ProDave

It's a structural t&g board fitted straight across the joists, secret nailed.

Our present (solid Maple) floors were sold as "random lengths". In practice that meant there were 4 different length pieces and a lot more of the shorter ones than any others. The best tip I had was "close your eyes and pick up a piece" then use it, rather than looking at the pile. Even then you had to be careful not to end up with two adjacent joins in line etc. I "added" to the randomness by using whatever off cut was left from one row, to start the next.

It amazes me just how many new houses I see around here where the whole ground level at the front has been raised to floor level to give level access. It clearly must be bridging the DPC as there is seldom any effort to separate the ground from the wall. In my case I have left a large French Drain. I did talk to my BCO about putting the ramp at the back but he referred me to the "access to principle entrance not reasonable" bit. Just because you don't like the look of a ramp is not justified reason to put it around the back, there has to be more of a technical issue at the front before you can do that.

This is the floor surface for the mezanine floor above bedroom 3, that will be accessible from bedroom 2 (daughters bedroom) which will be open to the vaulted ceiling. The mezanine comes out to just beyond the centreline of the main room, and even at this point, there is barely room to stand up. So I am doing everything possible to reduce the overall make up of the mezanine deck to preserve as much headroom as possible. Originally she wanted carpet up there. With this in mind I have spaced the joists a lot closer than normal at 250mm centres, planning something like 15mm plywood as an adequate thin floor to span that small gap between joists. I currently have a temporary sheet of 11mm OSB up there which seems fine. Now she tells me she wants a "wooden" floor up there. I thought about laminates, but they are not normally regarded as structural. I strongly suspect they would be okay spanning 250mm centres but no manufacturer is going to state that. i guess at a worst case laminate onto my 11mm OSB? Does anyone know a "thin" and "Wooden" floor that will span 250mm centres? It's not like it's going to take heavy traffic, have heavy furniture on it. As I say you can walk on one bit at the edge, anywhere else you will be crawling, it really is more of a storage space than a "room"

They do in Scotland

You have to consider building regulations as well as planning. They DO set minimum sizes of an "apartment" and things like door width, corridor width, space in kitchens, activity space in bathrooms etc. So in effect they set the minimum size a house has to be. Of course you can have a 1 bedroom house with two very small "studies" or "store rooms" if you can't meet the regs for all 3 bedrooms, so there is some wriggle room.

Check your local planning policy. There will be things like minimum distances between facing windows, a certain amount of amenity space being needed such as parking, possibly turning space, bin storage space, clothes drying space, maybe even bike parking space etc. if the outside space is very small, they might remove your permitted development rights. That is a PITA if you want something simple like a shed. So perhaps preempt that by including any sheds you are likely to want in the initial planning application. It certainly amazes me sometimes here just how little outside space you need. In the town here, there is a trend for back building behind existing houses which leaves both the original and the new house with only a tiny outside space. But it seems if you can fit two wheelie bins and a rotary clothes line it seems to be "enough" There are other building regs things to think about, like if you have a window very close to a boundary it might have to be fire rated glass etc.

And some of them only got "built" for £100K because they were not finished.

Which part of Scotland? Is this a plot you have bought or a knock down and rebuild?

What size of house? To get under £100K is doing well, I doubt I will achieve that in spite of me doing so much of the work myself. As Peter says, No 1 is insulate, insulate, insulate. No 2 is air tightness. No 3 is good doors and windows, No 4 is an MVHR unit (mechanical ventilation with heat recovery) Then you can think about heating, which should not be much. I am going for an air source heat pump and to buy one for self install should be under £1500, possibly under £1000, i.e not a great deal more than an ordinary boiler. I personally would not have oil or LPG again, the price is too volatile. (though I will have LPG for cooking, the usage is so low that the cost hardly matters) I will be fitting solar PV, but by the time I get there, I doubt the (already low) feed in tariff will exist any more. So that means a DIY installed system bought as cheap as possible, and almost certainly some form of battery storage to ensure near 100% self usage. Tell us more about your house design and where you are building. Oh and welcome to the forum.

That needs a "hatch" also higher up on the inside of the cupboard to fill the stack from above. I have never seen someone set the spacing of a stud wall to match the standard size of a loo roll before.

Well this lot moved in with just bare stud walls so all "open plan" upstairs.

Some different terminology in use here. So now we know what lookouts are. Can you explain in the second picture what the "Moat" is please? ( I really don't think it's what I know of as a moat)

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?