ProDave

I installed mine myself with the help of SWMBO It was only a couple of hours to dig the hole (I had my own digger at the time) and put the tank in the hole. We then spent the rest of that day and all the next day mixing barrowing and pouring concrete. Another day in the digger saw the rest of the drains laid. We are discharging to a burn so no leach field. In our last house we hired a digger and driver and he did the whole lot in 3 days including an 85 square metre leach field.

There's also honour among hill walkers. You can drop your overnight gear in the bothy on the way up the hill and just take your day pack to the top, in the near certainty all your gear will still be there when you get back.

Thanks I will price up their offering when I do the UFH but it was the very cheap, if very limited range bathroom stuff that caught my eye. P.S I assume you are another radio ham?

A catalogue dropped through my door for http://www.theunderfloorheatingstore.com/ They appear to be part of the Travis perkins group. Anyone used them? They also do bit of bathroom and wet room stuff. This cheap back to wall toilet has got my interest http://www.theunderfloorheatingstore.com/bathrooms/basins-toilets/essential-bathroom-back-to-wall-toilet P.S according to the catalogue if you enter the code TRADE20 at checkout you get a cheaper price and that BTW toilet goes down to £51.37

A Bothie in what I believe to be it's true sense is a mountain hut or shelter, free for anyone to use and usually in remote places https://www.mountainbothies.org.uk/ I have visited many, though never stayed overnight in one.

And as I said, our house name in now on the council's list but they won't pass it to Royal Mail unless I pay the ransom.

It all seems a bit petty to me. So the issue was not that they used the garage for accommodation, but that they created a new access to a road without permission. The neighbour appears to have a similar entrance to that road, so they probably thought it was safe. Could they not have taken the access to their front garden parking area from the side road that feeds the garage? I suspect the additional front parking and garage being converted are separate issues and they would probably have created the front parking even if they had not converted the garage. It seems totally ludicrous that a house of that size was built in the first place with just a garage space and space to park 1 car in front of the garage. I personally would never buy a house like that because of the totally inadequate parking arrangements. I suspect there is more of a back story to this that we don't know.

Google "Slough" and "beds in sheds"

Check the condition of the battens (boards) They need to be sound and free of rot. When I bought mine, I stored it for well over a year before I was ready to use it, just with the boards stacked on top of each other. Nearly half were rotten with some kind of white fungus when I came to use them. I luckily managed to find some more to buy locally. So check their condition, and if storing them, stack them upright with gaps between them so air can circulate. Better still of you can find any at a sensible price, get steelstage "boards" I used a hired 7.5t flatbed lorry to transport mine.

I'll just mention we had a bath tap fail and turn itself on full flow in the middle of the night. How would that have ended if the plug was in, there was no overflow, and you were not there?

I renewed mine last May abut £450 for the year, I will no doubt be buying another year in May. Do England do the equivalent of a "certificate of temporary habitation"? If so that will enable you to move to standard buildings and content insurance.

I'm in the process or rewiring an old croft house. Now it is stripped bare, it has revealed that originally the bedroom walls were only paneled on one side of the framing. On the inside it was wallpapered, with the paper going over the wall framing.

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.