Ferdinand

Miserabilist ! Half the joy was just sucked out of my day. Real men build geodesic domes for their BBQ shelters. F PS I cannot see any problem unless you BBQ a giraffe, as long as it is the right stuff for the span.

An interesting, and complex one. So what have we got? Spent an hour looking at this out of interest. Planning App is South Hams Council 0852/19/FUL. The "huge forest being destroyed" and "cut down massive woodland" and perhaps the nature stuff is a little heroic - it is a proposed site of about 1 acre for nine houses, retaining part of the wood. The trees were planted as a green buffer by the developer of the houses the objectors live in in about 1995-8. I see a long term issue there - if environmentalists keep trying to portray modern developer buffers as being as essential as ancient forest then that will make ancient forest less unique. They need to explain how a farmland-scrubland bird - Cirl Bunting (which is actually doing very well says the RSPB) is protected by eveloping woodland. The interactive map on the Council website shows it as a scrub field with I think whips planted (below). I do not think it has any protections except for the one imposed with the Planning Permission. Something being on the National Forest Inventory is as meaningful for protection as it being on a Ordnance Survey Map. IMO they have 5 real issues with bite: 1 - It is outside the community boundary ... though the link road seems a more logical boundary in some ways. 2 - if he has chopped more than 5 cube of wood within a quarter, then he needed a licence from the Forestry Commission. But I think it is only restoration plus a £5k fine. 3 - There seems to have been some sort of planning requirement on Linden Homes to maintain a green buffer. The current were built in 1998, so it may be that that has expired - or perhaps the requirement to maintain has expired. 4 - If there is any proven damage to protected wildlife, then he may be under animal law. Felling in December mainly excludes bats and birds nesting trees, so it may be down to badgers etc. Unless perhaps there are reports from bird surveys or bat monitors. 5 - Not zoned for housing. Plus politics. There is still some time to comment deadline. Objectors playing a cute game on timing. IMO this could be developable, maybe, but it would have to be a 'sylvan natural community in the woods' type of vision, and would need something very heavy in the planning balance on the pro side. Affordable self-build plots in a woodland setting might be the type of thing, plus sustainable community benefit, or a version of what the Southwell Eco-Community was in the 1990s when that was built. After all, 3 million houses have to go somewhere. I think Linden called this right, and walked away when they could, though perhaps they should have offered to sell it to a local trust. I wonder how much they sold it for? Ferdinand Very before - Council Interactive Map http://gis.swdevon.gov.uk/CNET4914LIVE/CMFindIt/ Before - Link above After - Link above

Do you have a photo of the brook in full spate?

There are people here with projects on that scale. My first thought would be to employ a detail orientated experienced Project Manager. Ferdinand

Jeremy for one has one of these under his drive made from IBCs. Ferdinand

Lucky for you moss is not like bats or trees. ?

Hmmm. Leca might do it. But I think that is more expensive.

I like some moss and lichen on my patio. It reminds me I do not live in Celebration, Florida.

It seems to me that you have them over a modest barrel. Dependent on contracts, they need to put you in the position you would have been in if they had not c*cked-up. Depending on your spec, the loss of height may not be significant. Probably the only solution they can *insist* on is rework-to-spec, and then you should get losses (eg delays) compensated. Alternatively work out what you actually want, and negotiate it. An acceptable compromise, plus the difference in cost between that and the 'replace it' one, plus a compensation sum for time + other resultant costs, should be where the ballpark is. The quickest timewise answer may be a further 18mm floor at right angles, but you may want to run checks with an SE etc. Ferdinand

Call local Building Control and see if they know anything. You may need to be judicious as they auto-publish less information than Planning.

Has anyone entered any awards with your self-build? Or been entered by anyone else? I do not mean TV; I mean things (picking an example out of the air) like the Brick Awards, run by the Brick Development Association. There are also local awards and the Civic Trust Awards, which are for a "contribution to the built environment". Presumably there are also awards for contributions to ecology etc. What was your experience? Ferdinand

Good luck. I prefer Mixology (which needs some more cocktails).

I think that is offensive. If a house has been well-designed by an Arch-Tech, then they have no business taking the limelight away. Do you know what the reason was? It sounds like the nasty little clause in RIBA House of the Year on C4 that limits entries to those designed by RIBA and Wales, Scotland and NI versions of RIBA. I want "House of the Year" not "House of the Year by a member of The Sponsoring Organisation". Gets! Ferdinand

? On insulation. Do you have any details on what you have actually got? Material, thickness, u-value etc. The space that insulation takes up when it is in a pile is quite startling. Assuming yours is a house not a bungalow, I make your wall, roof and floor area about 1300sqm. All those surfaces insulated with 250mm of EPS (OK, but worse performance than many here would use) would require 4 x 40ft containers, or a volume stacked solid equivalent to your 10 x 8 x 2.4m kitchen. Plus a third. As it happens my parents restored a 5000sqft house that had been empty for several years. That was a small manor of 5000 sqft. They took two decades and did it slowly. Everything always costs that much more money or time if there is that much of it. By the mid noughties their energy bills without a strategic 5 year fix would have been running at 6-7k per year. I thought when I first read it that that was the house budget ! On insulation and slabs, have you considered external wall insulation? It may be a bit daunting as you would be looking at spending 80-100k on it, but if you are looking at all that digging for ufh, the EWI plus extending it downwards by 600 or 900 may well be a viable option. Needs analysis, but if you save 5-6k a year on bills it could be viable. You need to do some heat modelling including long term costs. My experience on multiple attempts to consider EWI on houses roughly 10-20% of that size is that it is usually totally unviable if you have done much other stuff first. But here if you get to avoid some major work, who knows? Ferdinand

Welcome @jimboban. I can see that this is going to be a party thread. However, one initial question ... your house was built in 1975. Are you absolutely sure that there is no asbestos in it? That is nearly peak usage time. Several of us here have lost parents or partners to related diseases. Ferdinand

Somebody's offcuts? Or one roll of rockwool or similar.

AIUI Squatters Rights have never been a thing, except in rhetoric. Except for normal Adverse Possession after x years. In England, Squatting in a residential property is a criminal offence and can be dealt with by the police. As to security .. disconnect all the services, and possibly board and fit remote cameras etc. You will want those for your site, so get them now. F

If you want to chew the cud without the post-inserted elephant traps that you did not fall into, the House Planning Help podcast is probably a good option.

If you install an air-source heat pump (ASHP) to heat your property, it will attract a subsidy called Renewable Heat Incentive, which is a payment to you based on how much CO2 emissions are saved by the installation of the system. The calculation is done on the basis of the guestimated CO2 emissions numbers in your (less than 2 years old) EPC Report, taking potential savings by loft and cavity wall insulation (which you can often get done for free) into account. Naturally that means that if you upgrade your fabric by other methods, and have a new EPC done before you apply, your subsidy will be materially smaller. Here is a comparison for 2 semi-detached bungalows, one with an EPC of 74-C, and the other with an EPC of 44-E. Restored bungalow. EPC: 74-C. Annual energy for heating: 6,577 kWh. Annual energy for water heating: 1706 kWh. Total energy: 8283 kWh. Calculated RHI Payments: £530 for 7 years. Unrestored bungalow. EPC: 44-E.. Annual energy for heating: 12,283 kWh. Annual energy for water heating: 3421 kWh. Total energy: 15704 kWh. Calculated RHI Payments: £630 for 7 years. What to do: Get a new EPC report to document the poor status (about £50), and get your ASHP process done under that rule, rather than doing it later. In the case of the small detached bungalow above, the difference is worth £700. (Cynics Corner: The apparent truth that for such an install done the official way to get the subsidy - via an Approved Installer - seems to cost more than having one by a competent installer who is not Approved, by an amount which takes up most of your potential subsidy-gains, is not to be mentioned.)

I thought i had answered this q, @CC45. Apologies. Unfortunately that is not possible, as the soil pipe is fixed where the toilet is due to the routing to the soil stack. Cheers

Cheers. An approximate breakdown of costs would be fascinating. This is what I said elsewhere in an article entitled "How to build a house on your field" (you seem to have done better than this): " Paragraph 79 is an exception allowing for high quality houses built in the open countryside. Going down that route you would perhaps need a specialist architect, and a specialist planning consultant (recruit via the architect), and a planning budget of at least 50-100k, and a time budget of 3-5 years. The statistics are that approvals across the whole of England average about 10 per year, and that there are three or four architectural practices which account for the majority of those six dozen or so successes in the last few years. The practical implication of this is that the best way is to use an experienced architect, which will then give you an advantage over the probably-inexperienced Council." Ferdinand

Looks superb Eileen. Would you comment on the Design Review Panel in relation to "Selwyn-Gummer Exception" houses? I came across them in relation to Par 129 of the NPPF, which mentions "design review panels". I agree that the concept is useful, however to me to DRP marketing (eg description on home page) tries to imply that they are The Specific Organisation referred to in the NPPF, and I do that the NPPF refers to "a design review panel" rather than "The Design Review Panel". A private company trying to look like an official actor or an industry association is a marketing policy as old as Methuselah, and does not preclude a good job being done. The Companies House data has the look of a normal private company. Could you comment - is this the only such organisation and is officially recognised, or is it one example of potentially many? The query arose from a previous question and I put it on my list of planned topics for a standalone blog. Cheers Ferdinand

I would say 3 DOUBLES. In smallish houses (say trad semi) 3 double bedroom houses are like hens' teeth. Most are 2 doubles + a single. I rent one to a FOF (friend of family) couple, and it took them 2 years to find a suitable local property for me to buy. On the Gravenhill Plot 6 one, it seemed to me that one of the doubles may be splittable in 2 for when the boys reach that mutual-hatred age ?. This is a critical insight , and it accounts for perhaps 2-3 million extra households if you compare the numbers over a generation. The kind of measure that would help prevent that would be to facilitate 2-3 person shared households - the opposite of what is in place now where they are denigrated ("HMOs"), introduce tax breaks for eg Civil Partnerships / Marriages, and extend Civil Partnerships to pairs of platonics or relatives. One good example of this was actually when Oxford was one of the first Councils to go overboard with regulation of small HMOs a decade ago. Ferdinand

Change of diet should do it.

I distinctly recall that it was donated ?