Ferdinand

I am not convinced it needs a lock unless you are in a city and the thing can be reached from the roadside. Once the parcel is inside it is invisible, so the thief has to be present on delivery or following the van. Unless there is something in there every day.

Sign for your bathroom door at the end:

When you are finished you will lie back and think of Italy, and go "Bugger ! I forgot the frescoes !"

Which requires an extra drill swap, and goes some way to explain why @Onoff is using his bathroom build as an opportunity to compete with Michaelangelo's Sistine Chapel Ceiling for DIY Project Duration .

I think we need about more information about how the water is getting in. How high is your water table? Other options might include tanking the inside of the chamber, or covering the whole thing with a gazebo or garden locker type structure, or even a cover plus a circular French drain to prevent the water reaching the leaky seal. Suspect that Plan A should be the seal around the drain as that sounds easiest. Ferdinand

I have electric ufh in the conservatory. That is on 100mm celotex in a screed then porcelain tiles. Works fine on the few occasions it has been on. Ferdinand

In your circs I think you are correct. My only ideas in that case would be: 1 - Minimise your holes. 2 - Install header and footer battens screwed firmly into the joists in the ceiling and floor not the wall, then fix verticals using angled screws at top and bottom through verticals into the header and footer batten. You could use narrow right angle brackets but that would perhaps be excessive. You could play games such as putting a gloop of silicon into the drilled hole before inserting the concrete screw but that would not be so good imo. By the time you have a monocoque via the plasterboard it will be solid. Ferdinand

@Dudda THe membrane surely needs to be on the warm side of your insulation, otherwise you will have a risk of condensation when your humid inside air meets the cold watertight- I assume - barrier. SO fixing screws breaching the membrane should not be an issue ... it goes on afterwards. Unless I have misunderstood something. For fixing studs I use these in the relevant size: http://www.screwfix.com/p/easydrive-countersunk-concrete-screws-7-5-x-50mm-100-pack/1066H?kpid=1066H&cm_mmc=Google-_-Product Listing Ads-_-Sales Tracking-_-sales tracking url&gclid=CPj-wdLJvNECFQeNGwodJusA9 Typically they need 30-40mm in the wall. The method is 1 Use a multi material drill but such as a Bosch Multi construction ones from Screwfix. Very good in the small set but check it is long enough for your screws (as the actress said to the bishop). 2 Pre drill stud if desired. 3 Hold stud against wall, and drill hole in wall through hole in stud using same drill. 4 Switch to impact driver and screw Concrete Screw into wall. Ferdinand

PS The google earth gradient feature is a fantastic tip.

If you have school children to hand the fun and educational way is to peg it out on the ground and estimate it by using known size cardboard boxes e.g. MOrrissons banana boxes, compare with a calculation in class. You can just have a small number and lay them next to each other in sequence. For the other. I reckon a number to 2-3% i.e. less than one lorryload is adequate, but a better estimate should be straightforward. Obv. the area is easy ... just draw a diagonal and use Pythagoras twice for the length or measure off on your software, then the formula for the area of a scalene triangle on each of the two parts. I would deal with the dual aspect slope by approximating the sw ne 18cm fall to zero as the other way is 10x larger, and averaging the se nw slope at height 26.9 which is exactly half. I would allow a bit extra by making that 26.9 into perhaps 26.8 or rounding up by x lorryloads (= say 10cm / approx depth * no of lorryloads estimated) to make sure I was slightly over in my budget calcs. Then I would want somewhere to use any excess close by and an option to vary my order by plus or minus 5%. I would also do a couple of sanity checks on the ground if I felt it necessary. If you have a pro ground survey, I would expect your surveyor can draw a box and press a button on his software. Or you can set up some posts and a tarpaulin and measure the amount of water it take to fill to the new level . Ferdinand

@Bitpipe One of my Ts is going into rental caravans as a semi-retirement job, and picked up her first caravan when she was down on a site chatting with a friend already doing it and a 7x couple were selling their holiday van. The site owners really make some of their money at entry and exit from the scene. @Appleco But at present many are mothballed for the winter :-), so an ad somewhere may be the best way to find someone planning to sell. Ferdinand

This is the time of year when people on holiday caravan sites sell off their caravans when they upgrade or when the site operator declare their holiday rental static vans to be too old. So talk to the people on your nearest holiday rental static van sites. Also bear in mind that the operators pay very poor prices when they tenants sell to them, so talk direct if you can. Look for people advertising new static vans for next year and ask them what about the old one or put an ad in the local shop. Ferdinand

Quite tempted to use the worktop as a place to store a couple of my spare porcelain floor tiles, as it will match and keep the worktop safe. Ferdinand

Wickes are offering discount cards at the counter which offer 15% off all purchases over £10 in Jan, Feb and Mar. It does not stack with trade discount, but it should stack with eg 5 for 4s and so on. My purchase today: £9.98. Gah ! (Note: just my local branch during refurbishmemt See below.). F

Nothing specific in the article.

I think English is the bond you want on a sharp country bend. Or well rooted idiot bollards.

I would say that OnOff's bathroom is Procrustean not Procrastian... F

I had a loft done on a scheme 2 weeks ago and they were excellent. They took just an hour to add 250mm to the 60mm already there. Turned out that the surveyor was a blues dancing acquaintance. Ferdinand

Chatting to a couple of Timber Frame manufacturers to try and get some constructive estimates together. Sadly Space4 do not supply outside Persimmon any more. But, working to Building Regs only spec, a full Timber Frame kit for a detached house in the 90-135 sqm range can be 220-250 £/sqm. That includes everything except Tiles, Cladding, Plumbing, Electrics, Gas and Finishes such as paint, and requires a site, slab, services and to build it. (will update this post with further estimates for the other items) Ferdinand

My understanding is that on medium size upwards sites of say 100+ houses in a normal uncomplicated setting, the cost structure for a big developer for an average 200k house might be roughly: Site Purchase, groundworks, infrastructure: 50k Building it: 50k Planning Gain taxes and cost of affordable provision: 50k Planning, Paperwork, Promotion: 25k Profit: 25k. Sanity checks welcome.

Those are *excellent* questions @gravelld. That may skewer my comment because they traditionally view EWI as a solution for "hard to insulate" which normally means solid walls. I am not sure what they do with non-fillable cavaties eg 45mm cavities from something built in say 1925. Over the years I have had several quotes and surveys, and those have been on solid walled houses with one on a narrow cavity house which was declared ubsuitable for cavity-wall insulation. I think those should be OK, although the default will be building regs minimum. As it is basically a cash grant up to X amount, if you choose to have a gold-plated solution at your own extra expense that is no skin off their nose unless your entire scheme falls within the limit, which probably means mid-terraces only, when it would be more complex. It will all be in the initial conversation. The quote I mentioned above was in December 2016, and still included a very small amount (5% ish) of funding. Their spec was U value of 0.29, but they were happy to quote for 150mm rather than 90mm EPS, and the minimal funding was still in the quote. I had a long chat with the head of BS (=Building Standards) at my local council, and his key point was to check previous jobs and to supervise and enforce detail to the nth degree. Ferdinand

Back in December I was nurdling a post looking at the issue of the extra cost/benefit by building thinner walls. The point is that LAs specify maximum external directions, but Estate Agents value by internal floor area. So eg a 10m x 6m internal size detached house which used 150mm celotex rather than 300mm PUR in the walls potentially gains 10 x 6 x 2 (sides of house) x 2 (floors) x 0.15 sqm of internal area which is 18sqm or 15%, or a master bedroom suite , representing perhaps £36k of extra market value at £2000 per sqm. Lots of angles on the calculation, and ways to interpret it, but is it something we think about? Ferdinand

IMO yes, but you need to think first about the whole thing and decide your spec, plan and budget first - which should be reasonably consistent. You can either do a big bang, or in bits as appropriate. You really want to make sure you do our glazing first or mount it in the EWI, and need to give thoughts about dealing with the cold bridge you may be creating in the entire thickness of all your walls at the top if you don't EWI the gable, and your gable becomes a radiator. Room in roof insulation is the best solution there or your free loft insulation plus stick slabs of PUR to the gable inside your loft to lower the EWI temp gradient in the wall. If you do go IWI remember the slice of wall between your Ground and First floors, and window reveals. One thing about EWI is that the govt is planning something soon, but are still at the waffle and standards stage.So look into that. Last time grants were two thirds of the first 6k but they needed to be able to apply EWI to most of the house. Get yourself on a waiting list at some of your local suppliers to be contacted. Or do some modest IWI and make sure that the assessor misses it if you EWI later. See https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/578749/Each_Home_Counts__December_2016_.pdf Also an issue for you will be sealing the cavity or your EWI will be useless if it is open to some degree to the outside - in which can you may as well put the EWI on the garden wall :-) . Ferdinand

I have just done a reasonably extensive IWI refit which might be a useful point of comparison. In this case I looked at EWI but the quotes came in at 14k for the whole thing (small but long 3 bed semi), which was EWI on the gable and the back plus IWI for the front room and bedroom because ornamentation prevented EWI. For the rented property that would swallow 6 or 7 years of profit by the time other necessary works had been done, so we went IWI instead, which is summarised below. There is a long thread about options and debate called The Landlord's Energy Dilemma over at GBF: http://www.greenbuildingforum.co.uk/newforum/comments.php?DiscussionID=14688&page=1 If ECO funding was still in place for EWI I might have done it, as it would have been under 10k. The IWI scheme with other bits worked out at about 3k, and the tenant is buzzing about it having had a couple of weeks of Cold House first. The Deilemma of the title is that I have done the investment but the Tenant gets the saving, which is less problematic that the Green Deal where the T pays for my investment but still not ideal. Ferdinand

I suppose you *could* post an information page somewhere (blog?) and run some google ads. That has worked for me on occasion just by optimising the post to hit the top 3 Google results, but you nee a decent platform to start with.