ProDave

They did leave the whole ground floor standing. In essence they merely took off a dormer roof and replaced it with a new box to give the upstairs full usable floor area, and extended the upper floor with the mock cantilevered bit over the car port. In doing so they saved the construction cost of a new ground floor and new foundations. And they did end up cladding the existing lower floor with external wall insulation before the render. My guess is this classed as an "extension" and the council tax will remain the same until it changes ownership, so there is a saving. I noticed they used Rationel windows but they didn't say if 2G or 3G or if ali clad or just painted wood finish. Again I am asking questions like how did they get away with no handrail on the stairs etc? the Kitchen island on wheels (with a coil of cable underneath because the hob is on the island) might "solve" the activity space issue. Just push it to one side and there is your activity space (though the other side may be a bit cramped) then push it back for normal use though perhaps not meeting the activity space nonsense. Re building regs on a conversion. I did the wiring for two old fishermans cottages knocked into one. At one point building control were saying that everything had to meet current regs, which would have meant gutting every room of the house to add more insulation. In the end they settled for only rooms that had been altered (the rooms either side of the knock through) having to meet current insulation levels.

Me too. While it was a bare plot I took the risk there would eb no public liability claim (though you can buy cheap pre work insurance to cover this) My actual self build policy started a few days before I started digging the foundations.

I paid £698 for TWO years from buildstore. That won't be long enough and I will be extending it before it expires.

Having never used one, can someone explain how a straight claw hammer works? The curved claw of a conventional one seems to work well for pulling nails out, what advantage does making the claw straight have? (if it ain't broke, don't fix it) And how does a magnetic nail holder work? Surely you want to position the nail where you want it, and hit it. If space is tight a pair of long nosed pliers works wonders for holding a nail and it doesn't hurt your thumb if you hit the pliers (I do this a lot nailing cable clips). A magnetic holder on the hammer, what do you do? put the nail in the holder then swing the hammer plus nail at the bit of wood and see how near the mark you can get the nail to start? Again never tried it but it seem so counter intuitive.

No. I didn't bother with the anti condensation lining. The only bit that may be "bothered" about a few drips of condensation is the timber purlins that it screws to, so these will be treated with preservative, and then a layer of DPM stapled to the top, so any drips will just run off the DPM and should never wet the wood.

Well the prices are in. Steel Roof sheets.co.uk quoted £405 including VAT but not carriage with "phone for delivery price" and when I told them where I was they said delivery would be about £500 and they would get a quote for that if I really wanted. Er no thank you. Planwell were £516 including VAT and delivery. Then I tried the two local merchants. Travis Perkins were £342 including VAT and delivery, and Jewsons were £329 including VAT and delivery. so Jewsons have the order. The lesson there seems to be forget the specialist and just go to a builders merchant.

I honestly could not tell you what make my hammer is. I chose it because it has an orange handle and is ever so slightly less hard to find when you have put it down somewhere. The only hammer I have ever broken was an old wooden handled one and I was trying to remove a really stubborn nail and the handle snapped. More modern metal handled hammers don't seem to suffer from that. Otherwise they differ in size and weight.

Each heat exchange unit has two rectangular filters, so 4 in total. They are the sort of plastic mesh stuff that is used for grease filters in cooker hoods. So you can buy it in sheets and cut to size to make your own filters when they need replacing

So you need piling because you have made ground. The piling rig can't operate on made ground. So you have to dig it all out and replace with compacted hardcore. (a piling mat) Now you have compacted hardcore do you need piling any more? This sounds like you have just laid the base for a passive slab?

I had not heard of Udireco before, but that is very similar to what I have used. My timber frame is clad with 100mm thick Pavatex wood fibre board and then rendered direct onto the wood fibre. The other one I am aware of is Steico, but Pavatex worked out cheaper. Having just googled Udireco, it seems the main difference is it has a soft backing layer to conform to irregular walls if retro fitting to an existing masonry building. you won't need that "feature" if fitting it to a new build timber frame, so have a look at Steico and Pavatex as well. As far as I know I am the only one on this forum to have used this system. There are a number of subtle changes needed to the timber frame system if adopting this sort of cladding, one being the OSB racking layer goes on the inside of the frame (I lost count of how many people told me my frame had been put up inside out) And because i have no blockwork skin, the structural engineer specified some parts of the building need two layers of OSB on the inside to achieve sufficient racking strength. There is lots more about it on my blog, but some of the early stuff still hasn't been copied over from my old blog on ebuild. I did all the wood fibre cladding myself (though not the rendering) and only finished it earlier this year. Because it was a slow process and I knew it was going to take time to get it all clad, parts of the frame were just temporarily clad in a sheet of damp proof membrane to give it temporary protection from the weather.

I am wiring a new build that has exactly this. So they obviously think it's going to work. Check what underlay they supply, in this case it's a "special" one for UFH that is perforated with lots of small holes. I am there again on Friday so I can see if I can find out what underlay they are using.

Hi and welcome to the forum. That looks like an efficient use of space and quite simple. Why not build in Timber frame which is so popular up here?

A few tips if you are making the frame yourself. Try to design things to be simple to build. For instance a roof pitch of 45 degrees makes everything simple. If you had say chosen a roof pitch of 42 degrees, you would curse that decision at every single angle cut. Make the panels, each one pre covered in it's outer membrane (plus overlap) so when you put the kit together you just have to staple to overlaps and it's almost instantly watertight. Even if not in Scotland, I would suggest using the Scottish approach and clad the roof with solid sarking board (usually OSB or ply) then put the membrane on and almost instantly the roof is pretty watertight. Far better than the English method of flappy membrane or felt stretched across between rafters. The length of time it will take to erect the frame and get it pretty watertight is insignificant in terms of what exposure to water the frame can withstand. If you erect the first flor first and it will be a while before the second floor and roof goes on and you want a working platform, temporarily clad the floor in cheap OSB and regard it as disposable.

My guess is it's a single phase supply. Most of the run done in large cable because of the length (they used wavecon 95 for the run down the road from our transformer) And then a junction to convert down probably to 35mm concentric for the run under the road and into the house. I saved about £1000 on my connection by digging a trench and digging the connection pit (so they didn't need to bring their own digger) which in my case halved the connection fee. I still think paying £1000 for them to pull a cable through a duct in a trench already prepared and just connect both ends was a lot of money. I then filled it all in after they were done.

I am planning to draw the air for my stove from the ventilated under floor space. It's on the drawings and building control have approved them so it must be okay.

I was going to ask about the S106. Aren't self builders exempt from that now? And welcome to the forum.

Virtually all that trenching and the road crossing should be contestable work. The road crossing has to be dione by an approved contractor or they may even be able to mole under the road. As above, are there any services that need to cross that road? get ducts in at the same time for all of them so you only have to have the road up once. The trench across the 3rd party land can be done by anyone, even you if you had your own digger (a number of us here have or had our own machines) Get independent quotes for that part of the job and the price may come down a lot.

I have always managed to get Aico RF bases for about £20-£30 each on ebay. That's a couple of hours of a sparky's time trying to fish a cable through a long impossible route. Sometimes it is the cheapest option.

Check manufacturers instructions. some are happy to be on a vertical or sloping wall, some not. Keep at least 300mm from a corner or a light fitting. If you can't get a link cable from the old to new part of the house, use radio link bases to link them. Then you only need power to the alarm in the old part of the house. Not the cheapest, but Aico are my favourite make.

That is something I have wondered about and will investigate when I get a system running. My thought if your heating demand is low, and you have all day to heat a tank of water, is in such conditions run the heat pump for say 20 minutes then off for say 40. That would have to be by an external timer. If doing that, and giving it time to defrost on it's own would avoid a defrost cycle then it would be worth doing. The other efficiency related thing i want to look at is separate the heating of the DHW tank and the heating of the buffer tank, so it only ever heats one at a time. When it is heating the buffer tank for the UFH then I would want to set point temperature of the heat pump set very much lower, than when it is heating the DHW tank. Again that will need some custom controls.

But now for us lesser mortals, you need to explain what "Stone columns (ground improvement)" actually is. (with a pretty diagram)

What a different climate you live in. A couple of weeks in winter when the daytime temperature does not get above -10 is not unusual here. Re number of showers. Is that "man showers" or "woman showers" It takes me about 5 minutes to have a shower and wash everywhere and wash my hair (granted I don't have a lot of that left so that bit doesn't take long) It would be a "short" shower if SWMBO is out in less than 20 minutes.

I believe all unvented cylinders have pressure and temperature relief valves so there is no problem.

A previous rental property, when we got it back from the tenant, I found there was a leak in the roof above the bathroom (would have been nice if the tenant had told us the roof was leaking and dripping into the bath) I emptied that bit of the loft of the sodden insulation and just laid it out in a bedroom, expecting it to be scrap. But in the couple of weeks it took me to fix the leak and re board the bathroom ceiling, the insulation had all dried out, so i put the old insulation back.

I joined the "poked them with a stick" club. Our previous house had a wasp nest in the roof void above a bay window. I put on all my motorcycle leathers, gloves, helmet, boots. Got SWMBO to tape up all the joints with masking tape. Then I squirted half a can of Raid into the void, before poking the nest with said stick to really stir things up, then emptying the rest of the can. Sure they swarmed around me, but then never got in. I nearly suffocated and sweated like a pig though.