ProDave

I did consider leaving out the floor insulation (suspended timber floor) under where the larder is going, but changed my mind as it would then be a major PITA to put it in later if we changed our minds and didn't construct the pantry. Our new house is performing well in this hot weather (it's even hot up here) remaining nice and cool inside. The inside temperature of the south facing walls is just 0.5 degree hotter than the inside temperature of the north facing walls.. Thanks no doubt to the insulation with a long decrement delay. The caravan on the other hand needs all the doors and windows open to stop it becoming like an oven. The ground slab under our suspended floor (there is one bit still not insulated and accessible) is still measuring 6 degrees today, so if we wanted to cool the larder a simple fan through the floor to draw up some cold air would probably work well.

Can I raise my wacky larder / fridge theory again. Think about how a fridge works. Basically the compressor etc is there to remove heat from a fridge. Most fridges expell the removed heat via some form of plate on the back. So the back of a fridge will be warm, expelling the extracted heat. The inside of a fridge will be cold. The front and sides of a fridge will therefore be cooler as that's where heat is drawn in to replace what has been extracted. So to sumarise, back of fridge is hot, front and sides are cool. My wacky idea therefore was to build the fridge into one wall of the larder, such that the font and most of the sides were in the larder, and the back was outside the larder (in my case it would have been in the hall) The theory that the cool surfaces of the fridge would continually be removing heat from the larder thus keeping it cool. It would need a fridge sized hole in the wall and the fridge sealed to that hole. And the rear side of the fridge would look silly sticking out of a wall, so I would have put a false wall up just beyond that with air vents to allow the hot air out. I won't be putting this into practice as SWMBO has decreed the fridge is not going in the larder, but if anyone ever tries it, do let me know if it worked.

We used the Baumit.com render system with their Silikon Top final coat. That is definitely very waterproof and robust. It might be asking if they think that would adhere to what you have.

The standard here is ordinary blocks laid block and flat. (one block on edge, two laid flat gives a wall about 330mm wide

This is what I have done in the same situation A small retaining wall made of railway sleepers. A French drain along the front with the level of stones lower than the air bricks. In my case it will remain open like that. It's only along the front as the side and back the ground level has sloped down and it's not needed. I will bridge across it when I form the ramp and path to the front door. Could you do something like that with the paving slabs cantilevered over and keep the drain open at the ends for airflow?

Use a glyphosphate (sp?) weed killer like Gallup360 That's what I used to clear my plot and it worked well, with a borrowed backpack sprayer.

If you want it to last, build the whole lot out of engineering bricks, a mix of red and blue to get your desired pattern. Unlike a house wall, a garden wall will remain damp for long periods, and the frost gets in to a normal facing brick and you see the results. Same applies for cement render to a garden wall, seldom lasts long for the same reason. Engineering bricks tend not to absorb water so less likely to fail. I like the English garden wall bond one with a row of soldiers on top, rather than concrete capings.

You can abstract small amounts without a licence, I forget the figure. If I was going to water the garden from the burn I would just drop my submirsible pump in, use it, then remove it, and tell nobody. In my last house we had the old well in the garden. I had a pump in that for watering the vegetables. Yes I am happy for him to culvert the whole lot if he puts a big enough pipe in and SEPA have approved his plans. What I was against was him putting a small pipe in that from my experience would not have coped with the flow on at least 2 occasions since we have been here, hence it would have backed up and my garden wold have become a pond.

If you hate dormers, consider my idea of "gable ends" instead. Ours (like just about every house in the Highlands) is room in roof, but I built big gable ends, instead of dormers. Think of a dormer, but don't chop the sides off. I first saw this style of house on Skye and liked it. I have to say I am very pleased and just about the entire floor area upstairs has standing headroom.

This is not over yet. The neighbour has still not spoken to me. But he has been speaking to my tenant in my old house. But he is apparently applying to SEPA for permission to culvert the burn across his garden. It will be interesting to see if they give him permission or not. At least if they do one would hope they will be specifying a proper size of pipe to be used.

A victory for common sense.

The only thing I would do differently is sell the old house first before building the replacement. The inability after 2 years trying to sell the old house has left us working on the new house in dribs and drabs on an almost non existent pot of money.

Hi and welcome to the forum. Finding a plot is always the crux, that needs to be your main priority. Until you get that, then detailing the plans is not a priority and should be regarded as just putting ideas and concepts onto paper. Until you find a plot, you won't know what size and shape the house will be, and how you want to orientate the house with respect to views, sun, neighbours etc.

One can only wonder what goes on in someone's mind to make them hate others (and themself) so much to do such things. Only when we can begin to understand WHY they do it will we ever have hope of changing that behavior

How does this work if you have an air tight layer on the outside of the cold roof? Surely in winter that will be a recipe for condensation? Don't building regs demand ventilation of a cold roof, meaning your air tight layer must be at ceiling level and only there?

Can you find any builders near you using it? I got mine via a local builder so was able to take advantage of their bulk buying and got it a lot cheaper than any on line supplier and no delivery cost.

Tripple socket means all 3 connections are female http://www.screwfix.com/p/floplast-equal-junction-triple-87-5/12152 So the bottom will just plug onto the stub coming out of the ground. Your new branch to the wc will plug into the side, and a bit of pipe then the slip coupling out of the top. Yes that's an underground one, the first I found the the same applies to the above ground ones as well

The slip coupling will NOT go at the bottom. The branch for the pan will need to be a tripple socket branch and will go straight on the stub of pipe coming out of the floor (cut to the right length) The slip coupling will go somewhere above to enable you to join it all back together (as you can't pull it apart) and you might need two slip couplings and insert a short bit of pipe between them. You may also need to expose the stack a bit higher, it might not be possible to get it all in what you have exposed.

Track lighting would be my choice. Anything else, ecen if you find a fitting that is narrow enough, you have to get a cable to it, and surface mounted or in trunking will look pants. Akternatively (not so popular now) a low voltage suspended lighting system you know where you string two tensioned cables and the light fittings screw onto the cables.

My recollection was the OSB formed a tight sandwich either side of the bales with no air gap. If a fire has got to the point it has burned through the plasterboard, and then through the OSB to ignight the bales, I think the house is lost anyway.

Ah yes, cutting through pipes. My previous house had UFH upstairs and downstairs. I had worked out the en-suite layouts to have a 900mm square shower. I had even drawn on the floor where the UFH pipes went. So when SWMBO changed the spec to have rectangular 1200mm showers, of course the waste was in a different place. Jig sawing the hole in the floor for the waste, at just the time I saw the line on the board, the fountain started to rise from the floor.

I wired a straw bale house many years ago. I was very impressed with the insulation. I was working in the house in the middle of winter, snow on the ground outside and it was cosy and warm in the house. The only heating on, was a tiny electric fire in the middle of the main room downstairs, doing a good job of keeping the whole house warm even upstairs, and that heater was not even on all the time, it was clicking on and off on it's thermostat. This one I did, they encased the bales in a twin wall timber frame with OSB on the inside and outside, air tight membrane on the inside then a service void, and timber cladding on the outside. The only issue with regards to services, was the few places cables had to go through the walls, they were put in conduit (and sealed to the air tight layer.) I recall there was a concern about the dryness of the bales. They wanted them much dryer than you would perhaps want otherwise and they had to choose (or were lucky) to get a decent dry spell for the straw to dry in the field before being baled.

As @JSHarris says, a portable building does not exempt you from planning permission. It exempts you from most aspects of building control but you still need building control for the drainage to serve it. There's a program running on Channel 4 now by Sarah Beany, how to live mortgage free. I think a lot of the advice she gives on that program is misleading. In one case she said it's easy to get permanent permission for a portable building on agricultural land, and another one she said they don't need planning permission at all as they are not going to live in it forever. I am not sure either of those is true.

Probably @Crofter house is the cheapest being built here as he's doing everything himself. He is also building under the "portable building" (caravan) legislarion so he is exempt from building control. You might want to take a look at that option as it's not a million miles from what you want. In Scotland a portable building can be up to 100 square metres. In England and Wales it can be a bit larger (but I don't know the exact size) because the Caravan act in England and Wales got updated at some point but not in Scotland. If you find you can live within that size limit, that is a way to shave off some of the build costs. You might be able to get a more eficcient use of space as you would not have to comply with building regs accessibility and circulation space rules. the downsize is you might not to be able to reclaim the VAT as you won't have a conventional completion certificate, and I don't know of anyone that has tried reclaiming the VAT with any other paperwork instead.

Whether you need concrete or not depends entirely on ground conditions and in particular the level of the water table in winter. Ours is anchored in by pouring concrete into the hole once the tank is in deep enough to encompass a retaining ring built into the bottom of the tank All manufacturers have some form of anchoring kit. Also by their nature and the physics of displacement, a conical shaped tank would need a higher water table to make it float out than a round or flat bottomed design. Even so, I would only ever empty ours in summer when the water table is low. The risk of floatation is the greatest when you empty the contents and before you can fill it again with water. The air blower in our Conder is in the top of the tank though I could see no reason to stop you mounting it remote if you wanted. It sits in it's own compartment under the big lid, that's completely encased so you are not looking down into anything nasty when servicing it. Emptying is done through a separate smaller lid that you unscrew.