ProDave

You can have a static caravan as a garden outbuilding without planning permission. If you connect it to a drainage system that part will need a building warrant but still not planning permission. Expect to get someone from the council snooping. If you are just using it as a general purpose garden building as for instance storage and a work place, or a summerhouse then you will be fine. What the council wants to check is you are not using it for self contained habitation. That is where you will need planning permission. So if they suspect you are using it for that, they have a right to come and check.

It will be interesting to see how much difference it makes, but it is like permanently having a very large loft hatch left open. It is also disappointing that the surveyor did not mention it might be a good idea to close off that gaping great hole and insulate above it.

I would frame and board over that hatch. Then insulate that new ceiling from the eaves loft access. At the moment warm air from the house can get up that great big hole, meet the cold air in the loft and it is no surprise condensation can drip down the old chimneys. In the short term stuff some rockwool down the old chimneys from above and lay a sheet of it over the top of them. You will find your house warmer and heating bills lower when you do that.

If you can get into the eaves space you should be able to see the top of these old chimneys. Start by insulating the eaves space with normal rockwool type insulation making sure the tops of the old chimneys are covered. for good measure stuff some down from above. Once all nicely insulated replace the plasterboard with foil backed which is more resilient to moisture.

Those look like the remains of 2 chimneys, hence the black, that is years of soot. It looks like the chimney stack above has been taken down and roofed over? (more external pictures might confirm) and the lower internal chimney breast removed.

It all became "worth it" in 2 stages, first when we moved in to the unfinished house (from the static caravan) and then 4 years later when the old house sold. Short version of story, we started in 2013 put our old house on the market in 2014 and it did not sell. 3 years it was on the market with no buyers, several other properties around us were the same, simply no buyers. That was the low point. Shell not even wind and water tight, no money to continue. Plan B was an offer to rent the old house with the intention to buy it later so we moved into the caravan and did that. We than had a slow "build as you earn" and completed nearly 2 years ago, and the old house finally sold to the tenant at the end of last year. Lessons from this be flexible with your build and financing plans. If you can't be flexible, don't even start until you have funds secured to at least get the house habitable. I cannot describe how demoralising it was to have an unsalable house and no funds to continue the build of the new one.

The usual configuration is a desk under the bed so you don't need full standing headroom.

I assume you have very high ceilings? Otherwise a standard 8ft ceiling height and 6ft under the bed, allowing just 6" for a mattress will give you only 18" between the bed and the ceiling. It will be like sleeping in the quarter berth on a boat. Don't try sitting up in bed.

That works out at pretty much £10K per bicycle space created. I sometimes wish I was fortunate enough to get such a contract at such a silly inflated price.

The whole flat felt roof looks very poor. I really dislike totally flat roofs. That looks in poor condition, witness patch repairs and staining where it looks like it puddles. There is an upstand along most of the edge of the gap, and that ends near the sloping roof as if it is designed to allow the water to run off at that specific point into the gap, but with no proper means to deal with that run off. If it were mine, I would re roof that flat bit totally. You have enough of a step between the flat roof and the sloping roof, to put a bit of fall on the "flat" roof so it drains to the right of the picture, and an upstand ALL the way along the edge of the gap to stop water draining down into the gap. And re roof with something better than mineral felt.

Your plans are not clear. You really need a full set, upstairs and downstairs, and plans for existing and for what you are seeking to end up with. It is also not clear what is the original footprint when the house was built. That is what planning rules are based on. You are permitted a certain amount of single storey rear extension under permitted development, but without knowing which part is the original part of the house it is impossible to say if your proposed new extension meets that or not.

Vast improvements but could do better. " However, Tuesday’s auction secured only half the offshore wind capacity needed every year for the rest of this decade if the government hopes to meet its green energy targets. Almost two-thirds of the new offshore wind capacity that was eligible to bid in the auction failed to bid low enough to secure a contract. Tom Glover, the chief executive of RWE’s UK business, which missed out on an offshore wind contract, said: “It is a little disappointing in the context of the government’s targets that only 30% of eligible new projects won – but this shows how competitive the auction was, which is a good thing for the consumer. “It means the government will now need to work harder to get more offshore windfarms away in future auctions if it wants to achieve its goal of quadrupling offshore wind capacity to 60GW by 2030.”"

Lots of issues in the above post. As an existing structure built without PP it is too old for any enforcement action. Make a new structure which this would be without planning, and you start the clock ticking again. Up to you if you want to take the chance nobody notices and the council come looking. It needs PP because of the height of a raised deck, with or without under croft. Again if you want to dig a big hole next to your house undermining the foundations without SE input and without building control then you take the risk if it goes wrong or a different set of people from the council come to take a look. Why not replace the rotten timber and keep the existing deck and separately build a nice shed away from the house under permitted development rules for your storage needs?

What's the issue with the Sun amps?

Good choice. Your boards need to be self supporting over 1200mm. It should be easy to find "past their best" scaffold boards for next to nothing that have rotten ends so are no good for scaffold but will cut down for what you want.

Direct link to my blog page when I did my bathroom http://ardross.altervista.org/Wilowburn/bathroom-wet-room-floor/ 22mm O5 floor panels and an Impey shower wet room shower former and the Impey tanking system that doubles as a decoupling mat for the tiles.

If it is attached to the house it is not an "outbuilding" Due to the height it would have needed planning permission for what is there. It is almost certainly old enough it will not now be enforceable to make you remove it. So if repairing what is there, do NOT take it all down and rebuild. Repair in stages. There was a case here of someone taking down a similar structure and a neighbour photographed the old structure gone and the council then deemed the replacement was new and enforced it's removal. If I read this right you are hoping the house is built on very deep foundations and you hope you can excavate a lot of soil to create a "room" under your deck? I would not be doing that without advice from a structural engineer and it should involve building control.

My money on the water stains below is NOT anything to do with the traps, but poor sealing around the shower tray and edge of the bath. My No 1 tip, is do your new bathroom properly as a wet room, with a wet room shower former and tanking system, and suitable top access trap. That will be an end to trying to seal a normal shower tray to a normal wall.

A manhole does not exist without pipes connecting to it. So there will be some kind of drain, and these days it is normal to divert the drain rather than build over it. So first work out where the drain runs, and who owns it. Come back with photographs and sketches of your findings.

Get a quote for the diversion. That is the only way you will know. High water table does not always mean piles. Our water table here is high in winter, but normal strip foundations about 1.5 metres deep are fine. You just need to get through the soft organic top soil into something solid. A SE witnessed a number of test pits dug down to about 2 metres and confirmed all was well. Our previous house nearby was the same except it needed to be a little deeper as that plot the ground had been made up a bit. The most cost effective build shape is a square box, not an L shape. If you could mirror your L diagonally so the back of the house was a straight line and the notched out L was at the corner where the sewer was you might be able to avoid the diversion. And moving it back on the plot just a bit would also help. I can't see planning objecting as the houses to the north (assuming north up) are set well back so I can't see that as a problem. Finding the exact location of the sewer will answer is it possible to design around it and avoid the diversion or not. That would be my priority.

We have a Telford 300 litre heat pump UVC. It was only last year I built the airing cupboard around it (it's in the corner of the small bedroom to give optimum short hot pipe runs) so now it is in an enclosed small space. I had expected that airing cupboard to be a real hot house, but it is only a few degrees hotter than the room it is partitioned off from. That is a testament to how little heat it loses, mostly down to all the pipework being well lagged as already mentioned, and storing water at 48 degrees.

This just shows my pet hate with wood. Wood just wants to warp. The quicker you can get it from the merchant, cut and made into what you want and screwed together tight to stop it warping the better.

Best upgrade you could do is an unvented cylinder which generally are better insulated than the simple spray foam vented sort, and one with proper horizontally mounted immersion heaters usually one at the bottom and one mid way up. The top entry immersion heaters are nothing but trouble.

If the site entrance is where the Heras fence is at the right of the last picture, then surely you would want a lot of it to remain as a site road? If not start breaking it furthest from the entrance and you have the "concrete road" there to push the first batch of rubble to the entrance with the diggers dozer blade. Then keep working your way to the entrance. Not the larger diggers might not have a dozer blade, something to check. I moved about 100 tons of soil around my site just pushing it with the dozer blade then digging it into a nice pile at the destination.

I have just completed a multi year battle with a window supplier for a faulty pane. Just like you, their initial response was "send a photo" and like you although it was plain to see with the naked eye I could not get it on a photo. They would not budge on the photo requirement. Ieft it just over a year and contacted the supplier again, but not wanting to enter the same silly send a photo lark, I said I have a window pane that I think might need replacing can you send someone to advise. I carefully did not say which window and what i thought was wrong. No doubt thinking they were going to get a sale, they sent someone. As soon as he saw it he said "you want that replacing because of the fogging between the panes." I then wrote to the supplier telling them one of their surveyers had pointe out the problem and seen for himself what the problem was I expect a replacement glass unit under warranty. It was fitted last week.