ProDave

Your appointing a solicitor at stage 3 after planning, suggests you are buying a plot "subject to planning permission" There is nothing unusual in that, indeed that is exactly what we did. BUT you need the solicitor on board right at the first to draft a legally tight agreement to buy the plot if you get the planning. Solicitor is not normally needed for planning / build etc. A planning application will only confirm the principle that you can put a house that looks like that on the plot. It does NOT ,ean you can actually build the house. Ground conditions, a gas main right through the plot etc can easily prevent you physically being able to build the house, as can a lack of a drainage solution etc.

A very good example of people not caring in the slightest about running costs of a house is our Solar PV system. Most of you know we have been trying to sell our house. We have solar PV on the original (now >50p per KWH ) rate. the income from that just about pays for all our electricity used (even though it is only a small solar PV system) making the running cost of this house for the next 20 years very low. Not one of the people who have looked at the house have showed the slightest bit of interest in the solar PV and how it makes the running cost of the house so low. Not one.

Again that's the dinosaur in me. Certain things "should" have a stopcock not a ball valve. Ball valves will be used for local isolation of things like taps for maintenance.

I could use one of those and a 15/15 brass stopcock. I might go for that option. I guess that's another of my prejudices, I hadn't looked at pushfit stuff.

It's certainly true that energy is not the biggest cost in running a house so not the No 1 priority. It is still funny though now people will buy a better fridge to save £10 a year in electricity, but won't buy a better house? Take out the mortgage because by the time you retire that really should be history, and still by a LONG way, the biggest cost of a house is the council tax. No amount of insulation, tripple glazing, heat pumps or mvhr will do a thing to reduce that. Perhaps if air quality is seen as more important, then things like mvhr may become seen as desirable things to have in a new house? Surely unless you buy a really old house, people are not concerned with damp and mould these days are they? Even our modest 14 year old house built to normal standards of the time does not suffer from either of those, not in the slightest.

I am trying to avoid those mdpe to copper adapters. I have used one, once, and to be fair it sealed first time and never leaked. It just did not inspire confidence. It was a "rubber bung" in essence and when fitted you could flex the copper pipe where it fitted into the mdpe fitting. So on the present house I used brass stopcocks that take a 25mm mdpe in one end and a 22mm copper out the other, both secured and sealed with a compression ollive, that inspires confidence and gives a solid joint. The reason for mdpe to the outside taps (yes there are 2 of them) Well I have wood fibre and render cladding, and my philosophy is not to make penetrations in the external cladding that might be a source of water getting into the wood fibre. So in both cases the outside taps are piped in 20mm mdpe. One under the floor and into the garage, the other out through the blockwork wall under the sole plate and then back up the outside of the wall to the outside tap. Try that in copper and it would not last a winter. The best compromise I can find is a brass stopcock with two female 1/2" BSP fittings, then a 15mm to 1/2" BSP male on the input and 1/2" BSP male to 20mm mdpe on the output. That's 2 more fittings and 2 more joints than I would like if only I could find the correct stopcock.

A Laurel hedge is for the VERY patient gardener. We planted that along our front, 10 years ago, on the basis it was slow growing and therefore low maintenance. Well it is CERTAINLY slow growing. It was about 5 years before we even trimmed it the first time, and even now, it's barely a 2ft high "hedge" perhaps scraping 3ft high in places, but to look like a hedge it has to be trimmed to the height of the slowest growing bit. Will not be repeating. Perhaps we are just the wrong climate for it?

Perhaps it's a case of you can only have an appeal considered once? Initially they refused to consider his appeal because he had missed the time limit. Somehow he has managed to actually get them to consider the appeal this time around? so now he his having his ONE shot at an appeal?

Good news, so that's one more interpretation of what is and isn't "adjacent" to the highway.

I'm trying to order some pipe fittings to get some basic water services into the house. And I can't find the right stopcock I need. 25mm MDPE main in to copper services. That one is easy. A brass stopcock with 25mm in and 22mm out. But the one that has got me stumped is copper IN to 20mm mdpe OUT to an outside tap. If I use this one http://www.screwfix.com/p/poly-stop-cock-20mm-x-15mm/98486?_requestid=101742#product_additional_details_container The water will be going the wrong way and it probably won't work at all. I need copper IN (don't care what size but would choose 22mm if I had a choice) and 20mm mdpe OUT Surely I can't be the first to want to do that? Yes I know I can do it with equal mdpe in / out stopcock but I hate those horrible mdpe / copper insert things that go with them. I did this on my last house, 14 years ago, so I know it can be done, but I don't recall where I eventually found the right stopcock from. Tries BES, T'stn, and screweys so far.

I think all that has happened, is Scotland kept the old system as it always used to be in England, nice and clear (if slightly more restrictive) but England changed their rules to something much more open to different interpretations.

Hi Dee and welcome (back) We did try and contact as many of the old regulars as we could find contact details for and sorry you slipped through that net, but now you are here please carry on as before.

So it looks like in 1995 (my situation was before that) they replaced a perfectly clear guidance (between the house and the highway = 1M max permitted development) with an ambiguous guidance (adjacent = 1M max, not adjacent = 2M max) So now the guidance is so ambiguous that it is open to interpretation and there is no guarantee if what you are proposing is allowed under PD or not. Only a planning officer and / a court can now decide that. Assuming the edging stone you have laid marks the edge of the footpath, I would say you can touch your fence from the footpath so does not meet the situation in the example above. Get that hedge planted ASAP to reinforce your argument that the fence is not "adjacent" to the highway I am not trying to be awkward, but I still think a neighbour, particularly one who does not like what you are doing, would be justified in raising this with the council, who would have to investigate. They may or may not decide the fence is okay. but looking at the street, everyone else has a low wall, sometimes with a tall hedge behind it There is also the issue of when do Permitted development rights start? I thought it was not until the house was complete, so if that is the case, regardless of the height, you have no permitted development rights just yet anyway? Also check your visibilty splay requirements for the entrance. I had to have a certain visibility distance at a height of 1.02 metres, 2.4 metres back from the edge of the road. Or to put it another way, I would not be allowed to have a hedge or fence higher than 1.02 metres high, less than 2.4 metres from the road. Yours looks closer than that.

I would wait and see what the council say. My experience was several years ago with South Oxfordshire District Council and then, most definitely, if the fence was anywhere between the house and the road, then over 1 metre needed planning permission. That link you posted is very vague. It says 1 metre next to a road, 2 metres otherwise. so would it be okay to move it in 6 inches so it's no longer "next to a road" and build it 2 metres high? I think not. I think that is trying (very poorly) to describe the between a house and the road rule.

This is a very grey area. It's not usually a case of how far the fence is from the road, but if it is between the building line of the house, and the road, it WILL need planning permission for a fence over 1 metre high, even if the fence is only 6" out from the wall of the house. In practical terms I can see why you have put the fence there, and someone is just trying to cause you trouble. Unfortunately the council may feel they need to be seen to be impartially upholding the planning rules, and you don't have PP for a fence, so they would be quite entitled to enforce you to remove it. Perhaps a compromise would be to agree it is only temporary while the hedge grows and for them to grant temporary permission for the fence? I had a similar situation in my very first house. the back garden fronted onto a road. As far as planning law was concerned that garden was between the building line and the road, so as far as planning law was concerned anything there needed PP, so I had to get PP to move my fence by about a metre, and erect a garden shed. The silly thing was the real front garden of the house did not front a public road, so I could have put up a tall fence and put my shed there in the front garden without needing PP, but it would have looked quite ridiculous.

Well the best "rule of thumb" I can think of is chipboard flooring will normally be 22mm and add the thickness of a carpet. most hardwood flooring will be a similar thickness. I am allowing about 10mm for tiles and adhesive, but that is massively dependent on what tiles you choose. Another "challenge" you might not have thought of is when transitioning from a tiled floor to a hardwood floor, I don't want a step, so the under build for the hardwood floor area needs to be thicker than the tiled floor area so they end up level with no step.

That's looking very crisp indeed. Those boards that they had to break out and replace. I can only assume the new ones slotted in won't have the tongues and grooves intact, so I wonder if over time that will cause issues? I hope not. Are those the doors that TP seem to have on sale at the moment? I wish I had the cash to buy some, but don't and knowing my luck when I do, I won't be able to find such a good deal.

Perhaps one is the pump, and the other is the thermal mixing valve? Trying to make their quote look like you actually get more than you think you are getting? Pictures of what they are offering?

Were you planning to set it up and commission it yourself? If not you will need a gas safe engineer and he will be capable of changing the jet and setting it up.

@Tennentslager Are you saying your cheap Machine mart stove is just a "tin box" with no fire bricks to line the fire box? I am thinking SWMBO is thinking of a WBS for our static 'van, but I don't like the idea of one with no fire bricks as surely the sides and back will get much hotter?

The sparrow's share should be the input less efficiency so say 80% efficient, the sparrows get 20% Or have I got that wrong?

I would suggest you go for a pretty standard timber frame design which is what we mostly "do" up here. That will be the standard stock house design so should be easy to sell. If you do what we did on our last house, that is pay a builder to build the shell then do the rest yourself you still have plenty of scope for doing work yourself. 12 years time is a long time so I won't even try and predict what the market will be doing then, but if someone had asked me 12 years ago when we had just completed our present house, I would never have believed 12 years on it would be almost impossible to sell.

300mm of MOT1 and 50mm of base layer tarmac. I expected this to get trashed by all the delivery lorries, concrete lorries etc, but it hardly touched it and eventually I will just put the top layer of tarmac onto it.

I would be interested in how you find the insulating collar. Particularly with a roof with counter battens then battens, almost all of the thiickness of the roof window will be outside the insulated makeup of a warm roof, so I feel it needs something. However if that skinny black thing in the picture is the "collar" it looks a rather pathetic attempt and I feel it should be possible to DIY something better. On the one I have done so far (cheap 3g window I would not recommend) I made a surround out of 20mm wood fibre board that was left over from cladding the back of my garage. Certainly better than nothing. I found you have to pay a lot to get much under 0.9 U value for a roof window. Have a look at the eye watering price of the 4g Facro offering.

Looking at the floorplan, the facing dormers are bathrooms. As I thought, the living room is at the back, which if the plan is "north up" faces East, so your average working familly will get home of an evening to a living room and rear garden in shade. Still, the two bedrooms at the front will be overheated by the afternoon sun to ensure an uncomfortable nights sleep. I wonder what the floor plan of the other 3 is like? they at least have a south facing garden.