Ferdinand

That sounds like the same texture quality issue as trying to touch up over a spray painted surface. It may be necessary to rough up an entire section / room, or create a feature (eg area for a sitting area or a dining table). Or I suppose one could rough it up in patches across a region so that the larger texture becomes the feature. F

Do polished concrete floors get sealed? What with? There should be nothing to stop you imposing a pattern on top if you find the right material, before sealing. A long time ago my father stenciled a border onto a (I think) chipboard floor with an appropriate type of paint., as opposed to trying to hide that it was a cheap and cheerful material. The effect was to turn the chipboard tinted by the sealant into a background texture. I think it was resealed once or twice in a couple of decades. But he had the same sort of resin / fibreglass experience as @SteamyTea, and was an architect to boot. There may have been a tinted sealant under the stencil, and a more transparent one on top. I would not have expected it to work, but it did. I would probably not be that bold without a lot of homework first. There is probably a type of paint that would do it over concrete then be sealed. Just one way to alter the impression. Best of luck. F

What the ... are you talking about a pie? ? With grout, it is attention to detail. My B-I-L is wonderfully anal about this, and spends an extra hour cleaning up all the joints with a cloth round his finger after I have already stopped. Glad to have someone like that around. It just gets harder to get off. (Physically, not metaphorically) Good to see the progress, F

The shower appears to spray across the shower, not along it.

Another missed opportunity ... ?.

So I stand by my original statement .. same footprint as a bath give or take.

This is mine in the posh bathroom. Front to back is 1.1m. End to end is 2.6m. The screen is 1.8m high. Installed by the former owner. This is 8mo overkill. My plan is to shrink it a little by installing a bath on the left end on. You could play tennis in this.

I gave my students 760 x 1600 in their student house. But the 760 was constrained. 900 or 1000 x1800 sounds good. To me the same footprint as a bath seems one way to be make a decision where the exact dimensions are not that important. Another way is a comfortable size for 2 people (or 3 students) to enjoy themselves, or if downstairs space to wash 2 large muddy dogs, or person plus carer, or enough room to be spacious for a very fat man like Eglon King of Moab (content alert: gory story - young children will love it), or someone in a wheelchair. Or for space for a shower plus a bench or chair to sit and shave your legs. Or you could plan to dry your washing in there with a dehumidifier. Personally I think that say 900 x 1600 would be better than square, so one end can be wet, and the other "mainly dry". Ferdinand

@vivienz I made a late comment on your previous post but this is now more similar to my situation where I made them move their wires back in 2013. Can you PM me a pic of your Wayleave please and I can see if I can see anything helpful. I did this to move my lines. Ours was also a 1950s agreement. We probably saved 6 figures in our case ... as it as planning for an estate. Yours is hopefully less drastic. There is a detailed resource thread here copied from Buildhub, which I hope you found via the other. F

I cannot find my original thread from the end of last year; it s somewhere ?. My setup is exactly the same Combi as you, ufh downstairs and rads upstairs, controlled via 2 separate programmers. UFH have room room stats, rads have TRVs. There are a couple of small pipe runs that are on whenever the heating is running. UFH was broadly zoned by room. the controllers are overkill imo. I do not have a buffer tank, so there is some cycling. My problem was that the ufh was not getting heat all the way through, which meant that it was unpredictable what was running hot and cold, and I was having to mess about with flow tenperatures too much. The main things that we adjusted under guidance from the gurus, Pump setting, to make sure that the heat was getting all the way round. Boiler flow temp, to keep the flow/return difference to a minimum. I have ended up with a flow return difference of about 12-20C in winter, which is still quite a bit but far better. Best of luck. F

Thanks for the comments. I used an Ikea Lillangen tall, narrow unit, which has worked excellently. Here are before and after pics. £85 plus a bit over £10 for the legs. And the existing towel rail was just cut down. Pics are not colour balanced. It is actually from the same range as the whb.

Ouch. My comments. I feel focused slightly on possible regulatory action. 1 - We had some of these moved, but may have been 33kV, when we did our big PP. We were faced with having a swathe through the middle which was pretty much house width. Fortunately we had a Wayleave with the right to make them move it all. There is a thread somewhere which explains the stuff, but this is oversailing so different. 2 - The process to switch it off is IMO a nonstarter. There may well be 500 or more people supplied by that, and to do such work *must* have a long process. Lots of notices, consultation, applications etc. Takes months to plan if not emergency. unless something is happening already. 3 - You have practical alternatives which is good, if you are allowed to use them. the jack up option is like putting your first floor on acroprops to repair the downstairs wall. Parents did that to a listed building and rebuilt a whole facade. Perfectly normal technique, but you may need a bit of redesign on the roof as it will need to be self-supporting. 4 - You need some more piccies showing where the thing is in reality, taken along the line of the wire to see the actual distance from the house. If you have a known dimension in the pics it would help so the distance can be estimated. Could be something very simple such as a known 2 or 4m piece of wood on trestles level with the closest point. it may be beneficial to put a time lapse camera on it along the line if you have them around, so you can see how far it moves in any wind that comes along. 5 - I think at some point you are going to need to talk to the LPA, and there is a risk that someone may just try and say no (though I think they will be sympathetic). It might be beneficial talking to your been-round-the-block wise owl just for their feel for the situation; it will have happened before though only occasionally. Since you have an architect it might be worth asking them if they have had one, or to call in a favour or ask their oldest local architect friend. An alternative might be a quiet chat with an old hand at building control, or even someone in the electricity company, but personally I would want an informal idea first from someone not links. 6 - I would perhaps avoid spending money on the garage bits for now until you have a better idea which direction this is going. Sure you have done that anyway. The rub is that some stuff is interdependent of course, and you cannot do eg the slab in 2 bites. 7 - If it is a comfort, I do not think that the LPA will stop you In your tracks as long as you are not doing something in specific violation of THEIR requirements. IMO the ones with the big spanner will be the utility, but they will want a workable solution too. As this must happen sometimes, I am sure there are ways .. just takes a bit of work to find them. Ferdinand

If it is not to passive house levels experience says you need a lot more cats ?. Will try and digest and comment a little later, since the forum helped me readjust my similar setup earlier this year.

I like the feel of option 2. Sorry - did not have time to read the whole thread except for Zen Jack and his moderately cold feet. But there is an option 3 below. My comments are: 1 - This is a high risk time, with Brexit and so on, and unpredictable markets, and in your area taxes recently changed to slant against you should you sell. In my view that means bigger contingency up front and leave some of your final spec items a little less defined, then you can have lollipops if you haven't spent the lollipop money on known or unknown unknowns. I would suggest perhaps a 20% contingency, and be aware of possible compromises that you can make should it be necessary. 2 - The one thing to include a lot of in your budget is time, whether elapsed or spent. You sound to be doing your due diligence, which is good. The thing is the old insight that things become an order of magnitude to fix each time you go one stage further into your project. So make your mistakes on paper, by learning enough up front to have a good enough idea of what you want. Then you don't need to keep changing it. 3 - On the finances I might try and avoid a self-build mortgage altogether. 5.5% for 3 years on 200k is an extra 15-20k interest over a normal mortgage. I would max out your current one to buy the plot if you are happy, because the trend in interest rates is a slow up, then see if you can get to habitable stage in the new one out of savings to get a normal mortgage on *that*, then work from that. There are tradeoffs there vs what to include in VAT reclaim, costs-benefits of staying renting or selling your current one, cost of the new one, and so on. Run the numbers for you. 4 - WRT to the plot, you need to work out the things you don't know about the plot that could impact you later - eg ground conditions, expensive services (if there are still some to get), planning conditions that will be imposed, ologists, and so on. That is about risk management, but it is also about the way you may need to negotiate your deal. Given that you have planning but will want to change it, make sure eg that your seller will not object to the kind of thing you want if they live close by. I assume you have had a chat about your ideas with the Planner. Ferdinand

You can also get flexible paints designed to fill tiny cracks .... Wickes have one for “walls and ceilings”, for example. I think the6 are intended for plaster as it ages, but could be useful..

You could also do anything else ... tile, cork noticeboard, checker plate is one I have seen up to dado eve above a worktop. The sky is the l8mit. But a beer fridge is essential for the Buildhub en masse inspection visit . It s nearly september, so if you wanted the new skill you could do a plastering or DIY evening course. F

I’d say you more like Archie from Balamory with all this creative experimentation. I trust that Archie has a Waste Transfer License to be accepting yoghurt pots from third parties and taking them down the road in a carrier bag.

Mine is grey. All of them are grey. And anybody who disagrees gets concrete boots and a deep garden pond.

This is a slightly exaggerated but amusing cautionary tale. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/wildlife/9827052/Holy-bat-protection-Thats-cost-me-10000.html There was a wonderful comments thread on it which has vanished, F

Ask your optician, or take your glasses in and ask them to test them. Of they can probably read it out over the phone, or ask by email. One of the things I like about high street opticians is that they will still unbend my glasses without charge when I bend them into a strange shape. F

The option for docs is a 27” monitor and an iPad to take the photo. F

Or get your prescription from the optician, and buy some prescription online glasses from somewhere direct for a tenner. Depending on what closeup means, and whether you need to be hands free, you can get a monocle (from £25) or an eyeloup (set of 3 2x to 10x for £10). Or something that sits on a table. Ferdinand

I think for something that crisp you want a Contorted Hazel or similar as a contrast. F

That's about right.

I find that with my Range Cooker, even in my 2010 regs house. I think my cooker hood us something like 250-300 cbm per hour. So OK, but not stonking.