Ferdinand

@Lesgrandepotato Hey! Love it when people aim to sweat the detailed costs and spend it on getting a better house, affording a house in the first place, an extra bathroom, dinner or lollipops. If you mean this stuff ie Leyland Trade Brilliant White Matt paint in 10l tubs, then we can probably help you save some more next time. If I have the wrong one the ideas may help anyway. This weekend (I would wait until Monday for reasons below) I would be paying £12 a tub for that at Wickes, which is my closest DIY shed. Others may be able to do better. These are some steps you can do in the order they would apply at Wickes. You may not have all of these, but you could do some of them, and perhaps some different things if you look around. 1 - Basic price at Wickes £19.99 per 10l tub. 2 - Bulk buy offer: £15.99 each if you buy 3. (Same link). That is quite a mean offer, since they often do 4 for 3 or 3 for 2, which would make it 14.99 or £13.33 per 10l tub. 3 - Trade discount. Minus 10% for a Trade Account. Fairly easy to get with a couple of bits of paperwork. Should be doable for many self-builders if you meet the requirements. Very reliable minus 10% at Wickes off everything. £15.99 per 10l tub becomes £14.39. 4 - Extra 5% Trade discount on Mondays at present in July and August, due to a relaunch. ie Wait until Monday £14.39 per tub becomes £13.59 per tub. 5 - Pay with reloadable Wickes cash card for a further 10% off. £13.59 per tub becomes £12.24 per tub. These cashcards are an element of many Employee Benefit programmes, and are available for scores of big stores. If not an employee working for someone else you can get one my joining a Westfield Health Cash Plan (only route I know for self-employed), which is a long established - pre-NHS - institution which lets you claim back money you spend on glasses, dentists etc and will usually pay for itself. 6 - Top up the cash card from a Reward Debit Card before you leave home. This will bring it down to about £12.10. I would want to see if I could beat that by leaning on my Johnstone's Decorating Centre. Everything is dead simple once set up. Feel free to ask questions over on the sticky Money Saving thread. Ferdinand

I just received 'Livyn' Vinyl Tile samples from Quickstep Uniclic. They seem *really* tough. 4.5mm vinyl with uniclic joints. Look to be a good option if you need a thin but hardwearing floor. Prices are just a bit large, mind - from about £30+ per sqm. Left to right: Chestnut, Slate, Travertine. The laminate uniclic can be relaid a couple of times without undue damage. This should be reusable more times. Worth a look, Ferdinand

Or plastic decking. I cannot see how something with up to a metre of fill can't move, short of leaving it as a rubble pile for a year or two to settle. Presumably the management will not spprove of that. I think your slab may have to be self-supporting and reinforced. F

Do you decent ground conditions there now or is it already full of rubble? If so why not cast some concrete piers in situ first using shuttering or moulds. Or drill wide - say 300mm - 'post holes' using a hired auger, then put an 8" pipe down the middle but not the bottom to the height of your patio support. Fill the pipe with a wettish mix which will come up the side to give a wide base, and you have a post from which you can cut off the pipe if you wish. Or hire a couple of people to do it. Then fill around your structure with your rubble or whatever, and build the patio on the piers. You can buy such moulds off the shelf if you look. Or design your patio to be relayable easily. Ferdinand

Interesting that the Beeb says "senior executives". Does that mean the majority of tenants and leaseholders on the board of the KCTMO will not be charged? Ferdinand

If it has no direct effect on them in Council Policy or Planning terms, then an Appeal against that aspect of the PP should succeed. What is your detailing around the solar panels? Are you better to make essentially that whole roof slope solar? Are panels less expensive than your roofing choice yet? Ferdinand

They would have trouble conditioning a complete date, as planning conditions are required to be enforcible to be lawful, and it s difficult to see how eg bankrupt could be forced to finish a project.

30-40% off Sandtex Masonry Paint Both Wickes and B&Q have reductions on this. Wickes: Sandtex Textured masonry paint in various colours £30.99 for 1 x 5l tub. 2 for £40 minus the usual 10-25% reductions if you get them. http://www.wickes.co.uk/Products/Decorating+Interiors/Paint/Exterior-Paint/c/1001119 B&Q: Similar discounts on Sandtex Masonry paint, but here on the smooth version. 2x5l for £40. Usual reductions for trade etc are less reliable, but oldster Wednesdays should apply. http://www.diy.com/departments/painting-and-decorating/paint-stains-varnishes-and-wood-treatments/exterior-woodcare-paint-stains-varnishes-and-treatments/masonry-paint/sandtex/_/N-nzdZ1z13hjy They are also doing similar reductions on Dulux weathershiled if that floats your boat. 10l is a *lot* of masonry paint unless you have a big job to do. Ferdinand

Thanks for the replies on this.

I think this shows every sign of being (another) attention seeking kneejerk - what is known as virtue signalling. Mrs May's government has lost the traditional Tory virtue of self-restraint and a cautious pace of change. She has caught something from Mr Brown. Not impressed. F

Surely that is also why Osbo killed the CO2 tax bands last year - haif of the cars were exempt from road tax.

Or you could learn a new skill and press-gang @Mrs RA: or use your other bricky. F

Is not this for one for: 1 - Get long straight sufficiently strong batten. 2 - Attach spirit level to it. 3 - Attach a couple of cheap cupboard door u-handles. My favourite straight edge is the steel I-column in Wickes in the wood-aisle, that I use for detecting bananas amongst their CLS. My brickies just used a brickiees' line, wrapped aroound a brick at each end, and a long spirit level to check it for each course. Added: Thinking about the geometry they may well have the line wrapped around 75mm bricks and emerging from the top for a wall made with 65mm bricks, which would give a 10mm mortar joint. Ferdinand

Looks good. My plans have changed since the Garden Office ... I will now be doing a roughly 3m x 4m leanto/Covered Way, since that is closer to what is wanted. I make my budget about £2k now for a non-insulated structure with a flag floor, cladding, and an opal polycarbonate roof, which is being built next week and includes the mother-of-all-fences to enclose the small yard. Ferdinand

I put self-levelling down in a concrete floored former attached former coalhouse at the back of a terrace. It was concrete(?) floored and no dpc, and the stuff just came up again in chunks. Was an attempt at a quick solution which failed. Given there was no prospect of it drying out, in the end I just put a painted on dpc down, and dropped a sheet of ply on top loose as a slight protection - knowing that it will have to be replaced before long. But it was basically a bike and tool store. Ferdinand

Yes. One of the issues is finding wood burners (if you are going that route) that are small enough. People have to look at burners designed for caravans or small boats.

You also need to be able to cool it; when if it is designed to keep heat in, it can be tough to get out. This is a particular problem in autumn and spring with low sun.. That is things like solar shading via various techniques, some abilty to expell hot air, perhaps the ability to create a secure stack effect with windows (ie one bring in shaded air downstairs and one to take it out of the rofo), something to move heat around the slab is done by some members. Ferdinand

One good idea is to always think of the cost of running the building for 10 or 20 or 30 years as part of your budget and include it in your spreadsheet models. Even people in normal (ie subnormal) houses can do it using the crude numbers from the EPC - though here we are very rude about EPCs. You may not be there for that long, but it will help you to get the principles right and avoid eg complex things that will need mending. There can be things for using things that are complicated or really cheap and requiring replacement, but each case needs to be justified. KISS is right 99% of the time. Ferdinand

May you have an issue with Fire Engines? It looks more than 45m from the road and I am nto sure than drive is over 2.75m wide or that there is space for an appliance to turn around inside.

Here are the large and small scale plans that Badger sent me. Have sightly anonymised, but @Badger posted the full location information previously so not much point. F

Welcome. It would be useful if you could post an introduction in the Introduce Yourself forum here: http://forum.buildhub.org.uk/ipb/forum/1-buildhub-guide-information-about-the-site-introduce-yourself/ Does your floor have a damp-proof course?

If it came to it, you could even purchase land from your parents to park on, have a foot pathway through to your plot, and be using *their* entrance. So there are ways, but it is all contextual.

Also STC and optic fibres, and remarkable science in the Plessey company eg Gallium Arsenide chips - but these were perhaps industrial establishment rather than government? I think a criteria should be that Government support should remove constraints from potential achievers, and insist on success, rather than impose direction. That is a similar model to high performing athletes getting 70-100% of average salary but for 2-3 years at a time.

@Badger We need that location plan , otherwise you are about to get 137 ideas about your bungalow, of which at least 3 will be completely relevant . F

I think we have successful models. Can anyone comment on the success of spin-off companies from our Universities as a possible successful precedent for winners picked by the public sector? One key seems to be to keep politicians and their dirigisme *out* of the programme; another is that the people involved have a personal stake in the success or failure. Imperial College, for example, has a significant portfolio of such companies spun off from research with University seed-funding and/or support). See Imperial Innovations (a support programme) and these lists of eg Engineering and BioTech spin-offs. (This is a different thing to Graduates eg MBAs starting up companies, and again a different thing to City types who know their sector starting up companies - one example of this last is Big Yellow Storage started up by four City Types in their 30s and 40s in the 1990s, with whom I had a job interview in 2001 with one of the founders.) What we don't have is a culture of routine growth from large end of small/medium (say 20-40m) -> either Mittelstand (ie dominant sector specialist) or medium/large (say 250-500 million turnover). And unfortunately we have a political culture of hatred of successful people (though a lot of that is politicians who can't find any other way to promote their bankrupt ideas), while tolerating people leveraging their establishment positions for a few million of personal wealth. Ferdinand