ProDave

Are you sure? I thought there had to be a fire stop? I have a horizontal batten at the top of my service void, only drilled for pipes or cables.

I have never subscribed to the "plant room" philosophy. I have wired 3 new builds now where that has been done. and without exception, the obsession of putting everything in one place has resulted in the hot water tank being much further from the main points of use than it has to be. I have a room above my garage that houses the mvhr and will house the buffer tank for the heating. The main use of that room however will be a workshop and storage. The Air source heat pump is a monoblock unit outside. That then only leaves the hot water tank and that will be in an airing cupboard off the small bedroom,m putting it very close to the kitchen and bathrooms.

No just the Impey water guard kit, paint on primer first, then lay the corners, joning strips then the main membrane.

Reminds me of the time I had to replace a hand dryer. I went to the board, turned off the breaker labelled "gents toilet hand dryer" A groan came from an adjacent office as I had killed a dozen pc's. And the hand dryer was still on.

But NOBODY other than electricians knows about safe zones, and the number of times I have encountered a picture hung above a switch or a socket, where for aesthetic reasons, they have meticulously measured to ensure the nail or screw is exactly in the centreline of the switch......

The tanking is easy, all I would say is it sticks like..... so you MUST get it in the right place first time, no second chances, particularly so for the pre formed corners. Yes if it leaks, it will rain downstairs.

So I have one of my wet rooms in progress with the tray in place, the waste connected, and the tanking kit down. Should I get the watering can out and make sure it is all waterproof before I start tiling the floor?

I am having the same naming battle. Our council want £150 to register it, so I just ignored that. I chose a house name, that matched with the theme of other names in the area, checked there were no other houses nearby using the name, and checked I could register a domain name of the house name. I have no trouble getting post delivered here. No problem with utilities (the lecky still have it on their database as "land 30 metres east of (next door neighbours house name)" so had to enter it manually. I thought it would come to a head when we moved into the static caravan and started paying council tax. But no there were no issues. The local council now confirm it is on their address database. But it is still not on the Royal Mail postcode database. I have spoken to them, but they will only add it when the council inform them, and it appears that would cost me £150 just for the council to convey a simple bit of information to RM. There is something about the cost for a council service has to reflect the actual cost of providing that service. Well £150 would pay a staff member for a whole day, so clearly in this case the fee is too high. So I continue to avoid it. Now if they would offer me the service at a more reasonable say £50 I would fill in their form. But at the moment I see no pressing need to do so. It would not surprise me now if I tried, they would say "sorry that name is in use....."

Be careful if going for outline planning (actually called Planning In Principle in Scotland). If you don't provide many details, you may find unwanted conditions attached. e.g when I did my PIP application, I didn't give much details about the house and as a result it came back with a condition that the roof must be done in natural slate. I later managed to get chat changed to a particular concrete tile that has a bit of a slate like finish. If I had specified all the finishes I might have avoided that. The advantage of PIP is it is usually much quicker and you don't need lots of expensive detailed drawings. it is the normal route if someone is planning to get permission then sell the plot. In my case it was to establish the principle of building a house on the plot before I bought it.

Given that positive statement, I would proceed with a planning application.

Have you actually tried a planning application? Our site was perhaps a but similar in that it was a vacant empty plot just overgrown with scrub. It sat between 2 existing houses. A few years ago when the council were updating their local plan, the then owner tried to get is zoned for housing development and failed. (There is already a piece of land at the top of our road with a now derelict wooden former restaurant that is zoned for housing on the local plan) But in spite of our plot failing to get zoned for housing at the last local plan update, it did get planning. Our local plan has a presumption against "new housing in the hinterland" unless it meets one of 3 conditions. One of those is an infill plot between houses in an established development, so ours passed that and got planning, even though it had no designation on the local plan.

Tanks in the loft are last centuries plumbing. Either fit a combi boiler, or unvented water tank that as it's name suggests runs at (close to) mains water pressure so needs no header tank. Apart from not needing a tank, it is so much better to be able to have a shower with decent water pressure.

That Aldi one is what I would describe as a "generic" SDS drill. They are sold under many different names. I bought mine from Screweys about 14 years ago and is badged Titan. 14 years of use and abuse and it's still going strong. In that time I have replaced the brushes once, and fitted a new, much longer mains flex to it. It doesn't do reverse, just forward with or without hammer, and hammer only for chisseling.

Read up on "safe zones" Cables can run vertically or horizontally from an accessory in the safe zone that it creates, or in the corner or ceiling safe zone. The 50mm deep thing is different and determines if rcd protection is needed or not. I prefer to leave a gap in the service void battens at 450mm and 1150mm from FFL but I have yet to find a joiner kind enough to do that so I usually have to drill the battens. Protector plates are a good idea if you think the guy fitting the plasterboard is so stupid he has never heard about safe zones or cannot see a cable and make an effort to avoid it. Since I am doing all my own plasterbording I have not used them.

We used Kerto beams instead. Smaller than Glulams for a given strength and span. But even then we had to go for a larger size than the SE specified as that was all that was available without a silly premium. Our one 12 metre long ridge beam arrived all on it's own on an an artic.

Mass building is a different game to self building. Yes you want to build cheap for maximum profit. You also have the economy of scale on your side. But building cheap is NOT building good. It's at best building adequate. Most people accept it simply because most people don't know better. It amazes me when someone buys an old house with an EPC F and then complain about the heating bills. Why don't they do a bit of research about the biggest purchase in their life, yet they would not buy anything other than an A+++ refrigerator? If you think an epc of C is good for a new house, think again. I am aiming for an A and that should be where the mass builders are aiming now? I have a suspicion that eventually people will wake up to the EPC and it's implications, and as a resuilt older poor houses will become worth less. That is starting already as in Scotland you can no longer rent out a house with an EPC F so instantly those are no longer of interest to landlords so reduced demand. Most self builders do so because they want something better than a mass builder's average house and self build is the only way to lavish the care and attention needed. In this argument neither side is going to be changed. The mass builder will carry on churning out cheap adequate houses and the mass public will keep buying them, and the self builder will still strive for something a lot better.

Neighbours can be funny things and often won't do simple things to help themselves. I came home one day, to find the party fence between my garden and next door missing and a skip in next doors front garden. The skip lorry had cracked my concrete drive in the process. I made a lot of fuss about that resulting in the contractor doing the job next door digging up and re laying my cracked concrete drive, and fitting a shiny new fence to replace what he had taken down. Unbelievable how he could have done that and thought nobody would mind. From the other side, I was doing a lot of work to my semi detached that I knew would be a noise issue for the house next door. So I made a simple request, that they inform me if they are going out any time so I can do the noisy work while they are out. They went balistic along the lines of "why should we have o go out......." That's when I gave up trying to be nice.

You will need to be able to read and understand the manual to set it up, things like heat compensation curves, setting the flow demand temperatures. Better still would be for YOU to read and understand it, so you can fine tune the system and make it work as efiiciently as possible. I would personally hate to have a system where I only know how to turn it on and off and nothing more about it.

I paid somewhat less than half that to BUY my own. Time it was up was not a constrain then. But not every builder will be happy with that arrangement. Mine is Kwikstage, possibly the most popular of the system scaffold types. Cuplock is anther popular one.

I can see yours being the first "knock down and rebuild" where you knock it all down except for your shiny new bathroom, and rebuild around that......

We did when we built our first house, as there was a chance we might sell it within 10 years, That has now lapsed so proved to be a waste of money. This time around we found the costs had doubled so we decided not to bother.

Hi and welcome to the forum. I might suggest having your email address on a public forum is not a great idea and will lead to it being harvested by robots and you receiving a lot of spam email.

This one is half the price and free posting and looks the same https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Flip-Plug-Bath-Waste-Grating-Brass-Body-Solid-Tail-35mm/261613538788?hash=item3ce961cde4:g:Ep4AAOSwDk5ULQq5 Still need an overflow and a means to connect it. Never seen the overflow fitting sold on it's own, I have only ever seen them as a kit with the waste. I guess I could buy something like this, throw away the waste and use the flip over one instead? https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/MCalpine-FJ10WC-75mm-Seal-Bath-Trap-with-Center-Pin-Waste-and-Flexible-Overflow/272919390661?epid=15008871263&hash=item3f8b4369c5:g:amYAAOSwyYFaAcfA

@Nickfromwales That's the sort of thing I want. Now find a supplier that does small orders at a sensible price, or a big name supplier I can pick one up in Inverness...... Oh and it needs to include an overflow and connection for that

^^^ Should there not be a charge of "wasting parlaiments time" for that?