ProDave

What I learned was you can plan everything in the finest detail, then be completely derailed by circumstances outside your control like the old house not selling, or not selling for enough. It's always going to be a tricky one. Selling a house where you are carving the garden up and building a new house is bound to be tricky. Not everyone wants to live next to a building site, particularly one that might take a while. It would be a lot simpler if you could find a way to finance all the ground works, i.e. foundations and all service connections and the basic levelling / landscaping of the plot before you have to sell the house. That way at least you can repair any disturbance to the garden that goes with the old house, the buyers will know their garden does not need to be dug up, and they will clearly see at least the foot print of the new house. As a guide it cost me about £10K for the foundations for my house and another £5K for service connections. It's no bad thing to have the foundations in before ordering the timber frame, at least it can be built to "as measured" dimensions and you know it will fit.

A bit of "thinking ahead" is also worthwhile. E.g in my house in the upstairs bedrooms I have left a short run of floor board adjacent to each end wall as a "trap" i.e not glued down, just screwed down with enough clearance that they can be lifted later on. These will allow me if required to fish new cables across the ceiling of the room below at any point. It should also be possible to drop new cables from these traps down into the end wall service void of the room below, and down into the AV / media cupboard under the stairs. The theory being when the next nee fancy AV connector comes out to replace hdmi then I can pull through the required cable from the av cupboard to the televisions in the main rooms.

Drain runs first, they have to go in straight lines and downhill so have first grab at available space. MVHR runs next. They don't need to go up or downhill but take a lot of room. Normal pipe runs next. Electric last. Cable bends easily and does not mind taking a more tortuous route to go around all the other more fussy stuff.

Get a halogen G9 lamp. The fittings may not be rated to take them due to heat, but a short test won't hurt. My guess is it won't light up at all showing you have a wiring fault somewhere like a poor connection.

Another one using 2 trestles and 4 scaf planks as a site workbench. Oh and my 25 year old Workmate 800

It says "LED G9" So could it just be they have provided a very low power LED lamp and it's not living up to your expectations of light output?

Need more information. Leaving the earth disconnected should not stop a light fitting working, but may make it unsafe so go back and connect those earths. You can NOT use an earth core for anything else don't even think about it.

I have a customer who (she claims) gets a headache under flourescent or LED lighting so is now on a mission to stockpile filament bulbs to see out her days.

Slightly related to this, the Scottish government announced is is to launch a "not for profit" energy supply company, the theory being if you eliminate the profit, then consumers will get a rate closer to the wholesale price. It will be interesting to see what that offers when it launches.

Make sure the power is off and long nosed pliers will extract that. Done it many times. I thought you were going to talk about silly light fittings, the sort where it is impossible to to get two 1mm cables into a terminal etc.

Well my stairs arrived from Staribox today. Managed to get the top flight in. Unfortunately there is a problem with the two newel posts that join the top and bottom flight. They don't fit and they have finished the top detail incorrectly. I have emailed stairbox with pictures. Unfortunately, until that is resolved I can't fit the lower flight (which in itself looks correct)

It arrived today. Fitted easilly and all working again. A big thank you to @Onoff

Our largest bedroom (daughters room) has a full height vaulted ceiling. It also has a mezanine floor above the adjacent small bedroom. The duct for both these 2 bedrooms is in a small boxed in area right at the very bottom of the mezanine ceiling slope. One goes down through the ceiling for the small bedroom under the mezanine and the other comes out of the mezanine overhang for the big bedroom.

I am looking for the confused smiley. Never mind I'll have to borrow one.

On our first build they did. The engineer that came to make the connection was pragmatic enough to leave a long coil of cable so that when the house was built we could uncoil it and route it into the house. As always, tell the suits behind their desks what they want to hear, and the man on the ground will make it work.

Steady on. MOST of you on this forum are "southerners"

4 days in total. 3 days with 3 men on site (2 spreading, 1 mixing) and the 4th day 1 mixing and 1 spreading.

Normal landline connection.

Downstairs is going to take a lot longer. The plan, once the stairs are in and it's painted, we will start sleeping in the house. Next step will be to get one of the bathrooms plumbed in but that's £££ to spend that are in short supply. Downstairs is even more big ticket items like the under floor heating, getting the heat pump plumbed in and working, flooring, kitchen etc, so progress will be limited by availability of funds. Downstairs is not even plasterboarded yet. So for some while yet we will still be performing a lot of functions in the static 'van.

This time it's plastering. Blog at the usual place http://www.willowburn.net/ Look for the entry Plastering Upstairs. Here's one picture to whet your appetite Next comes painting, lots of painting. And the stairs are due from Staitbox on Monday

The extra cost is put down a "distribution cost" It must be a bit galling on Orkney, where you generate more on the islands than you use, to still be hit with this surcharge.

Another company I worked for later on sent and received machinery all over the world. so had a lot of surplus packing crates. A lot of it came from Brazil and was really nice hard wood crates (far too nice just to use as packing wood) It used to get piled up during the week at the back of the site and a big bonfire light each Friday morning. So the accepted practice was to go and pick over the bonfire on a Thursday lunch time and put any you wanted in a separate pile then go and organise a wood chit and collect it after work. I built a couple of sheds, a whole load of fencing, and boarded my trailer with that nice Brazillian wood. Not long before I left someone decided it was no longer "correct" to burn it, so they started paying a contractor to remove the waste wood, and at that point employees were no longger allowed to have any.

I am sure @Stones is on the same Iresa tariff as I am, and you won't find cheaper at the moment.

A 35mm box works just fine with a 25mm cavity and the thickness of a piece of plasterboard.

Well I have continued my "test" Last night as the house had reached comfortable temperature, I turned the heater down to it's lowest setting, 750W As I went to bed it was -3 outside and +15 inside giving a temperature difference of 18 degrees. According to the heat loss spreadsheet, that should require a heat input of 1KW to overcome losses so I was now under heating the house. And this morning the internal temperature showed a drop of 0.5 degrees overnight. I think this shows the real world heat loss is indeed pretty well matching the predictions from Jeremy's spreadsheet, so I now feel a lot happier that we are on target to achieve a house with a low heating requirement.