ProDave

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.

Hi and welcome to the forum. At a target price of £500 per square metre that is going to be challenging to say the least. I wish you well with that and expect to achieve that you will have to do just about everything yourself. There are various man made cladding materials and don't rule out a render finish, but ultimately the decision is more likely to be what the planners will accept not just what you would like and what is cheap. You could choose a super thick timber frame to fill in the walls which is easily DIYable then it's just the cladding to choose. If you like the idea of render then you could clad in a wood fibre board that gives more insulation and takes a thin coat render directly as I am building with. I did have to pay someone to do the rendering as that is not in my skill set (I would have made a lousy job of it)

Not so funny, I saw a friend who is building himself a garage. His hand is strapped up and imobilised having sawn through the tendon of his left thumb when the saw jumped. He showed me the blood trail across the garage floor where it happened........

Tell them to send the cctv to You've been framed. The £250 will pay for the computer repair.

Our house is being done under the 2013 building regs as that is what was in force when our building warrant was submitted, so I escape the need for a CO2 monitor which seems to be new in the 2015 regs. I agree it might be an interesting thing to have, but my interest does not stretch to £200 worth of interest. I completed wiring a new build last year and that didn't need it, but the new build I am currently wiring does have to have this CO2 monitor installed.

Get a caravan. No this time I mean a small touring caravan. Our touring 'van is full of stuff in storage like this. Now, the touring 'van will get just as cold if not colder than the static 'van, but with nobody living or cooking in it, the moisture levels stay low so even though it's cold, you don't get condensation on anything. It's also away from the house and everyday living so does not get covered in sawdust.

If the boundary is not a perfect straight line, then set the garage so it's 800mm from the boundary at it's closest point. Then if it ever comes to "tape measures at dawn" then no part of your garage will be closer to the boundary than agreed and there will be no cause for complaint. you can only set the levels at the front as the plans and the rest take care of themselves. Strictly speaking if the site slopes, then this should have been shown on the elevation drawings. Use any excavated soil to level as much as possible te ground immediately around the garage to make it as level as possible. P.S why did you need planning for a single garage? If it had been 1 metre from the boundary it might well have been permitted development?

Hi and welcome to the forum. That's a big question that needs to be broken down into smaller questions. Do you have any land yet? do you have any idea what you want? Tell us where you are and what your goals are.

For me, the problem is worse in the sloping ceilings of the roof upstairs. There it is just the wood fibre sarking board and an insulated timber frame. There's also the small matter of 2 velux windows not yet fitted so an obvious great big hole to let air in between the frame and the membrane. Obviously it will be a lot better when those are fitted and sealed up. Downstairs where the wood fibre is rendered and all windows are in and sealed, it hardly inflates anywhere at all. But it is certain there will be some air leak somewhere so I was concerned this might continue and be audible. I might look at an extra row of battens in between the ones that are there to reduce the "span" between supports so to speak.

I'm close to finishing fitting the air tight membrane to our house. Inside the house, the timber frame is clad in OSB sheet. The air tight membrane is stretched over, and then battens are fitted (following the positions of the studs in the frame) to both hold the membrane in place, and create a service void before the plasterboard goes on. On a windy day like today, when there's a gust of wind, the membrane on one side of the house will "inflate" very slightly between the battens, and the other sode of the house it will suck tight too the OSB. In doing so you can hear a very faint "crackle" a bit like a rustling crisp packet, but very much quieter. My concern is it's going to continue doing this, and will it be audible once the plasterboard is on? Clearly there are some small air leaks in the frame, and the membrane is doing it's job of catching them. But although it's stretched as tight as I can, it's not elastic and not tight like a drum so will move a bit. Anyone else noticed this? did the plasterboard shut the small sound in?

Have you any idea what sort of external insulation? One option is wood fibre board like I have used that you can buy from Ecomerchant (though in the end with a lot of grief I got it cheaper via a local builder) http://www.ecomerchant.co.uk/exterior/insulation/ecomerchant-protect-ewi/steico-protect.html Ignore what it says there, you can get it up to 160mm thick in one board, and other makes are available, e.g I used Pavatex.

To show the futility of (especially) RDSAP EPC's, I will recall the house I saw for sale described by the estate agent as an "Eco House" and describing all it's energy saving features. Then at the bottom of the page it stated EPC: D One has to wonder sometimes....

You have a good start as you have a lot of equity in your existing house. The equity from that should buy the land so that's one hurdle. If you can slum it, and the site is big enough, you can live on site in a static caravan. In such a case it's normal to ask for temporary planning permission for the caravan with the main planning application for the house. You will have to pay council tax for that, but usually just band A. You can get some quite large static 'vans or even a twin unit if you want more space. We are currently doing just that living in the 'van while completing the house. To build a house normally needs a self build mortgage which releases the money in stages. That will restrict your choice somewhat. I don't have any experience of that but others will come along and advise.

By the time you cut through the small amount of blockwork above the door, allowing for the lintel, there's not going to be much left of it to hold the floor joists above from strongboys. I would be inclined to prop it with planks and standard acro's under the ceiling very close to the wall on both sides. Perhaps as well as the strongboys?

Sounds good to me.

Just use the small size wago's as good as anything. It's not like you will want to unplug it often is it? If trying to remove that, the tip is a really hot soldering iron as you have to heat the mass of the board and the plated through hole. Heat the solder that's there and one leg at a time pull the component out. Only then use a solder sucker or solder wick to clean the hole out. If it's lead free solder, a little drop of 60/40 applied will make it flow a lot better. If you can't desolder it without messing up the board, just snip the wires as close to the board as you can. Solder the new wires onto the board and there should still be enough on the sensor to solder onto.

The DHT11 is a 4 pin digital sensor but only 3 pins are used.. The datasheet is here http://www.micropik.com/PDF/dht11.pdf If you can desolder it and rewire it in the exhaust duct, I can't see why it won't work. The data sheet mentions cable lengths up to and over 20 metres so I can't see why it would not work.

A quick scan of that lot reveals a manual barely adequate ro connect it an use it, even less so for understanding the technicalities of how it works or how to do anything fancy with it. When using the controller you have, it appears to use the terminals HF, LF and MF (high medium and low fan?) to select the speed. There is also mention of a manual 3 speed control using the terminals L(1) M(1) and H(1) * Are these in fact the same terminals,. just referred to by a different name to put us off the scent? * (I am not entirely sure what's in the brackets, you zoom in and the resolution of the image is too poor to be certain) I think it's going to be a case of stick with the controller you have, or forget it (at least as control goes, perhaps just keep it as a display) and configure your own controller. I doubt you will ever need 3 speeds. you will need a trickle speed and a boost speed. Once you know which one is going to be your boost speed then a changeover relay contact will switch speed for you. you then need either a boost timer or your own humidistat system to command the relay.

Do you have an electronic copy of the manual you can upload? I have to say it seems bonkers to put the humidistat in the controller. I have always heard of the humidistat going in the extract duct so it senses the humidity of the air it is extracting. If you can find a manual we can look at, we might be able to suggest something.