Ferdinand

Fold the membrane over the top and overlap, then put whatever you want on top .. I usually do 2-3 inches of 20mm gravel on top or decorative, then if I want to I loose lay pavers. If the pipe is inside the membrane at the bottom of the gravel fill it stays clean. The pipe increases capacity should it need it since gravel makes most of the space to be stone not void. You want your holes to be smaller than the general size of your gravel. F

Needless to say a commercial mortgage will have a potentially higher rate of interest :-). Also, personal loans are now down around 3% APR, but the amounts are limited to around £25k, which will probably not even scratch the surface of this. Perhaps specialist banks may have something here in increasing that 25k figure. F

Can you spray the top with instant aerosol or spray gun adhesive as you dismantle each course? Or can you use some sort of industrial hoover? If a normal hoover can get soil from a posthole, then a big one could do this if attached to a suitable tank.

Presumably it helps to be Usain Bolton catch them :-). Who is of course now available.

I think you would need to ask a broker to find that. From their point of view it would still be a higher risk than a normal house for a conventional bank so that would require a premium. Perhaps worth talking to a couple of more specialist banks to see if you can treat it as an intermediate risk. Suspect that the size of your likely mortgage on a large plot in Londonish may justify the overhead. Or are you financially sophisticated, and can you get an interest free balance transfer or initial purchase deal card with a really high limit over several years? I have no idea how far these deals go, but you may be in a position to find out. I am aware of people who have put ridiculous amounts through their personal cards ... 5 or 6 figures per month ... in search of air miles by using it as the conduit for purchases for quite large businesses they own via expenses, so obviously unusual setups are achievable for a suitable customer. Best of luck. Ferdinand

Excellent spot. Like the videos. A little less impressed with the slight hero-worshipping content of the first H&R article. I appreciate it is a coup to get Charlie, but I hope it settles down in the further articles. I will be really interested in the detail of how he saves money.

Good taste in Teeshirt colour. I know a 15 year old who has just painted her bedroom that colour, and it looks quite cool. (Update: Her dad is going to repaint the skirting and the picture rail, and then introduce her to the concept of masking tape.)

My fencing spike / digging bar / pry bar seems OK. Smashes bricks like flies. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Silverline-633869-Digging-Bar-1700/dp/B000T9R26W

When I did my "but of everything DIY" evening course at the local school / college, the lecturers also did bits of jobs from time to time. Since yours is an unusual technology, perhaps you could have one of those as well - also perhaps for supervision purposes if necessary? F

Having read this technical document, I am going with 900mm joist spacings for the roof, and 900mm spaced horizontals for the walls - and 10mm 2-ply or 16mm 3-ply polycarbonate depending on price difference. With the roof I am hoing with 6x2 joists between the current since they are only about £15 each, so that I can put a real roof on it should the need ever arise. Ferdinand

I am not sure how to tackle this directly, but the VOA and presumably the Welsh equivalent should have a helpline. This may be one where a specialist paid-by-results consultant may help - say if they get 15% of what you save. One elephant trap: is this one where your rebate will only backdate to the time you Appeal (or whatever the process), rather than when you bought it? Which puts a premium on Appealing quickly. Is there something you can do to the building to make it ineligible as a school by definition? eg take the roof off or disconnect the water or find asbestos or demolish? That needs a specialist answer. Or could you sublet it short term and retrigger the exemption, or rent it to a charity? F

It sounds as though you are taking your risk / opportunity -assessment very seriously, which is excellent, They probably could - it is not difficult to apply a staff to the ground through a bush or twenty. And topos are an inexpensive one to do. Your position is stronger in that the principle of development is conceded for that site, and that entrances etc are approved - so those are elephant traps which have been filled in. And October 2019 is comfortingly far away for you to try Plan B before Plan A turns back into a pumpkin.Assuming the purchase happens quickly-ish. You should also be able to reuse some of the reports with no even potential problems due to expiry dates etc (even though the LPA are very unlikely indeed to notice). If you have problems with assignment of report you could possibly use weasel wording such as "a previous report on this site found that...". Ferdinand

Shellac? Traditional way to bring out the grain, but also a decent barrier to water vapour, This is not quite my area, though.

i have posted elsewhere about a leanto I am currently building (think roughly an enclosed carport). I may be using multi-ply polycarbonate sheet for cladding the roof and walls. My question is where does the sweet spot lie in terms of: 1 - Noise transmission eg from rain. 2 - Ability of different thicknesses to span across joists and posts. At present I have joists at 1.8m centres spanning 2.5m-3.5m across the leanto to a wallplate. I can easily add a lighter intermediate structure. 3 - Price for different thicknesses of sheet. I expect that 2-ply (10mm) or 3-ply (16mm) will be the thickness I need, but I would be glad to hear of any experiences. The sketch plan and elevations are below. Thanks Ferdinand

You can approach this from several different ends. On the one hand you can find cheaper wood, import from France etc,or use oak cosmetically as suggested. On the other hand you *could* do something interesting like buy an oak woodland, or import it from eastern Europe yourself, do the entire build personally etc, to reduce the cost. Or you could use a different wood. I am not very knowledgeable about alternative timbers as house structure if you want the "old wood" look rather than the "twisted Green Oak" look - but here is eg some reclaimed Greenheart. Greenheart was used eg for the foundation piers for Swanage Pier in 1860 and lasted until nearly 1930. We used to have a large pile of 9" x 18" beams from a Victorian Mill which could presumably have been used in a newbuild. Even after 20 years outside we could have used them with just perhaps a few mm sliced off the face. My comment is a little speculative, but my point is do not limit your options to the conventional. Ferdinand

Returning to this. I think you *may* be cruising for a bruising if you are using someone who is treating it like a bog-standard house conveyance - with all due respect to people who make their living doing routine transactions. Or is it a demolish-and-rebuild or a known-reliable plot? On the other hand if you have emotionally already bought it then you may have gone past the point of no return in your head, even though you can withdraw your offer. We missed assigning reports on our much larger project getting PP and selling a field to a developer, and it cost us £1000+ when the Housing Developer we were selling to made it a condition of sale. The project could take it, but it is a lesson learned. If you are not in a position to identify for your risks, by definition you cannot identify the costs in time and money to manage them, or the size of the risk package you are choosing to take on blind. You may be OK, but there are any number of things that may be expensive to fix that you *could* negotiate on had you noticed them before you push the button, and here we can by definition only do personal opinions, albeit sometimes about specifics. The expensive uncertain stuff is the stuff underground, and that which is not identified on the standard bits of paper or may only appear in searches after you have started spending money on solicitors so already have some downside to withdrawing. If you do not have a suitably experienced solicitor/conveyancer and it is not , then I would suggest that you consider rapidly building up some hinterland yourself (books etc), or hiring a local professional to do a sanity check / elephant-trap hunt for you. For that route, you probably want the old and qualified experienced person from the backroom of the local independent estate agent - 10 years local experience ideally. You would get a 15 minute scoping conversation free first ... and they may be able to say "there be dragons" or "plots down there are usually OK" on the spot from having dealt with one eg 17 years ago. When does PP run out? One key questions is .. why are they selling it? If it is obviously just to make money then that is comforting, as is the fact that it has full PP. Ferdinand

Late with this reflection, but can you put something useful under the patio ... eg storage area for tools and stuff that struggles to find homes elsewhere, or even a wine cellar (!). That will not help the size of your quote, however - but it may maybe (perhaps) help persuade SWMBO. Ferdinand

The sort of things that happens is that your ducts fill up with water through microfractures, or the plugs at the ends shrink and leak. I am sure that BH people have experience and solutions (eg you can blow them out again with a blower, which might be an elephant, or a Henry-hoover type thing, or an air-line. Just do not stand in the wrong place at the other end :-), and we are perhaps dealing with things decades down the line. Ferdinand

No idea what the reason might be :-), but I sure that one will turn up eventually if we don't consider it . Spare ducts is a good mitigation strategy. I think I am in favour of putting services under loose laid paved paths on gravel trenches. For me it is probably paramount to be able to get to everything without disturbing too much else. In our last house we had a whole area .. perhaps 250 sqm (out a of about 2acres) ... of our garden that was saturated for years, and the corner of the next field was the same. We eventually sold off the neighbouring bungalow, and the Fred Dibnah style chap who bought it dug the deep foundations and sunken floor for a gargantuan engine shed in that same area with his JCB, which then filled up with water too like a lake or Texan swimming pool. Eventually he excavated the post war sweep driveway at the front, which was about 400mm of washboard concrete, and found no fewer than THREE leaks in the water pipe underneath. Fortunately it was on the supplier side of the meter but measured at several litres per minute, and had been running like that for over a decade. God knows what the bills would have been if it were on the house side of the meter and Severn Trent had no leak liability capping scheme. Following the theory of the Critical Job Detector which exists in every piece of computer equipment to make sure that it breaks down at the precise moment of maximum stress and cost, I formally formulate Ferdinand's Law. Ferdinand's Law Draft One. The likelihood of needing to access any item of equipment or service in your house for any reason is inversely proportional to the time, cost, difficulty, domestic disharmony and disturbance required to gain access to the item. Ferdinand

No idea what the reason might be :-), but I sure that one will turn up eventually if we don't consider it . Spare ducts is a good mitigation strategy. I think I am in favour of putting services under loose laid paved paths on gravel trenches. For me it is probably paramount to be able to get to everything without disturbing too much else. In our last house we had a whole area .. perhaps 250 sqm (out a of about 2acres) ... of our garden that was saturated for years, and the corner of the next field was the same. We eventually sold off the neighbouring bungalow, and the Fred Dibnah style chap who bought it dug the deep foundations and sunken floor for a gargantuan engine shed in that same area with his JCB, which then filled up with water too like a lake or Texan swimming pool. Eventually he excavated the post war sweep driveway at the front, which was about 400mm of washboard concrete, and found no fewer than THREE leaks in the water pipe the supplier side of the meter that we measured at several litres per minute, and had been running like that for over a decade. God knows what the bills would have been if it were on the house side of the meter and Severn Trent had no leak liability capping scheme. Ferdinand

You do not want to run anything where you will need to dig up your drive or 50k landscaped garden for any reason. I have just just negotiated an easement for a landlocked property and we put it approx 300mm in from the fence along the obvious location at the back of a wide flower border. And you you want a spare duct or two, for obvious reasons. F

I have recently been getting TopCashBack tracking through Ebay sometimes. Worth a whole 1% or so. Will buy a pint to soothe the nerves. F

Welcome. I would say model your whole house including energy requires fr the next 10-20 years, as you may find some investment in your existing structure will be a good idea.

On the Discounts thread and off-forum we are having a debate about how to recover VAT on purchases made with a Gift Card (eg from an Employee Rewards scheme). So, for example, if I put my £12k kitchen or £150 paint through a Wickes or B&Q Gift Card in order to save about £1200 or £15, what documentation do I have obtain and present at the end in order to get the VAT back from the HMRC under the DIY build scheme? I will be asking HMRC for advice via the Helpline, but has anyone successfully completed this cycle? What did you do, and eere there any difficulties? There are at least 2 different cases ... one is where VAT is charged on the purchase or top up of the Gift Card, and the other where it is charged at the time of Sale of Goods. Homebuilding Mag had *this* article about VAT Reclaim in 2016 by Accountant Andrew McDonald, which does not address this detailed point. Does anyone happen to know Andrew to invite him to comment on this thread? Any experience or resources will be welcome. I hope to produce a small FAQ at the end. Rgds Ferdinand

I would be inclined to ask them before I buy anything :-). If say you have put 20k through a gift card for an extra 2k saving, then claiming the 4k VAT back proves difficult, it is a big loss.