Ferdinand

Cheers. IIRC someone said they are the same as Ryobi.

Cheers. Bought.

You lot are 'orrible. Now you have me wanting one. Two more SENCO DS202-14V DuraSpins on Ebay. This one, on its own: £100 http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/SENCO-DS202-14V-DuraSpin-DS202-14V-Cordless-Collated-Screwdriver-/282622613945?hash=item41cd9ed9b9:g:EcgAAOSwLzhZniWZ This one, which includes a Senco SD300 Drill-Driver in a double set: £110 http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Senco-DS202-14V-Cordless-Collated-Screwdriver-SD300-Drill-Driver-2x-Batteries/182717067711?ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT&_trksid=p2055119.m1438.l2649 Does anyone know if there any issue with the double set? Is it, for example, an old product that is >5 years old (say)? Cheers Ferdinand

@ryder72 This may or may not be what you are after. However, if you are spending £50 per door then you are within touching distance of a product such as these reduced rom £140 to £84.: https://www.todd-doors.co.uk/iseo-c4500-white-door It says "semi-solid core", but they weigh 30kg each so that sounds quite solid to me. Ferdinand

One advantage of buying through Amazon Prime if the eBay seller will is high for pp.

If they have not asked for one, I would think twice about submitting the soil survey, but perhaps might consider a para in the Planning Statement which would serve to demonstrate that one is not necessary. Planning permission is formally not precedent forming, and pre-app advice is just an Officer's opinion anyway, so just because it has been mentioned before does not mean it is relevant now. I would address the trees FIRST. Very important. Know what trees you want still there and make sure that that is the position before you submit anything, once you are fairly sure you will do so. Cannot overemphasise this. I might also check exactly where the 250m landfill boundary line is, and if it is across a corner of the plot make the application site a little smaller excluding that part if feasible. Then make the bald statement that the application site is outside the landfill whatever zone. I have never done that so I am not sure if it would work as a tactic to head off a soil survey at the pass. Might the same tactic work with the Heritage Site thing? Not sure why they want a material schedule. What is that, anyway?

The only reason I would buy at TP is that the local £5 delivery gives them a small bulk order sweet spot sometimes. Obviously I have an account.

Looks like it will fit in well.

Cheers.

For the CU I bought about 3 weeks ago I went with Hager but bottled out on the RCBOs - went for a split board with each half with a pair of RCDs and MCBs on the circuits. I decided to go with Hager as a quality brand, but it was a short notice purchase and the RCBOs were about £28 vs <£5 for the MCBs. That was beyond the balance point in that situation. More research needed next time. Ferdinand

I am with Mike on this one. I do not want *all* the lights out due to a dodgy fuse in an ipad charger.

>2) how dry are your blocks, I have never worked with durisol but by the looks of them they will suck the life out of the concrete in no time, on that basis the only time you are likely to get a blow out is in the first hour or so, or while the concrete is pumping. The texture is like shredded wheat, except in shredded wheat the fibres are aligned. Kevin McCloud would love to do a demo. @recoveringacademic kindly donated me one at the weekend, so if he ends up with a gap at the top like @Construction Channel, you know where ir went. F

One thing to bear in mind quietly is that it may be easier to remove some things yourself (if circumstances are conducive to this) rather than put them into the planning system via a ground survey, eg someone here had iirc "lead contamination" come up on their Report, which turned out to be paint stored in a since-removed old shed some time previously. Innthat case it may have been easier just to have dug out the soil, cart it away, and remake the ground. Then leavel grass to grow. Once something is in the system it stays visible and if you have objectors they will nail you to the wall on it every time. In my case we treated single small bush of Knotweed, with evidence, before we sold our pot with permission. The next lot of surveyors made teeth-sucking noises because they found a dead stem lying on the ground (lesson learnt), and it is still there in the conditions a couple of Planning Applications later. Ferdinand

It's on your LPA website - which is likely to be a Council or Local Park authority. They have somewhat varying search facilities. It will come under something like "Search all Planing Applications", and you can go via a text box search specifying Road, Post Town, Postcode etc, or get into the Map Search and find your area, which should have some way of identifying planning applications. There should be some form of tickboxes which let you specify the data to be displayed such as eg Planning Records, Planning Records 2017 etc. Once you have the area highlighted there should be details displayed when you mouseover or click. That should give you a link to various Planning Applications, which you bring up, or in a new tab/windows by CTRL-CLICK or RightCLICK. Then you read those looking for Ground Conditions Reports or similar, Decision Notices, and Officers' Reports - the last are the summary by the Planning Officer. Ferdinand

Not quite - depends. Great for toast, too :-o . It needs to be used. If not, you have a large lump of iron sitting there. @gravelld said We were all electric except for the Aga hob (gas was quoted as about 15k for pipes in 198x as it was about 500m away), so 10+ storage heaters. But I am not spending today defending Agas . (Declares victory and retires from thread) F

Why not get a bigger one and just put the leaky one inside a non-leaky one? Or wrap the whole thing in a huge tarpaulin' scrunched at the top like a goody bag. Or a fold down side and sell fast food on the roadside? Or...

If there is little green area left, perhaps all the bats and badgers and hedgehogs are living in your little plot . A Phase I is quite reasonable price-wise. It is when they ask for a Phase II that you need to worry. I think here I would find several recommendations and ask for quotes for the phase I. You need a focus on - at least - ruling out any landfill risk (think 250m should make you safe there), and making sure no one mentions gas percolation tests without a careful explanation. We had to do these on a larger site, but we were much closer than that. I is a bit of a trigger, and tick-box cultures such as exist in Planning find it easier to require tests to be done rather than accept they are not necessary. I think it would also be worth getting all the Ground Condi tion reports (and Planning Decisions conditioned to requite them) so you can demonstrate that there are places between you and the landfill where tests were not required. Should be an hour or two online. Ferdinand

Think they fleeced themselves and the heading should be preceded by: "A Cautionary Tale". I love this: "Andrew would have liked a poured concrete kitchen floor, but settled for an impressive grey vinyl from The Colour Flooring Company. It was £800 including fitting, or less than a tenth of the cost of concrete" That 'inexpensive' sheet vinyl is 3.2mm thick concrete grey "commercial quality" (allegedly) and £28 per sqm, plus fitting by the company that supplied it. About £7 per sqm from elsewhere for thicker stuff. Or you could do uniclic tiles. The concrete comparison is mere smoke. Presumably it is also 100x cheaper than gold leaf - which fact is not relevant either. I would say that much of the £22.5k expense (£6.5k on a couple of mdf custom cupboards aside) is on a desire to have designer items - whch is actually money spent on art objects not the makeover. IMO they have overpaid everything by about 4x or 5x, partly because they do not know better and partly because they insisted on "icons". Ercol stacking chair (£500?). Chandelier - would quite like this at £100 (£300). Kitchen bentwood lampshade (£285 - Ikea version about £70, and I thought *that* was OTT). Bathroom floor tiles (£170 per sqm). New legs for the Ikea bed (£100-£150 for 4). Farrow and Ball paint. Farrow and Ball paint !! Suspect they also overspent by perhaps 50k on the £437k one-bedroom plus terrace flat. Plenty 2 bed or 1 bed + garden flats available for £350k to £450k in Stroud Green. People with too much money in too much of a rush. To give them one due, at least they can take most of it with them to the next place. Ferdinand

We had an Electric Aga (vintage perhaps 1998). Big one - 2 oven traditional electric ovens in the 'storage heater' but, with an add on with 2 more ovens and with an add on with 2 more ovens and a propane gas hob. Cost something like 14-15k (fitted !). Running costs were ££ but we were off mains gas and annual energy etc bills were the best part of £3-4k anyway in 2010 even being economical - the AGA was probably £600 of that. Was a 500sqm house going back up to 400 years. The traditional AGA ovens work well for some things that are surprising, such as using cast iron pans on the oven floor (far cleaner for a fried breakfast since all the splatter self-cleans off the oven wall rather than landing in your kitchen). They do a 3-pin plugin version. I can see an Aga working well with PV solar if your house needs the heat. I do not think we had *any* vent pipes or cooker hoods. Just a stonking iron sheet blocking off the old chimney above. Incidentally, the beam directly above the front of the Aga is made of fibreglass - cosmetic covering for a steel. Ferdinand

Are you a furniture making area? Around here I could probably find a small setup that would do me a custom job using their industrial sewing machine. If you are worried about the stiffness of the multi foil try 110mm soil pipe as your wrapping tube. Ferdinand

My understanding of solar in Spain is that the state run Electricity system is losing something like 30 billion a year, and in the absence of political will to charge what it costs they are groping around for cash cows, one of which us to tax solar produced electricity. http://www.mariscal-abogados.com/sun-tax-on-photovoltaic-systems-in-spain/ My further understanding is that having walked into this lamppost, they now find themselves having to backpedal. It may already have gone. Or not. https://cleantechnica.com/2016/03/10/parliament-spain-removes-punitive-sun-tax/ The only thing you can be sure of is that you cannot be sure. F

Can you not rivet a patch over it? That was how they built the Titanic .. er.

Does the crate need ventilating? You are halfway there.

Thanks for the responses. We had a two wheeled one tears ago ... difficult at corners and in not quite straight lines. I do not think I will get an electric one through due to cost. One thing I have not mentioned is that an ideal loaded height would be 12 to 15 inches. Cheers for the comments so far.

Ironically, £30 is exactly what it costs me for a new builders' barrow. The local BM do identical barrows in chrome, black and green at 3 different prices. Ferdinand