ProDave

Hi and welcome to the forum. My house is clad with wood fibre (Pavatex) and rendered so in due course we can discuss that. There should be some interesting conversations to be had as this project unfolds.

What was good though with all those angles, is how easy it was to find a home for the offcut. Some people talk of filling a whole skip with plasterboard offcuts. I doubt all my offcuts added together equate to more than 1 sheet.

Sorry, you need a different electrician. "C2= Potentially dangerous, Urgent remedial action required." A missing label is NOT dangerous. His coding that as a C2 imho makes everything else he says very dubious and not to be trusted. Some observations may be true, but I no longer trust his judgement. Sorry to say he sounds like the dodgy mot tester looking for trivial faults. What does @Onoff think? Regardless, the missing rcd protection from some circuits can be fixed with a few rcbo's at a LOT less than £500, no need to change that up front 100mA rcd.

A new entry in my blog at http://www.willowburn.net/ documents the plasterboarding of most of the upstairs Look for the entry called "Plasterboarding upstairs" (i'll bet you would never have guessed that) It's actually a very short entry for what has been well over a months (part time) work with just me and Kathy fitting all the boards.

Talk to other electricians. They certainly should be able to do the remedial work. And with a recent test report to work from, their own test should not take so long.

As with all things, you have the option of a different electrician. Are there other rcd's or rcbo's in the consumer unit? (picture of your CU?) A 100mA up front rcd is usually fitted up front on a TT earth install. There might well be others e.g feeding sockets and showers. If not, upgrading by changing to an rcbo for those circuits may be the cheapest option. Hell for £500 I would expect a new consumer unit, not just an rcd change. Making such a fuss over the labels is a bit like an MOT tester saying your seat belt is very slightly worn and needs replacing. I would replace the MOT tester. Do the EM lights need replacing because they are dud (batteries dead) or because there are not enough or in the wrong places?

In the last house, SWMBO tried planting things, fruit bushes, little flower beds surrounded by stones. they were all just a damned nuisance to get the mower round, weeding them to keep them looking nice took way more time than mowing a lawn ever did. They ended up neglected and tatty. I could not be without a front lawn. the garage is alongside the house, so no front lawn would mean the garage opening straight onto the road with nowhere to park in front of it. I would not want that, I doubt the planners would allow it. In a rural plot where you have to install your own drainage, a lot of land is taken up providing for that. most of it ends up covered in soil and you would never know what lurks below, so you can't even build a rural house on a tiny plot with no garden. I did consider garden space when planning. But mainly from a point of view where am I going to park 3 cars, a caravan, a boat on it's trailer, and a small general purpose trailer, where they won't look silly or too ugly, and where they won't block the view from the house. Then there are sheds, at least 3, a general purpose garden tools shed, a wood shed and a bike shed. Oh and not to mention the static caravan that is currently our home but later will become a workshop and studio.

SLOAP to me at least = a lawn, or what most people want from a garden, a flat space to do stuff. i don't see the point in a garden so planted up there is no space to actually do anything. Or have I got the wrong end of what "space" you are referring to?

I too was shafted by a lender in the past. We previously had a buy to let flat with small mortgage from Lloyds. Had been a customer of theirs for years, had a mortgage for 20 years with no arrears. We wanted to update the flat, new windows, new doors, new kithchen and bathroom. Applied for an extra measly £5K on the mortgage. Yes sir that will be fine. It doesn't take long, about 2 weeks, come back when you need the money. We ordered the windows, paid the deposit. The window company called to say 3 weeks, so we went to Lloyds to make the arrangements. The computer blew a raspberry. "You no longer meet out lending criterea" Long story short, we borrowed the money instead on a 0% credit card. Rolled it over onto another. It was paid off in 4 years with no interest charges (but a small admin fee for each advance) So it in fact cost us less in the end. But if they were the last bank standing, I would not give ANY of my banking business to any of the Lloyds group again. Absolutely shocking way to treat a long standing customer with a good trading history with them over such a small amount.

The angle beads are for corners, I don't think that relates to the render thickness, but how much the bead goes round the corner each way. The 10mm stop beads yes I think that is the render thickness where it stops. The bell cast beads, it's normal for the render to thicken at the bottom to cause the water to drip off away from the wall. The expansion bead, that it the thickness of the expansion gap I believe.

Ar the time, I discussed it with the BC officer. Yes his opinion was the flat bit would have to be 600mm wide, otherwise the detector would be less than 300mm from a "corner" That's when he agreed it could go on the gable wall, as long as the manufacturer also said that was okay, which Aico did. I suspect it is very much open to interpretation between different BC inspectors.

It's more complicated than that. Also more than 300mm from a corner. In my case and the one I did previously, the flat bit at the top of the vaulted ceiling was not wide enough to put it 300mm from a corner. We could have put it on one side, but that would have looked silly, hence why we decided on the upright gable wall.

Any room with a combustion appliance, e.g. WBS or boiler and any room the flue passes through must have a CO detector.

+1 to that. You also get the ludicrous situation where an item is listed, with postage specified as "Royal Mail" then you click the button to buy it, only to be told "Does not post to Scottish Highlands" I have even tried arguing "but you are using Royal Mail" to no avail.

Buy Aico alarms, and the remote test / silence button station. An alternative that I will be doing on a room with a vaulted ceiling, is to fit the smoke alarm on the vertical gable wall rather than a ceiling. Aico approve this and building control passed this in a house I wired a few years ago where we did this.

Here is my thoughts. All terminal vents want to be as wide open as possible, the theory being anything that restricts flow, could create noise. Although I have not done mine yet, that will be my starting point, all vents wide open, with perhaps those feeding the small bedroom closed down a bit to start with, and perhaps the second biggest bedroom closed down just a little because it has a very short run. A question that will affect balance no doubt. Do you balance the system with all doors closed, relying on the air gap under the doors, or do you balance it with all doors open?

That's looking very tidy indeed.

We chose top hung, so they only open outwards. You can open them all the way so the inside faces out, and the outside in, so you can clean the upstairs windows from inside. As I understand it, tilt / turn open inwards. Not the best idea when you have left a window open and a rain shower comes by? In the previous house we chose side hung, as that's what we had always had, and the idea of top hung to us back then just sounded odd, but now I would not choose anything else other than top hung. Again @JamesP Interesting how the prices vary so much. The quote we had, Internorm had a very slightly better Uw value than Rationel so if the prices are near identical that might sway it for Internorm?

Keep the weather out. While waiting for windows, all my openings were boarded up with OSB sheets

Another criticism with tape and fill, is you rely on the plasterboard being GOOD. One wall in our previous house, when the sun was just right (wrong?) you could see slight ripples in the board finish, which had I noticed I would have rejected that board. Plastering covers such imperfections.

Scrim tape is used at joints, which is a self adhesive sort of open woven tape. External corners are done with either metal or plastic beads. I have sort of come to a deal with him that I will pay for the upstairs, and we will then do a trade swap when it comes to the downstairs (he will be building a new house soon and will need an electrician. Yes it's the better finish we are wanting, this is supposed to be the long term house. It's not so much that taping and filling gives a poor initial finish, it just does not seem to last with screw head fills poping and corner joints having a habit of the tape lifting.

Plasterers are like hen's teeth round here. everyone just tapes and fills.

That's easy. Choose your door sizes, and allow for door liners each side. I think my door openings are 10mm bigger than that theoretical size to allow for packers to get it all square, which will be covered by the architrave.

I have my own scaffold. I have discussed that and all he wants is a small tower up the stairwell. All other rooms he will work from planks and trestles or hop ups. I have just had a look back in my book at the last house. We had that one taped and filled. That cost us £1290 to have the whole house taped and filled, that house used about 230 sheets of plasterboard, so £5.60 per sheet for taping. The price I have at the moment for plastering equates to £17 per board, so 3 times as much as taping (the taping cost would no doubt be higher now as this was 12 years ago)

Just to be clear, the boards are on. I am just comparing prices to get it plastered. And in my case that's not the floor area, that's the wall and ceiling area that needs plastering.