ProDave

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.

Yes it is. I also managed to purchase an early laser printer. A monster of a Cannon thing. It was given a notional value of £50 which I was happy to pay, but then the cash office complained about the cost of raising an invoice so I could pay them the £50 so suggested a nill value disposal instead.

I see some dreadful plasterboarding where the fitters bash ill fitting boards into place, bursting the edges in the process and just mutter "The taper will fix that"

Slightly different arrangement. Having identified your scrap wood, you had to get a "wood chit" signed by someone to say it was scrap and counter signed by the storeman. Then present the chit at the gate on departure. No size limitation, my trailer was the method of transporting complete workbenches. This was UKAEA It really was a hangover from 50 years ago when most people had an open fire and were regularly collecting firewood.

Perhaps @Visti can confirm or not. I recall on another discussion about the Graven Hill plots that they were obsessed with the end builder not being able to reclaim the VAT for the provision of services to the plots, and they "solved" the issue by selling the "golden brick" foundation package including service connections which would be eligible for zero rating. I thought at the time it was a restriction too far. I don't know if this is how they ended up progressing or if the idea was dropped.

Just to be clear, there was nothing underhand about me finding a good home for a number of surplus workbenches. The lab at the time was undergoing a period of change and modernisation and virtually all the old wooden benches were being replaced with smaller metal framed melamine topped replacements. The old ones were scrap. It was a quirk of the bureaucracy that anything made of wood could be freely given to employees as "firewood" for free. If an employee wanted any scrap metal or scrap electronics that was a whole new level of difficulty. Scrap metal was sold weekly and it was pot luck what was there each week. Scrap electronics had to go through the radio club, and i remember it taking a whole year for a scrap oscilloscope I had rescued from a scrap bin to be eventually released for me to buy it for £3 (I repaired it and still have it)

But wasn't it a Graven Hill condition that you buy their "golden brick" foundation as part of the plot, so local rules may prevent your chosen contractor from doing their usual package.

I am re visiting this with some more meaningful measurements. I have just received a few cheap elect convector heaters, something I am happy to leave on unattended. So I plugged one in last night and it's been on about 20 hours so far, just on a low heat setting of 1250W (just one element turned on) In that time the internal temperature of the house has risen from the 10 degrees it was sitting at with no heating to 15 degrees. This is one heater downstairs and heat getting upstairs by convection up the stair well (no doors anywhere yet) Last night the temperature was below freezing and just now it was up to the dizzy heights of 3 degrees outside. The heat lost spreadsheet tells me for a 10 degree temperature difference, the whole house should need a heat input of 640W so it looks like the 1250W I am pumping into the house is not only overcoming the heat loss, it is slowly warming the fabric of the house that has been cold for some time. I feel a lot better now that the heat input requirements should indeed be low as predicted.

An argument in favour of NOT plastering them in.

You cut the hole in the PB a bit over size so you can wiggle it Or cut it level to start with.

Why do you want adjustable? is your wall thickness too great? I will admit a limitation of the appleby boxes is they only work on pb up to 15mm. The house I have been wiring lately had pb backed with OSB and no he didn't cut an over sized hole in the OSB first, so had socket box holes 22nn thick. BG plasterboard back boxes fitted but they are the PITA sort where you just touch the lug with the screw and it retreats out of sight.

If doing that in Scotland, I would recommend a dry suit.

I am fitting mine after plastering. I have seen them done before, and there is a tendancy for the plaster edge where it meets the box edge to crack and flake. I keep saying it, but if using dry lining boxes. ONLY buy APPLEBY they are the only ones that are truly reliable. Some other makes really are dire.

We are to some extent using the pocket idea. We want the new house less cluttered. So the under stairs space is the AV / data hub. All the electrical gadgets will be in there, hi fi system, Satellite tv boxes, router and network gear, printer etc. This will allow a tv on the wall with no set top boxes to accommodate, they will all be in the "pocket". Infra red wireless remote control extenders will ensure all the gadgets can be operated by their own remote controls in the main living rooms. One item that won't fit there, that also needs hiding is the filing cabinet. That will be hidden in the cupboard in the hallway that's essentially for coats and shoes. I have to be a bit creative, and by removing one dwang (noggin) and replacing it higher up, the filing cabinet can sit into the thickness of the wall as well, so another "pocket" inside the cupboard.

£1000 per square metre is also our target and so far we are on track to achieve that. But I am doing most of the work on the build.

Oh if I could have my time again. The Lab where I used to work was "modernising" I lost count of how many of the 8ft long, 3ft deep solid oak workbenches I took home for just about everybody I knew. They were free to employees on a firewood chit. I left one behind in our house in Oxfordshire so I am down to my last one, that will be moving from our old house up to the new once a soon as I get a door on the garage.

One of the first items on that list, underground drainage £10K says all I need to know. That is a work of fiction and guesswork. I installed all our drainage including a treatment plant (and I assume you have mains drainage so don't need that) for probably half that. I would not trust those figures. It reminds me of our previous house where we tried to employ an architect but they quoted a fee based on a percentage of the build cost then proceeded to estimate the build cost at a silly high figure (so of course that made their fee higher) We ended up not using an architect and building it for a little over half that cost estimate. A lot of your costs should be fixed? If I understand it from previous discussions, the site sells you a "golden brick" which is your foundations and mains connections. If that is so, forget estimating, you will have that costed. Now your foundations are costed your chosen frame company can give you a pretty good estimate of the costs. One cost I would avoid, is employing a quantity surveyor. Some people have already given some examples. We paid £8500 for our Rationel tripple glazed windows. You probably have more windows than us, but not 3 times as many? The price for electrical is absurd. My labour cost to wire a new house is typically £3k. Materials will cost a bit more perhaps but in any event £10K should see it, so again twice the cost is should be. There is a theme here. Take his quoted figures, divide by 2 and you are somewhere close.

I have ordered the one that @Onoff linked to above. The issue is it must fit the fixed part that is there, otherwise I have a very awkward crawl through a very small gap to reach the pipe fitting to change the inlet piece. (the top access I left for this cistern was not as generous as it really should have been)

Yes that looks to be the one. the Cistern originally came from BES but while they still list the cistern, they don't sell a spare fill valve. That one looks close enough to take a punt and buy one.