ProDave

I assume this is a timber framed house? It looks like the builders took the easy way out and despite being recommended against, have indeed put joints in line with windows etc. Chances are, the building has done most of it's shrinking / settling by now, and simply filling with a flexible decorators caulk and painting is all that is needed.

I have just measured some of mine and I will be needing 180mm, 130mm and 95mm thick liners. Some hope. I wonder about making mdf liners, with ply backings glued on where the hinges will go so you screw through the mdf into the ply?

I have yet to get this far but it is something I just know is going to give me grief. On my last build, the house was built of standard stuff, mostly 4*2 or 6*2 frames, clad in plasterboard. But could I find door liners to fit? NO. the standard offerings were a few mm too big or too small. This time round with some 8*2 framing and an OSB racking layer as well as the PB I am expecting to similarly find no standard door liner fits. And yes I had problems with wood warping. This time around SWMBO wants white painted "woodwork" which means I can use MDF skirting and architrave and eliminate the warping issue. If I could do the same with door liners I would . I might even consider making my own from scratch if, as I expect, the standard offerings don't "work" "Cherry Picking" did not work. I personally went to the timber merchant and selected all my skirtings and architraves to get nice straight ones. With in a few days of being on site they resembled bananas. What I see professionals do is bring all the linings into the house and ratchet strap them all together (with a LOT of straps) to force them to stay straight while they aclimatise to the buildings environemnt. They often leave them like that 2 weeks before they dare unstrap them and start using them.

That of course brings us to road design and pinch points. One of the reasons I gave up living in the SE was ever increasing traffic but no major new roads to take it. What was a pleasant drive to work when I started when I was younger, had become a stop go crawl by the time I gave up. At that point I had concluded there was not the will to "solve" the issue of private car congestion, other than to tell us to cycle or take the bus (stuck in the same traffic jam) Now I have moved to an area of low population density, there is not much traffic congestion, but there is some. The issue here is bridges. It seemed a brilliant idea to build bridges over estuaries to link "close" populations separated by water. Thinking Forth bridge, Tay bridge, and to a lesser extent (but closer to home) the Kessock and Cromarty bridges. But what then happens is people start basing where to live on the fact that it's just a simple hop over the bridge to get to work. It's not long before the rush hour demand on the bridge is too great and it becomes a pinch point and long queues form. Without the bridges, long journeys would be slower as you would have to "go round" but people would have chosen to live on the same side as they worked and there would be no need tor thousands to cross the same pinch point at the same time twice per day.

Open plan front gardens are a pet hate of mine. Since about the 1980's they have been the normal offering on new housing estates. My first house had that, a completely open patch of grass, with nothing to separate it from the road or even from next doors equally bland patch of open grass. A covenant with the house prohibited you fencing in your front garden. The result was unloved patches of grass that the house owners occasionally mowed, but never took any pride in. When I moved up from that first house, NOT having an open plan front garden was very high on my list of must have's. And I achieved that in my second house with it's fully enclosed front and side garden. A much more welcoming space with no silly restrictions what I could and could not do with it. My last self build and the current one are the same. Although I have not yet decided where and how to partition off my garden from the road, it will be somehow. At least it is already fenced from next door all the way right up to the road. There is another issue with unfenced gardens that may one day catch you out. When I was going through planning for my plot, the issue of visibility splays came up. I did have the required visibility but did not hold "control" over the visibility splay as that include part of my neighbours front gardens. When discussing this with Highways, they made the statement that with unfenced land, they can "claim" the first 3 metres as "the highway" and I was told should a neighbour plant or build something on that, that blocks my visibility splay, to inform them, and they would come and remove it. So be warned, no fence, and part of your garden could become the highway at any point. The fence issue also became apparent when doing work on my site to prepare the site entrance. I was told when working within 3 metres of the highway anyone working had to hold a minor street works permit, which of course I do not. However if it is fenced, that does not apply, so I erected a temporary fence right along the edge of the highway to ensure I did not need such a permit.

Re roadside charge points. I have yet to see a car parked and using the charge points at a motorway service station. That will no doubt change and unless they build more you could well find you need a charge, but all charge points are in use and you have to wait an hour before you can even begin to charge. I noted when I looked there were two different cords with two different plugs at each charge point. So we are in the "VHS Vs Betamax" phase where the "standard" charge point is not yet established?

Probably short spans between sleeper walls, used o be common. Why use breathable membrane, surely you want it to be air tight?

Screwfix sell a wall stand off that will clamp onto ant ladder.

So this DNO scheme to use your car for grid storage. Am I right in saying battery life in the main is the number of charge / discharge cycles, not time? So if your car is used as a grid back up it will be charged / discharged more and the battery life will be shortened? No doubt that's the small print they don't want you to read? I am indeed interested in any new battery technology. One that makes home storage of solar PV viable is the breakthrough that I want (mainly a battery life issue)

Electric cars are not zero emission unless charged exclusively from solar PV or wind power. Hybrid cars will be allowed after 2040. More green wash.

Assuming you have say a low energy 11W lamp, by the time that is converted to 12V that will draw over 1 amp from the battery, so a typical operating time of 50 hours from a fully charged car battery. Thinking outside the box now, take a trip to a caravan shop and look for a 12V caravan table light, or simply change the lamp holder and convert any lamp you like to 12V and cut out the inefficiency of the inverter.

I there anything, the other side of the wall, a cupboard for instance? I can't imagine what sort of portable power pack you are expecting? There is this sort of thing http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Ring-RPP265-Professional-Power-Pack-300W-Inverter-230V-AC-Mains-LED-Work-Light-/282672441252?epid=1036522425&hash=item41d09727a4:g:zWsAAOSwZM9ZzLh3 Mainly sold for jump starting cars but some like this have a small 230V inverter built in so can be used as a portable mains supply. Perhaps if the lamp sits on a table with a tablecloth to hide this underneath? My life would be a lot easier if someone invented "wireless electricity"

SSE quote 125mm duct for anything. My single phase cable looked lost in the 63mm duct, I'll bet so will your 3 phase cable.

Well TK stairs are at least £100 more than stair box for me, and I can't get their on line design tool not to put a stair on our 180 degree half landing.

@Onoff will make you one. You should have it by next year.

I still think if he had started the shouty match with me he would have been off the site. Thankfully I have never had that with anyone on our site. I did have a "heated discussion" with the joiner on a house I wired last year. That was very unpleasant. I nearly walked off the job as I found it almost impossible to work with him, it was only the fact I personally new the owner of the house that I stuck it out and carried on, trying to find out what days the joiner would not be there so I could work without having to interact with him.

It sounds like you do NOT want the extra subscription channels that a pay tv package gives you. So remove that from your list and install a satellite dish and use Freesat. Then concentrate on the best phone / internet service for your needs and don't forget to look at mobile offerings as well as wired offerings. We only get slow BB and only via a BT line. But in the near future the community council is launching a community broadband offering delivered to each home by wifi. Also EE are planning a 4g mast very close to us. So I will be looking at both those as a possible way to dump the landline.

LED battery powered light?

Can't help other than to say I hate "built in" microwaves because they are all just a bodge fitting of a free standing MW and a surround trim. Why does nobody make a proper built in microwave, built to standard built in oven dimensions to be built in properly?

A lot of phones, including I think most Android phones will give you a reading of the signal strength if you drill down deep enough in the settings.

We had a light tube (I believe the brand was Solar Tube) in our last house. It worked very well and never had any condensation issues. No doubt it leaked some heat, and was probably not that good for air tightness. The bit in the ceiling was very much like a low profile flush light fitting with diffused plastic, and confused a lot of B&B guests who said they could not find the light switch to "turn the light off"

How much have you looked at the plot? Do you know its history? For our first build, we looked at a plot like that, with a higher level close to the road, then dropping off to a lower level, and the PP said the house must be built on the upper level (lower level was a flood plain). But when looking around the site, it became very apparent that a lot of soil had been tipped over the edge of the slope, to try and make the upper building level look much larger than it was. That loose soil would have been no good to build from.

No issues with the slab being exposed. I see it a lot here on small developments (probably building the slab so the development is "started" to lock in the PP then leave building the actual house until some time later) Another point though, as you are having one contractor do the slab and another build and erect the frame. Get the frame contractor to come and measure the site, check it for level and squareness, then build the frame to the actual on site measurements, NOT the measurements on a drawing.

It may be obvious but start at the ceilings and work down. As above we put up a temporary platform over the stair well and moved it lower as we worked down. This is where every self builder needs his own scaffold of a scaffold platform. You also need a pair of dead men, or a plasterboard hoist to make life easier (we are just using the dead men)

@Crofter is your man to advise where to get what on Skye