ProDave

Well going from the first few replies I have "solved" it. I had a rummage in the old garage amongst the rubbish stuff waiting to be upcycled and found a bit left over from an old shower riser. It was the same OD as a bit of 40mm pipe, and a snug fit inside a straight coupler. It seemed to melt ok with solvent weld cement. So that upcycled bit of plastic is now solvent welded into one side of a straight coupler, and the other end solvent welded to my now dead bit of pipe.

The housing market here went into recesion in 2008 and has never really recovered, just stagnated since, particularly for the large detached houses. When I started plot hunting a few years ago, there were lots of plots for sale as there are usually here, but none were selling. In spite of not selling, nobody dropped their prices. Before we found our plot (not actually for sale) I had looked at another, over priced. I offered what I thought was a realistic price (A bit more than we ended up paying for our eventual plot) and it was declined. 4 years later that plot is still for sale at the same price. My plumber friend bought a plot (that we had rejected as too close to a busy road) that had been on the market at least 4 years. Up here you will do really well if you self build and the house ends up worth what it cost you. Apart from 3 of us locally that have or are self building, you don't see much self building going on around here. Wind back to 2003 when we first moved here., part built houses with owners living in a static caravan were a common sight wherever you went. That just highlights how much lower demand there is for people to want to live here just now.

Yes I am looking at the DIY options. I need to have a ferret around the garage at the old house.

Looked at that option, but it runs too tight to a joist to fit the bulk of that type of fitting. I really do need a stop end that's no bigger than a 40mm solvent weld straight coupler.

Change of bathroom layout means change of drainage. I have a run of 40mm solvent weld waste that is now redundant. I can't remove it from the boss adaptor without cutting a hole in a floor board panel. So simple solution I thought, I will cap it off with a solvent weld stop end. Unless someone tells me different, nobody sells one.

Then definitely contest it. Make an appointment to meet the valuation officer on site and ask him to explain exactly how he believes it is habitable and taxable in it's current form. You should not pay waste water charges if you have a treatment plant.

Just one question. In order for them to have sent you a council tax bill, they must have valued it and assigned a council tax band to the property. What banding have they given it and is that banding reasonable? While I fully agree you should not be paying council tax now, if by chance it has been put in an unusually low band, I would just accept it and pay on the basis the long term saving is worth the short term pain. However if it's in the correct banding I would definitely fight it.

Up here, an "accessible entrance" needs to be 1 metre wide So that would leave you 5 metres to build on.

The "West Wing" extends further south than the main south elevation. This will mean the living room looses direct sunlight earlier in the day. I would "flatten out" the south elevation, though that is a radical re design. The garage is too short for a car. You need to combine the utility room to make the garage big enough and find somewhere else for the utility room.

Just to add another perspective. If you hit financial issues run out of money, don't just throw in the towel and give up. We were banking on the sale of out old house to complete the new one, but that never happened. As soon as I realised that was unlikely to happen I laid off the builder (amicably I am glad to say). Since then I have been doing all the work myself, to make what remained of the pot go as far as possible without spending it paying for labour. We are now down to just spending as we earn though some more funds should become available soon. The end result is the new house will have cost a lot less, but taken a lot longer, and when the old house eventually sells we will be better off.

That's a bit of a bugger. One way you could reduce the cost would be for the cable to come off the road into the front garden of your existing bungalow and from there across the front garden close to the road. You (or your chosen contractor) could dig the trench for that bit, and it would reduce the length of road or path to be dug up.

I did my roof with fibreglass valleys. Another cost missing from the estimates above, is stripping off some tiles to expose the valley, replacing any rotten battens, and putting the tiles back.

Hi and welcome to the forum. If you want to start a blog, you need @recoveringacademic or @PeterW to enable that for you. Otherwise just to ask questions, start a new thread in the relevant section of the forum.

Your problem is the amount of road to dig up, very expensive (I paid £1K just for the road crossing across a 3 metre wide single track road) You need to find out WHY they need to run the cable so far. If it is capacity issues ask just what rating supply they can give you from the existing infrastructure. It's not a matter of the condition od the existing cables, but their size.

Chip away from the inside to enlarge the hole. Drop a rope out through the hole. attach the face plate, with copious amounts of sealant applied. Pull rope, face plate pulls up to hole. Retain tension until sealant dried. Cut rope and push the end out.

Can you get to speak to the surveyor that made up the quote. It could be the existing cable is at full capacity? Or did you tick the wrong box and and ask for 3 phase, or an unusually high capacity supply? (I was "offered" a 12KVA supply and chose to accept that, as I just knew if I wanted more I would be hit with a cost for upgrading the local transformer)

The DL is in 2 parts now, the paper bit (that seems to last forever) and the plastic bit with your photo that needs renewing every few years. Which bit did you send off for the change of address? Would the hire firm not have accepted the other bit?

The controls are indeed different. For a system boiler you would expect a couple of motorised valves, a pump, a programmer a wiring centre and you would connect it the way you always had, and it would work. I think the trouble with heat pumps, is they are all so individual, not much cominality between makes. My own, the control box lives inside, connected to the heat pump with a 4 core cable. As well as plumbing in the usual valves and pumps, mine has a flow switch to connect (it will refuse to run if there is no flow detected) It also wants control of the immersoin heater in the HW tank, and a few other details. Nothing complicated but it needs a bit of reading of the manual and applying that.

Connecting a monoblock ASHP is really no different to connecting an outside system boiler. Most plumbers would be more confident pricing for that.

The planning can be locked in once you have "started" the development. there is then usually no rime limit on completing it. What constitutes "starting" will be individual to each site, but in our case we had a planning condition that the entrance to the site must be formed prior to building work started. I had a letter confirming that once I had created that entrance, the development had "started" so If I wanted to bail out, I could have sold it then with no fear of the planning lapsing. I suspect in any scenario where you are selling a part built house, you would be lucky if the sale price recovered the plot price plus what you had spent.

My only though, is if you bring to the attention of BC that there might be "voids" in the concrete fill of the blocks, then you re opening a huge can of worms, if Mr BC wants to be picky? Find a solution without him?

Buy a digger, learn to drive it and dig your own foundations. Go on, you know you want to......

Scotframe were the company that refused to talk to me when I started mentioning getting one of their standard offerings and increasing the amount of insulation...... Their exact waffle was "there is no synergy between what we offer and what you want"

Tell him I'll give him £600 for the SB

I am pretty sure this was the one I bought from Germany https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/20-Rollen-proclima-TESCON-VANA-All-round-Kle-be-band-30-Mtr-x-60-mm/381452848613?hash=item58d05c8de5:g:DG0AAOSwwbdWMxxx Be careful when comparing roll prices between one manufacturer and another. The Tescon is 30 metre rolls, some others are only 20 metre.