Ferdinand

Thanks. At this point I have nothing and an Amazon Prime subscription. The Sonos Ikea stuff looks interesting, once I had recovered from the idea of £300 for 2 speakers as the low-cost end of the range. My requirement is 1 - just to play music in 2-4 downstairs rooms, and probably have some variability. When I started the thread, the idea was to have music where parts could be excluded if different people had different tastes. 2 - The ability to play 2 or more channels would be nice. 3 - Extendibility in future would be a nice-to-have. Ferdinand

Cat flap debacle? *Us*? Here I can get Amazon to deliver to my local Morrisons, but Morrisons do not offer click-and-collect yet for their own goods. ?

Is this not back and offered by eg Hermes locations?

A supplementary question. How does one integrate Sonos with say Alexa? Can an Alexa stream different things to different rooms? Hopefully it is just plug and play, without the plug? (This is an area of profound ignorance for me; have always been a speech radio World Service man. But now is a time to ring some changes.))

In a similar situation I used rockwool attached with a staple gun, taking care not to go below the joist level. Saves a lot of time compared to PIR. I then put a membrane and 25mm of PIR on top then a floating floor. Ferdinand

That would pierce the insulated envelope. Hard work to avoid a cold bridge. My impression is that something like that would make the room feel much colder, as in you will feel a chill in the hall. Suggest rather something in your accessible porch, or outside. One nice way to do it is to have a thing in your porch for resting bags or boxes on whilst you unlock the door, and for that to have a lock-as-it-closed door of some sort. F

So in short, Salisbury (or perhaps not Salisbury) Cathedral Spire and a blunderbuss might be easier. Or perhaps a helicopter, which would presumably blow it all away.

To me that sounds like a semi-cold loft. But can you educate me about the thickness and u-value of the Space Blanket layer. I think a key qu is what you intend to do with your loft in the future - will it be used for anything eg bedrooms, Scalextric, model railway layout of the entire London Underground? Though if you have 350 sqm then arguably that should be enough for anyone this side of Imelda's shoe cupboard. Cheers Ferdinand

Would this not be an insurance thing 90% of the time, so the cost-benefit might not stack up.

Are your showers all planned to be gas? The other challenge you have here will be water flow and pressure, and there are I think showers which have their own tank and are electric, which would make it more resilient overall. When I looked at an 8 bed HMO I was planning to use cubicles of the sort that come complete with shower and whb, and potentially loo, which you carry in and just connect to the pipes and the power. Might be worth a look into how eg Travelodge do this. F

Is this The Englishman, who used to be known as such in the blogging community? He built a long barrow on his farm as a columbarium, near Salisbury, I think. Ferdinand

Various Dyson's £100 off for Black Friday: https://www.dyson.co.uk/black-friday.html?utm_campaign=uk_en__cross_category__na__do__dyson__na__na__text__all__DSA Dyson Ebay outlet refurbs at good prices. eg V6 Animal at £130. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/133192204227

CIL is (I would say) far less capricious / random than Section 106, and is calculated on a far more transparent formula. Not perfect, but probably an improvement.

How did you smuggle that bathroom out of Pompeii? Is it the one with the murals?

I think that is what sentries have under a busby. Would be a good viral vid ... Queen's Guard takes off hat and .... beehive yourself.

Sorry to hear that.

Indeed. But that customer is reaping their own whirlwind, and may have walked into a lamp post on the way to the showroom because they forgot their glasses and chose not to go back. ?. And most self-builders are more planned than that .. I hope I am ... ahem... /lie

I would say one key point with an aesthetic designer - such as lighting or interior - is to keep track of what you wanted (statement of requirements or design brief at start), and keep that 'in your back pocket' to refer to. That way you avoid being persuaded of things that you do not want / need, or - if you are persuaded - you know that you have agreed to the change. And to make sure that you know what their scope / dependencies are, and perhaps how much impact you will allow on other things. For me with an Interior Designer a red flag of impending budget creep might be "I want those light moved to *there* to be central over a table I want to put *here*, and it needs a new window *there*" in an existing house ie affecting other things. I recently employed an Interior Designer on the advice of a Lettings Agent when redecorating/carpeting a student house. The initial comprehensive scheme was nearly as much as I spent on a full refurb 8-10 years ago, but by judicious redoing and phasing we cut the budget down substantially, whilst still leaving a juicy enough project for the ID. Worked well and the LA has managed to move the house quite significantly upmarket, even though it is in a row of identical modern houses. I was very sceptical. So I find myself a slightly surprised convert to using designers. This is not true. It is a mind control trick to keep you in the garage painting planks of wood ?. F

i think @Triassic or @Jeremy Harris may have an example. here is a roevious thread. I think it is basically a numbered and keyed list.

Self builders: 56 hours a week continuing unprofessional development.

Sale value will adjust for the value of whatever is there, but if you were *really* skimped on the "parking spaces" (say 1 instead of a required 3 rather than 2 instead of 3 because one was notionally your "garage" which has been rearranged), then that might lose some buyers. On the width, I read the dimension as 2.990 but I see that was the lengthways for the Utility, and it is actually just over 3m - should be fine but check if counting parking spaces is important. F

Dangerous thing to say to @ProDave ? @jened1 Just go with a good set of plans and photos and use the pointers from this thread to make sure you cover the aspects you are aware of, and even if it seems complex you will learn a lot for the next step.

What's the word for a single-dwelling fatberg made of curry?

Is the road actually classified? (My understanding of roads in *England* is that if it is unclassified, and there are no other hindrances such as others owning land in between, driveoverrights to acquire, change of height etc you can just create an entrance. May be worth a check if your road is unclassified. I know this because when I was talking to the Council about drop kerbs in a town centre they expressed surprise that the 50m of road where my house was was not classified, and both ends were. But I may be overgeneralising the conclusion.) Ferdinand

Self-build life is full of wrinkles like that. Ferdinand