ProDave

My BIL lives in a house where this was done successfully a long time ago by a previous owner. His corner plot garden is now enclosed by a nice mature Beech hedge right on the boundary substantially increasing the garden compared to the small bit originally enclosed by a fence. but he bought it like that so he did not take the risk of being told to take it down, or having to wait for it to grow. And the garden was all flat to start with.

I would first pressure test the drains, to ensure the "damp" and smell is not being caused by a leak in the drains somewhere.

Have a look around the surrounding houses. Has anyone else done this? If no, there is likely to be a planning condition or covenant preventing it. You might get away with it but being on a corner visibility around the corner for traffic may be a concern. In any event I would not try and enclose anything in front of the front wall of the house. A hedge might enclose it, and if nobody complains once the hedge has grown to maturity to screen the garden you could let the wall fall down. But a hedge will do nothing to raise the ground level, for that you need a retaining wall, completely different thing, so you might end up with a bigger, but sloping garden. If you have not yet bought the house, £3 gets you a copy of the house deeds from the land registry. Find out if there are covenants or restrictions on the use of that bit of land, e.g it might be designated amenity land. Or look for a more suitable house to buy that gives the garden you want?

Is it as bad as you think? In your picture the bottom string looks at too high an angle (compared to the newel post it is trying to engage with) if it was at the correct angle it would be lower and the "adjustment" needed would be less. Still the manufacturers problem, unless they start throwing the "you checked the drawings" card at you (I know someone that got stung by that) Ours got the newel posts wrong as well, but thankfully that was all, and it then took them 2 more tries to get the newel posts right.

My BIL hung on to the end in charge of decommisioning one of the major instalations. I baled out nearly 30 years ago, glad I did doing so preserved my pension.

I had involvement with JET nearly 30 years ago now, and it was always the standing joke that Fusion power will be 25 years away, always. It was certainly an impressive bit of kit and fun to have worked on, but whether it represents value for money is doubtful. But if you don't try an idea you will never know. I still know a couple of people who worked on JET right to it's end, and in the latter years their job became maintaining a >30 year old control and instrumentation system built of now obsolete technology, so they became experts in repairing and maintaining the old kit, and scouring the world market to buy up any spares that became available.

Until recently, house buyers largely ignored EPC's and bought a house because it looked nice. Then complained it was draughty, cold and cost a fortune to heat. Landlords are the low hanging fruit, easy to say you can't let a property unless it is an EPC C, a lot harder to say you can't buy or sell one below EPC C. In recent years a lot of poor EPC properties will have been sold by landlords as they don't want or can't afford to upgrade them. What is really needed is a mechanism to make poor EPC houses genuinely be worth less than good ones. Quite how you achieve that without being "unfair" is difficult.

It saddens me how little regard people have for tradesmen. You think they are all a lazy overcharging bunch of wasters? I had always preferred to charge by the hour rather than the day, that way I do 7 hours, you pay for 7 hours. I also preferred to give estimates not quotes so again you only pay for what the job takes. Every time I have mentioned this I get shot down and told people prefer a fixed price. I always got the vast majority of my work through word of mouth and recommendations. That is the lifeblood of most sole traders. If you really have such a low opinion of them, don't recommendation, and they will soon be out of business.

Can nobody do maths here? 1,500,000 houses over 5 years = 300,000 per year = THE EXISTING TARGET (that has not been met for many yers)

Hinge the door the other side otherwise the open door blocks the bedroom doorway.

I count 154 "points" I used to estimate on the basis of 1 hour per point. So 154 hours. I am out of touch with labour rates "down south" but a few years ago I would be quoting just under £5K for the labour for that. I would guarantee southern rates will be a lot higher than that, £7K for labour would not surprise me in the least. Materials will add up, they could easily be another £7K depending what you want.

We have 8 houses sharing a 100KVA transformer which is where they derived the 12KVA that they offered me with no upgrade charges. They don't seem to apply diversity. What surprised me was when installed it was the same size cable as they would use for a 21KVA supply and they fitted a 100A fuse. You could ask what fuse they would fit in the supply head if you accepted a "3KVA" supply? I think the smallest would be 40A which would amount to 9KVA But with that many houses on one 100KVA transformer it does sound like it is time they upgraded it, and it still looks like they are trying to get you to foot part of the bill for that.

That would work if done as a full wet room. You would want to avoid too much water splashing on your door and into the WC area. For that in our wet room (shower in corner) I use two of the cheap over bath shower screens. Hung on the wall so the bottom is 100mm above the floor and the top is about eye level for me. The don't stop all the water splashing but most of it, a little will splash over the top and there will be some bounce at the bottom, but generally it keeps the non shower parts of the wet room dry. when not in use they fold almost flat against the wall.

Up here, if you go above 5 properties on a private road, that triggers a requirement for you to upgrade the road to highways standards and the council to adopt it. Check if that applies where you are. And one of the plots we considered buying had a clause in the planning, no building on the first 3 metres from the road, to allow for a compulsory purchase to widen the single track road.

Don't laugh but when I had to do a similar thing, I cut out cardboard shapes to scale of bath, shower wc, basin etc and their respective activity spaces and played a game of tetris with them to find a layout that would fit.

Your present system probably has a cold water tank in the loft, often a very flimsy plastic thing, did you worry about that?

My take was install all the cables you think you will need, but only connect the ones you actually have a use for. Like you I installed 3 to each tv point but I can never see all 3 being used. Partly my reason for installing several was in the event of some cable type superseding hdmi, I can probably use 2 network cables and a clever adapter to replicate the next standard in AV cabling. I think what I am saying is you won't need a 48 port switch.

If those sustainability guidelines were applied here, none of the plots in our road would have got planning permission.

Post the exact model number, I would be surprised if it can't do cooling. It might need an internal switch changing to enable that function. Cooling to radiators will work, just keep an eye on cooling water temperature so you don't get condensation on the radiators. ASHP cooling on a sunny day is free if you have solar PV as well.

The clue is in the name "evaporative". It "cools" by evaporating water. So it puts water vapour into the air. What else do you think will happen to the humidity in the room? Many will say this sort of "cooler" is snake oil. The only way to cool the room, is to remove heat from it. Something your ASHP is likely capable of doing?

And the corresponding downstairs layout see we can see what any upstairs walls can transfer load to.

And where in those views does your SE think a steel is needed?

I am surprised BC passed it without trickle ventilators or mvhr.

I am very surprised that if you have all the "normal" holes in a building as listed above for individual extraction and trickle vents that he achieved an air test of less than 3. Surely it would be easy to open a couple of windows a crack just to get a worse air test than make permanent unwanted holes.

MVHR is NOT all about air tightness of a house, at least not just about how air tight you can make the fabric of the building. If i take the example of my last house, my first self build. I don't believe the basic fabric was leaky. But because it did NOT have mvhr, instead it had: Kitchen cooker hood exhausting through a 100mm hole. Utility room extract fan, venting through a 100mm hole. 4 bathrooms, each with it's own extract fan, exiting through a 100mm hole. A stove that drew it's combustion air from the room, and for that it had an air inlet vent built into the hearth do admit outside air into the room directly behind the stove. and because it was not room sealed, the stove flue effectively was vented to the room. We also had a standard letterbox in the front door, a cat flap, and every window had a trickle ventilator which even when "shut" I doubt were particularly air tight. That is what a "standard" house has as a collection of big holes to let air in and out uncontrolled. Fit mvhr and we have NONE of those. So regardless of what air tightness test you get, simply eliminating those collection of huge holes to be replaced by one inlet and one outlet and an mvhr system is bound to be a big improvement. Of course because everything was thought about this time, the WBS is room sealed drawing all it's combustion air directly from outside.