ProDave

I know building control failed them in a house up here for internal use, because you could push the wires apart.

@lizzie What are those howdens wardrobe doors actually like? Reading the caralogue, says "8mm paper faced chipboard" It's the "paper faced" not even veneer bit that makes me think they might be rubbish and a poor relation to the real oak doors in the rest of the house.

That is my plan. The doors, door runners, frames, plasterboard all on the VAT claim. The internal racking / shelving is "furniture" and not on the VAT claim.

Last time I looked the VAT rules said a built in wardrobe can be frame, doors and 1 basic shelf. Anything beyond that is not VAT claimable.

I like the "out of the box" thinking there. When I have done built in wardrobes with sliding doors, I have always taken the timber door frame down the sides and finished off with architrave. I would never have thought of just having the door sliding up to the plasterboarded end of a wall, but I like the simple look now I see it. Let us know how durable it proves to be.

This weeks impossible build, the big log cabin in the "remote" Highlands, 12 miles from Inverness (did not feel very remote to me) So a big log cabin made of big logs. Probably an average of 12" diameter? That was it, that was the entire wall structure, exposed round logs on the outside and the inside. anyone care to guess what the U value of those walls would be and how it passed building regs?

Polishing a t**d springs to mind. The basic problem is no, or very little insulation. These prefabs were often on decent sized plots and sounds a perfect knock down and rebuild opportunity. If you are going to stick with it and try to improve it, them mvhr will at least recover most of the heat. Positive input, or central extraction won't. Look for a cheap unit on ebay? Beware, almost certainly contains asbestos. I declined a rewire on one of these because I was afraid of asbestos and did not want to be inadvertently drilling into it. My BIL lived in one of these for the first 10 years of his married life. It was heated only by a stove burning mostly wood. He relates how cold and miserable it was, and he spent the entire weekend in winter preparing enough wood for the coming week. His only regret was that it was rented and they could not buy the sites (the residents association tried) as he would love to have build a decent house on the plot.

Reminds me of the house at the top of our road. Previously marketed as an "Eco House" (I think because it had the cheapest available triple glazing) that had an EPC rating of D. It is always the first house in the road that the snow melts off the roof, and the people that bought it keep complaining at the high heating bills. A friend of SWMBO down south was looking for a new house. They looked at a detached house with a small paddock. It had solar PV on the original higher rate FIT. I advised them it was a good buy. But they then pulled out of the purchase because the survey raised doubts about the roof structure being able to support the extra weight of the PV panels. they also did not like the overhead power lines passing over the paddock. They ended up buying a semi detached house instead. There is no accounting for buyers behavior.

Definitely gas boiler if gas is available. UFH seems to be accepted but I would avoid new things like the Sun Amp as people don't know and understand them. UVC for hot water for me but again most buyers won't know or appreciate the much better hot water flow rates and would probably accept the cheapest smallest gas combi boiler. The more I think about it, what you want for your forever home, the best of everything, is worlds away from what you need to sell a home. I can begin to see the thinking in building new builds to the minimum they can get away with as most buyers don' know or care about the difference.

What I have found is most buyers are not interested in things that are high on my list, like location, views, orientation, quiet (away from through traffic) plenty of off road parking tor trailers etc, garage, sheds etc. So forget those if selling, they might be important if keeping. When trying to sell our old house, feedback we got from viewers suggested they did not like the "old fashioned" layout of separate kitchen, dining room and living room. These days people want a big "familly room" containing the kitchen, somewhere to sit down and eat, and a sofa and tv to lounge in. Then a separate snug living room so you can escape the noise of "kitchen stuff" Main bathroom must have a bath and a shower. A shower only is acceptable in an en-suite. Hard floor coverings are popular now, but buyers can't tell the difference between cheap laminate or solid oak, so choose the cheaper, as long as it looks good.

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.