharge to the burn was the only option before they would allow it. now it is installed is is wonderfully simple with nothing to go wrong. Make sure you use one of the air blower type treatments plants. I would not personally choose one of the type that has rotating mechanical parts in the brown smelly stuff.

Yes the size limit is external, so the more insulation you have, the smaller internal space you have. The size I am sure is based on a typical twin unit traditional static caravan, limited to 12 ft wide for each half, so that would be just over 7 metres. It looks like in Scotland we are limited to the older definition based on a twin unit of 10ft wide sections which is where we end up with just over 6M maximum width.

the Highland Council's definition of a mobile home is here https://www.highland.gov.uk/downloads/file/1346/bst_018_caravans_and_mobile_homes I assume it is the same for the whole of Scotland. There is a size limit, and a "ceiling height" limit, but no ridge limit on a "caravan" Note that in England you are allowed a larger "caravan" then we are in Scotland, something to do with the Caravan act being updated in England but not here. Planning don't need to know if it is a mobile home or a fixed home, they just want the size and what it looks like. If you get planning for something that fits the definition of a "caravan" then it means no building regs for the building. You might need building regs for the waste connection, ask them as you are just laying a pipe to an existing system they may still want to take their fee and inspect it. @Crofter has a building warrant for his drainage system. Good that the company supplying it will zero rate it. I have yet to find anyone who has tested a VAT reclaim on a portable building, you won't have a "completion certificate" but it must surely be worth a try to reclaim the VAT on anything you spend on it. As to bending the rules? I am sure @crofter has a vaulted ceiling. And the "rules" say it must be transportable by dismantling to 2 sections, but I know a company that makes such portable buildings typically in 4 sections and seem happy that it complies. Another advantage of building a "mobile home" is more flexibility on layout, e,g you won't have to follow all the over zealous "activity space " and "circulation space " requirements.

Are you missing a trick here? A plot that big in the city would surely support more than 1 house? Or are you planning a phase 2 later on to the right of the house you propose? (what is the significance of the "1" in the house outline?)

Pop one out from the ceiling and look again with the flir at the empty hole. I suspect something (hot pipes passing through?) is making the ceiling - floor void very warm and it is that warmth coming out that you are seeing.

It is interesting how planning policies vary. Up here, if you try and exceed 5 houses accessed from the same private track, they insist on upgrading the track to highway standard and the road being adopted as a public road. I am sure that is what happened here. In 1980 when my plot first had PP it was a private track and would have been serving 5 houses including the one on my plot (if it had been built then). By the time we moved here in 2003 the road was surfaced, adopted as a public highway, and serving 7 houses plus the first one we built and the neighbouring house under construction. I don't know who paid for the road to be upgraded.