ProDave

On that note, I would not have wanted to dig the hole for mine with anything smaller than my 3 ton machine. That was at almost full reach down into the hole. My machine would have been too small to have enough height to lift it off a truck, but luckily I ordered it from TP (who actually gave the best price) and their own truck offloaded it with a hiab. On the other hand we still have a lot of trees and I often find I have been working under them and then wished my machine was not as tall......

Did he give a reason? I am sure I have seen polished concrete with UFH.

..... And change it back to one WITH a hose connector as soon as the idiot has left the site. What does he think the double check valve is for FFS? I had this nonsense with Scottish Water. They would not make my connection initially because I didn't have the double check valve in line with the standpipe or the caravan. So I had to fit two of them and call him back. Lessons learned. ONLY provide your stand pipe, NO OTHER connections. Once your supply is on site SW don't require any other insperctions, building control see to all of that. And this double check valve thing drove me nuts. There is a single check valve in SW's toby on the boundary. There is a single check valve in my own toby used for my water distribution network. There is a single check valve in the TAP. But these three single check valves are not considered adequate, so as well as those 3, I had to install an in line double check valve. Talk about being paranoid. Why don't they just fit a double check valve in the toby that THEY supply, then the whole site sould be covered?

If 1.5 metre is your deepest excavation, then just about any machine will do that. For me, the choice was made by what was available nearby at the time. If the machine is to far away, transport costs add up a lot. Perhaps not an issue in densely populated areas where you will have a lot of choice nearby, but up here there wasn't much for sale close by.

Now I am a "believer" in dowsing in that I have been able to find a pipe before. But to be able to pinpoint where a leak is by that method? Greatest respect to him if he is right. Do let us know.

Yes it was. It was a design feature that I wanted to keep it simple and in some ways more traditional looking (most of the old croift houses don't have a boxy soffit or fascia) The wooden fascias you see now are going to be over clad in aluminium painted the same colour as the windows. That will ensure no maintenance and provide a drip bead at the front edge. Knowing they were going to be covered, I just used lengths of 8 by 2 constructional timber left over from framing up the roof. Originally I had planned to uses some posh rainwater goods, but chose the cheap plastic in the end. Having done so I like the black on white look. Surprisingly the most "difficult" detail was the offset bends where the downpipe joins the gutter. The downpipe is offset from the wall by a fixed distance by it's brackets. Two standard 45 degree bends gave it way too much offset from the wall. But I couldn't just take it straight down, that would have looked silly. In the end I had to choose the make of 45 degree bends carefully (the ones I ended up with came from TP) and then some careful work with a hacksaw to shorten them to make a much smaller offset. The finished thing looks good, just a shame you can't use off the shelf stuff.

Most of my run to the kitchen hot tap will be parallel with, not through, the posi joists, so I should be okay.

That sounds like a fair price. When I last tried an "architect" I was getting silly prices based on about 7% of their estimate of the build cost. So I didn't even go down that route this time. I used an architectural technician to detail the design.

My thinking is I need 10mm copper for the LPG supply to the hob (can't do that in speedfit) so one coil of 10mm copper will probably do my LPG run and my kitchen hot water run.

I must admit I was thinking copper for the 10mm run, no restrictions at joints (soldered) High mains pressure so I expect the hot water to be running at 3 bar from the PRV.

What thickness of EWI? My house is clad in 100mm thick wood fibre, and the standard Rationel cills work by putting the window frames half in the timber frame of the house, and half sticking out to then be encased in the wood fibre board. P.S I think the fitting of the cills is the one "bad" feature of the Rationel windows. They fit by being "pressed" into a slot in the bottom of the window frame. The builders didn't want to fit the cills to the windows before fitting them as most of them went in from the inside and the cill would be in the way to do that. So it was down to us to fit them from the outside afterwards. One of them in particular took some serious hammering with a hammer and block of wood to get it to go in. Nervous moments hitting the bottom of the window frame (in effect) very hard with a hammer.

I would say a SE is needed if there is a retaining element. I am building my house on strip foundations. One of my design briefs to the SE and architectural technician was I wanted "simplified" foundations. A lot of timber frame companies will design a house that uses thin joists on the ground floor and then a lot of intermediate sleeper walls to support them. I took the view that I need thick joists anyway to get enough insulation in (I am using 300mm JJI joist) and the first floor joists (posi joists in my case) are capable of spanning the distances in one go, so there is no reason the ground floor ones can't also span the same distance without intermediate sleeper walls. One thing others will warn you about is what happens if the timber frame arrives and it does not fit? Who is responsible? I solved that problem by contracting one building firm to build the foundations, and construct and errect the timber frame. If it didn't fit, it was entirely their problem to solve. As it happened, the joiners came to measure the foundations before building the frame just to make sure the ground workers had got it right.

I will be doing the same, 16mm leftover bits of UFH pipe from the last house, using the 16 to 16mm adapters at each end. The flexible pipe will wind its way through the posi joists, converting back to copper in some accessible point for the final conections. I don't want any hidden joints. I doubt I will actually use a true manifold. The objective will be the absolute shortest possibler route from hot tank to hot taps, and I doubt that will be achieved with a manifold, rather just branches off a backbone pipe with individual isolators. For the long run to the kitchen tap, I am going to install a parallel 10mm pipe. Only when I try it will I find out if the 10mm pipe delivers enough hot water flow to the kitchen tap. If it works, that's a lot of wasted volume saved. If not the 16mm pipe will be there to swap over.

I don't understand that "borehole view" on that geology map. Can you explain why there are a lot of "boreholes" all along the A9 road, where there are no houses? And the one real borehole that I know of nearby is not on the map. One of the estates in town appears to have about 100 boreholes, yet is on mains water. It doesn't make sense.

Another wall has been rendered, and it's really starting to look like a house now. More on my blog at www.willowburn.net, look for the blog entry "More cladding and rendering"

I think that's a good machine. I haven't used one myself, but a local ground works contractor has one, and it was used to dig the foundations of my present house. It is currently sat in next door's garden having installed his treatment plant earlier in the week. I would go and have a look, make sure it runs okay, check for leaks, check how much play there is in all the joints etc. The only difference is the one my local contractor has is on rubber tracks. That one is on steel tracks so it's probably older. Steel tracks last longer and seem to be harder to throw a track off, but they are somewhat unkind if you want to travel along a tarmac road in anything other than a straight line. My little 3 tonner has steel tracks so I wouldn't let that put you off.

Your second link is the type supplied as standard by Rationel.

This was the largest tree I removed: The one on the right. the trunk was about 18" diameter. It was very hard going with my 3ton digger. I had cut it off about 4ft above ground so I had a good stump to work with. It still took a lot of digging and pushing and pulling. I found the maximum "push" was achieved by positioning the bucket then pushing by tracking the machine forwards. That seemed to give more force than just trying to push it with the boom. Your difficulty is going to be the short stumps, so it will be more a case of dig them out rather than the brute force of push the stump over.

There's actually something cute about that little bungalow, almost a shame to knock it down. Before I bought my first house, there was an opportunity like that, a tiny little wooden bungallow with PP to knock it down and rebuild. It had an external brick chimney that was leaning away from the rest of the house. That was when my bubble was burst as everywhere I tried said they would lend money to build a house, but I could not find anybody that would lend the money to buy the site. Hence it was almost 20 years before I got to do any of this self build stuff.

Fred Dibnah did this. He dug a ventilation shaft the "old way" building a brick wall round it as he went. Dig a bit more out then lay another few rings of bricks underneath what was there, then dig more etc. Re Dowsing. I beg to differ. Have you tried it? I was your average skeptic until I tried it when visiting my BIL at his farm. He gave me his dowsing rods and said "walk across that yard" and part way across the two rods swung together. "That's a water pipe" says BIL. I got to try it in anger for my water conection. The contractor couldn't find the water main, it was further into the field than the plans showed. They were on the point of giving up so I went and got my dowsing rods and walked slowly into the field. About 1 metre further than they had dug the rods swung together and when they extended the trench there was the water main. If you actually hold a set of rods and try making them come together, you have to tilt them quite a long way, so you can't "trick" it. When they do "detect" something, they come together without you moving them. Like I say I don't even begin to understand it, I just know it works. Re the blindfold thing, perhaps you need to see for it to work? A friend of my BIL says he can see underground springs as a green hue on the ground and thought everybody can see the same as him.

Our well was about 20 feet deep. I never saw the water lower than 15 feet below the surface. If I dug one here i wouldn't need to go any more than 6 deet deep, even in summer. I once went down the well to drill the holes for the garage rainwater pipes from the inside. Just lowered my aluminium ladder down and descended it, complete with electric drill and an extension lead and drilled the hole. Someone afterwards told me that was a very stupid thing to do for a number of reaons.

Are you suggesting you dig a well or borehole as being a cheaper option than fixing the leaking main pipe? My previous house, a 1930's semi had a well. It was only a shallow well and it drew water from the water table. It was no longer in use being on mains water by the time we bought it, but local knowledge said the well in our garden fed 4 houses and the pub across the road. Water being drawn up by a hand pump in the scullery. The number of pipes leaving the well bore that out. It was very interesting to look down it at different times of year and see how the water table had risen or fallen. I did install a pump down it and used that for watering the garden. Later when I built a garage, I piped the rainwater from the garage into it as a handy soakaway. I wonder if that was SUDS compliant? If you want to know about dowsing, ask. I found I can do it. Please don't ask me HOW it works, but it does.

When I was down south and we had an extension built (of masonry) it was normal pratice there to bed a wallplate on mortar, so it was fully supported. Up here sole plates and wall plates are fitted "dry" to the top of the wall / Foundation. I wonder why?

We had a "similar" issue. but it wasn't because the foundation walls were not flat, it was the timber for the sole plate came from the merchant warped. The builders bolted it down as hard as they could and still it was clear of the wall in places. It wasn't until it had more weight from the frame on it that it finally "bent" itself flat. Timber, don't you just love it as a building material?

Ours was quite simple. I submitted my appeal, having found a number of similar sized houses for sale that were two bands lower, so a 2 band reduction is what I asked for. The council did not agree so it was set to go to a hearing, where I would be given the opportinity to present my case as to why I thought it should be lower, and they would present their case as to why it was the band the originally set. The day before the hearing I received a phone call offering not to go to the hearing and they would reduce it by one band, which I accepted.