ProDave

Transport from Plymouth would kill any Howdens staircase. I will get a price from them for a new one, if it's cheap enough to be throw away then I might consider one. It would have to be bodged due the floor to floor height being wrong so would not meed BR but would do as temporary if it were cheap enough. I shall have to research stairbox. Do you have a link?

Not really. The thing about a small budget, is you don't want to waste money on something that would ultimately be scrap. So it's either find a way to make something decent out of the cheap parts, or get SWMBO more used to the ladder.....

As the title says, I am thinking about cheap stairs. We are trying to get the house partly habitable for the winter, and I don't think climbing a ladder to go to bed will cut the mustard. So I need a staircase and it must be cheap. At the last house we paid a joiner to build the stairs, he did a very good job and it fitted perfectly with every detail a we wanted. But this time,. at the moment, it has to be cheaper. Howdens do a standard cheap staircase but only in one size, 2600mm floor to floor. Our house is 2700mm floor to floor. Rembrand keep pestering me so get a share of my joinery business, and I see they do this flat pack stair at any floor to floor height, and is in line with how much I want to spend http://www.rembrand.co/products/Kwikstair-Straight-Flight.html However it's not that simple (it never is) For a start I actually need 2 staircases, 13 steps in total, first run 6 steps to half landing, second run 7 steps to upstairs. Now I though I could achieve that with a standard 13 stair straight run, and a saw. Even if I achieve that, it doesn't get me the stairs I really want. For a start that basic stair has no newel posts. We need short newel posts at the top and bottom of each flight, on the left hand side when ascending. Now to me with only basic joinery skills, fitting a newel post onto the top and bottom of a stair stringer is a proper joiners job, at least if you want it to look nice. I would also like a half bullnose to the bottom step of the bottom flight. Of course this customising to get exactly what you want is what you pay a joiner to do to make a stair that matches your needs. So am I barking even thinking about doing this myself with standard cheap parts?

Who owns that? More importantly, do you have a right of pedestrian and vehicular access over it? Usually in the case of a grass road verge the first 3 metres is regarded as "the highway" so what about the rest beyond 3 metres?

Let's just say it's a 6 hour drive from here to the border. Is that big enough?

I wonder what membrane they use? Protect VP400 plus kept out house dry all bar a few drips for months before I got the roof tiled.

I am confused about the waste water drainage. If there is no mains (everyone else seems yo have a private system) then you will be looking at a waste treatment plant. Nothing difficult about that. BUT the processed water that comes out of it has to go somewhere. That can be a watercourse or an infiltration field (soakaway) You need to do a percolation test (well documented, dig a hole, fill it with water and time how long it takes to drain away) and from that you can calculate the area of soakaway you require. If your soil drains well it shouldn't be too big, but you have to find somewhere for it and building regs put limits on how close to a building, a road, a watervourse and your site boundary that it can be located. A common solution (which we used at our last house) is to get an agreement from an adjacent farmer for the soakaway to go under one of his fields. If you try to connect to your neighbours system, building control will very likely insist that is upgraded to current standards so that brings you back to all the same issues to solve. I can't stress how important this is to solve. It caused us several weeks of worry as building control rejected our first drainage proposal, then SEPA rejected our second, it was only then, that SEPA gave us permission do discharge into the burn, something they only do up here if there is no other option (and by that point we had exhausted the other options)

Hi and welcome to the forum. I'm over on the other side near Inverness but there are few on here over on the West. Look forward to hearing about your project.

Try and pre empt the conditions by providing as much information in the planning application as you can. Anything not completely defined is an open door for a condition to approve those details later. Site levels are easy. You can use an Ordnance datum if you can identify one. Otherwise make or choose any feature as a "Temporary bench mark" and reference all your levels to that, this is what I did. You need to show existing site levels and finished site levels. What are you going to do with all the excavated soil? in our case we used it to build up the ground levels so our site now slopes less than it did. That's the sort of information they are after. Also is there ant flood risk? look at the EA flood risk maps, make sure your finished levels are above any flood risk level in your area. You can use a laser line or rotating level and a detector on a staff. If you are really tight like me and did not want to buy a detector then you can use just a level and staff, and do all your measurements at disk when you can see the laser with the naked eye over some distance. The third was is the good old water level. A length of hose with a clear section at each end, the water at the two ends will always be level with each other. Note the point above about drainage, that can be a show stopper.

I am 99% sure my Conder has a small drain hole in the bottom of the pump chamber, so if rainwater did get in, it would drain down into the main tank.

That's good to know. Different areas have different rules. We had to jump through all sorts of hoops to eventually get permission to discharge into a burn through our garden. Re treatment plants, before you get too far, I think most on here, including me, would suggest you get one based on the air blower principle. There are several that people on here have used and can recommend. I would avoid a plant that works by having moving mechanical parts down in the smelly stuff. You really don't want the job of fixing failed mechanical components in that environment.

What are you doing for drainage, both waste water and surface water? What has next door done? Are you allowed to discharge anything into that field drain? You need to decide that before you get too far in your plans. you might be surprised / shocked at how much land you need for drainage so often it forces you to put the house over to ne side just to leave enough space for drainage infiltration fields.

@Onoff will make a scale mock up soon out of used beer cans and report the findings. It may take a while to complete though...

F

3.9 what? ACH?

Go and have a look at my blog, link at the bottom of the post. Some of the early entries are not there as I had to move the blog and haven't got round to reloading the early entries, but there are plenty of photos. Once you have a warm roof supported by a ridge beam, you can do what you like with the roof space. The largest bedroom (for our daughter) has the ceiling left open right to the ridge and the mezanine. The landing and bathrooms have a normal 2.4 metre ceiling and a loft space above them. The master bedroom gets a 3 metre ceiling and a smaller loft space above it. In our case it was a Kurto (sp?) bean used for the ridge which gives the same strength in a smaller size than say a GluLam beam. Steel can also be used. The MVHR ducting runs through the loft spaces. For the room with the vaulted ceiling, the mvhr ducts run around the edge of the mezanine where they will be boxed in. EDIT: Here's a picture of that room with the full height ceiling and mezanine. This one is not on the blog yet as it's still work in progress.

I am in the process of doing this. This is pretty much the standard house here in the Highlands. I can't compare costs though as I have not finished. Rather than using attic trusses this time, I have a warm roof supported on a big ridge beam, meaning all the internal space of the loft is warm and unobstructed. This is enabling us to have one of the bedrooms open right to the ridge and then a mezanine floor above the adjacent small bedroom. With standard attic trusses, you usually end up with less floor area upstairs. But our cut roof and ridge beam, together with using large "gable ends" instead of dormers, means the floor area upstairs is the same as downstairs, and most of it, all bar a couple of corners gives standing headroom.

Magic Man seems to have been recommended several times https://www.magicman.co.uk/

I'm in the countryside just outside Alness. I sail my boat from Avoch on the Black Isle.

Not so far from me then. I seldom go much further than Elgin. I'm 20 miles north of Inverness.

It's not very often I get to refer to someone as being "up north"

Hi and welcome to the forum. What do you regard as "North East" Scotland? There are already a few on here building around Aberdeen. I'm a little further north.

I would not want to go back to Talk Talk. We changed to them in the days when they were offering free broadband if you signed up to them as you telephone provider. The catch was that only applied to unbundled exchanges and ours was not unbundled. But we went ahead on the promise that our exchange was due to be unbundled and the BB would then be free. I didn't do any homework, but it turned out there were no plans to unbundle the exchange, that had been a lie. Then we had a fault with the BB. Talk Talk did not want to refer the fault to Open Reach, because they got charged for that (not my problem) they just kept sending me a new router as "that must be the problem" I think I had 4 of them, all made no difference. In the end, I escalated it to the CEO. Because of the lie about free unbundled broadband I was able to leave the contract early and all the money I had paid for broadband was refunded. BT took over the connection again, still with the BB fault, but when I reported the fault to them, it got fixed. The moral of that, is don't trust what TT tell you, and if you get a fault, it may prove very hard to get it fixed. IMHO not worth saving a few £ for shoddy service. Re getting a connection., all you have to do is run the cables as Open Reach instructed you. So in our case the cable came into the house to where we wanted the master socket, across the site, under the road, and ended as a coil of cable above where the OR engineer told me their cable was. When we were ready to connect, I just contacted BT for a "new line" They sent OR to make the connection. The same surveyor I had seen 2 years ago came out first. I had to pay the BT £65 new connection fee, but most of that was then refunded when the work over ran and our connection was late.

Yes ordered through their distributor ADW in Cumbernauld. Fitted by my builder. My builder double checked all measurements prior to placing the order so they knew it should all fit.

I think it's no on both counts. You should not connect an uncontrolable heat source to an unvented tank. That run would have to be pumped, No good again when the power goes off with an uncontrolable heat source, it would boil in the stove.