Ferdinand

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.

It might be useful to identify the REQUIRED elements of a VAT receipt for a self-build claim so we are clear. It would be useful background for me as I am serial renovating rather than self-building yet, so it is an issue I might easily miss. I will ask for one next time I buy from Wickes. I have spent quite a bit there recently so they should be helpful. Ferdinand

Absolutely, and it is good you have mentioned it. We need to bottom this in case there is a barrier. Certainly Wickes are quite happy with me combining this payment method with a trade account, so there can be no issue about payments for non-trade only.

@PeterW will be better for this one. The process should be exactly the same as normal, since the discount relates to the cash loaded onto the card, not the product purchased. I will comment more a little later, but I expect you just ask for one. Ferdinand

What is a roof horn? Google says it is something to do with sex on the pantiles near the Pamplona bull run. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/randy-tourists-horn-sex-house-10779803

You do not say roughly where you are - county? You should probably have taken advice before getting PP, but taking advice from a property-knowledgeable accountant would be wise now. There are many things that the system seeks to encourage you to do, which could involve pensions (or back contributions) or keeping money in the company, or potentially use your Entrepreneur's Allowance. I think holding actual property in a pension fund can be complex involving much buggeration ... not allowed in a SiP, for example. Potentially 2 of you can take the max annual employer pension contribution of is it 40k x several years of current and back payments minus your existing contributions into say a SiP. That could be significant before you even start. then depending on age you could draw down as allowed and park the rest somewhere conservative for your pension. Plus the value of what you put in can come out again. It is also worth considering a separate Ltd for the company built house to walk away clean.That may help with your isolating payments etc. The cardinal rule is talk to somebody who knows where the regulatory kaleidoscope has stopped for now, KISS, and follow the rules. Being too clever is not worth the candle afaik, because the admin overheads will be ££££££, and you are builders not bankers. Obviously, this is just personal opinion not advice and I am a layman who is not up to date. F

Make sure that the surveys are 'assigned' to you as part of the sale .. i.e. You become the client and get the benefit of the consultant's PII etc, and are able to use the reports without an extra fee. Ferdinand

Quite like Halfords. Our local has v. pleasant staff. You can always stack all of their different offers until the central computer moans. Hardly ever need to pay more than about 55-60% of the price for the things I buy :-).

I am referring to the Energy Performance process where you are required to model the theoretical energy efficiency of your house design, then have the results submitted by a Suitably Qualified Individual. I think @JSHarris has an article about it somewhere as he did the calculations himself and had to pay an SQI to put the numbers in a template and the doc in an electronic postbox. Another bit of revenue your customer would pay anyway that you can capture and save them sending elsewhere. Arguably a saving for your customer. There was also some input from an EPC assessor about the pros and cons. F

@nr projects Pretty much any report by a consultant who needs to visit the site and study something, then write it down, will start at about that £500 level. The only cheaper processes will be regulated or mechanistic or mate's rates. But as a bundle you will be able to save your customer money by not having to do a special visit etc. There may be further potential for other qualifications for different reports, but that depends on your market and ho so might be one to consider later. Surveys are universal and if you have done your own are a good risk reduction if you trust your own abilities. IMO the second most common one that may be trainable for relatively easily and useful in most builds as a bundled service may be traffic surveys and modelling, assuming that you have a numerate degree, but since many of us need a veritable parade of ologists there is quite a lot of scope to choose one. If you did not know what surveys cost then you have some serious homework to do to develop the gut feel you will need. A lot of people, including me, have shared aspects of costs on here, and some have shared full costs for all aspects of their build. Read this from me and scan all the blogs from cover to cover, especially @recoveringacademic and @JSHarris. A good exercise and a serious suggestion to understand the complications you need to help people through may be to build your own house. F

I think if you want it to be really impressive you need one that comes up out of the floor to avoid the labour of going down the staircase. There is perhaps a lot to be said for installing it in a structure dug into a small hill outside. Who was it who said they had lots of spoil to dispose of?

Secondhand? Post a want in Marketplace. Or can you set yourself up to fit in the trial period?