Ferdinand

(Reply removed for reasons of good taste). Shakespeare: If I prick you, do you not plead...

Being curious tor a long time is good exercise. Probably. Truth be told, I've forgotten what it was - but I thought I had over quipped.

I guess that these wells could be quite useful for site water supplies, before there is a mains connection. Ferdinand

I think that we should encourage all Planning etc costs to be included, as otherwise it is possible for heaps of bureaucracy to be piled on top and to pretend that it is not a real cost. If you are dealing with largish sites they include everything even covering Section 106, roads, adoption costs etc because it all has to be paid for out of the sale price of the finished houses. They also talk about e.g. floor space per developable hectare as a measure of density, and iirc some countries give Planning Permission in these terms. On our project at one time the buyers and out reps were arguing about whether local new build prices were 2000 per sqm or 1900 per sqm, and working backwards from there to argue about price. Ferdinand

Do we need the Building Plots Spotted on the Market thread back? Just asking. F

"I really need a minidigger to help ... erm ... save the newts. Darling". Perhaps Mrs RA can supply the genuine version... *innocent face*

Cheers.

S if I drill two 10m apart can I have 40,000 litres? So a 15m x 5m x 1.5m swimming pool = 112.5 cubic metres which can be filled in under a week to save about £160 here or twice that amount in the South West. Plus garden watering. Ferdinand

Fascinating. Our old house had at least 3 wells and a vaulted underground cistern. Are these things regulated, or can I just install a sand point well in the garden if I have the right type of ground? COuld be most useful if one wanted eg an outdoor swimming pond. When I see those great flailing water jets in fields in East Anglia or Lincs, would those be fed by boreholes? Ferdinand

Post the first 10 postcodes and house numbers here, and I can get those available for you. Ferdinand

Or just read the number off the EPC certificate

You can get a internal(?) measured floor area off the EPC certificate, and these are public domain. It is done by a pro with a qualification. epcregister.co uk allows address and postcode search. There is the possibility that they may be out of date due to recent building work since they are valid for iirc 10 years. Ferdinand

As ever, you are where you are, and after exploring your options you pays your money and takes your choice. Best of luck. I am now settling in to tonight's hotel, and the room is actually quite interesting design-wise so I may do a thread. No complimentary brandy, though :-(, but in Hilton Doubletrees you get a welcome cookie. Off soon to visit some more garden squares ... also some are inspirational designs in small spaces. Ferdinand

Tokyo time. Innit . Actually I had a cocktail (Susan's Sour something, with heaven knows what and 2 strawberries), a glass of wine and a 12 year old whisky. And a good snooze. OK, earwig-o, earwig-o, earwig-o. People have talked about using EPS a little thinner and having a little less protection, or using PIR (which costs very nearly the same "per u-value" as EPS. I would probably go PIR myself. However, another option for your extra, which would avoid days of inside digging, is what we call "skirt" ventilation, where you insulate the outside of your foundations rather than the floor. I'll give a fairly detailed explanation in case you are not familiar. It would be easy if you are doing outside digging round the house, or would help with any damp you have rising in your walls, if you have that. Skirt insulation is used as an extra when doing External Wall Insulation, when contractors tend to stop 150mm off the ground (leaving a huge cold bridge all the way round the house at the wall bottom), or when underfloor insulation cannot be retrofitted due to the floor being concrete or similar. The technique is: 1 - Dig a trench round the house next to your wall, probably one section at a time, but ideally all the way to the base of your foundations. 2 - Line the wall side of the trench with EPS (say 100mm-200mm depending) to its full depth. 3 - Line the trench with fabric to stop soil getting in and clogging the drain. 4 - Put a French drain (perforated pipe - perforations are in the bottom half of the pipe are it lies in the trench covered in gravel leading to a soakaway). 5 - Fill with LECA (Lightweight Expanded Clay Aggregate iirc - somewhat insulative itself) or Gravel, fold the weed fabric over the top and finish the surface as you choose. If you have 200mm of EPS in the floor I think gravel may be OK, but make sure it is bigger gravel than the holes in your pipe. EPS is the one to use for this as the performance of PIR deteriorates more if your drain gets clogged and it gets wet. Ideally you need a low water table, or your soakaway may not work, but if you have a high one some others may have relevant experience. I use a 2ft wide trench, 5m lengths of soil pipe that I drill holes in, the best weed fabric I can find with generous overlapping on top just below the surface, level with a final couple of inches of gravel, and simply loose lay Pressed Council Slabs over the top to give a circum-house-path that can be easily removed should I ever need to maintain anything. In future when I build it will be tempting to put services in there in the gravel, but I have not considered that in detail yet. Skirt insulation works by closing the peripheral cold bridge to the outside surface soil which is at outside temperature, and creating a far longer heatflow path. The heat escape route is closed off because the ground, once you get down a couple of feet, is warm all year round at perhaps 5-10 degrees centigrade. The piece of ground under your house would gradually heat up over time, and the benefits increase. If you only do part of your periphery there will still be a benefit. I tend to add it in tactically whenever I dig near a house wall. There is much discussion of this on the Green Building Forum, and a number of years' experience, and people like Steamy Tea can correct me if I have anything wrong. Best of luck. Ferdinand

There have been a couple of questions about insurance .. One about working as a handyman, the other about insuring the contents of containers. I am wondering whether there are ways around this using other policies or memberships. e.g. is there a professional membership of say a Trade Union or Professional Body which covers doing small jobs, or routes to get storage containers covered. One possibility for the latter is household insurance covering sheds if you are building in your own garden. Any other suggestions? Ferdinand

I did. Burrrrrrrpppp !!!! Bit footsore after about 7 gardens, mind. I have had some further possibly useful, rather than flippant, thoughts during the day, which I will add later on this evening. Ferdinand

it is always a good decision to have good brandy around. But perhaps not before mini digging. I think I agree this might not be a time to try something new. Best of luck. Ferdinand

I am supposed to be on holiday, but I have just been settling in to the corner suite to which I have been upgraded (!) drinking my complimentary brandy (!!) in the Earls Court Hilton, which is a bit 1980s in brown style but comfy. If you decide you need to dig some out, remember that you can get micro diggers that will go through a doorway that would speed you up. 88sqm sounds like quite an area. Ferdinand

Can't you use the numbers from the Party Wall Act to give you an estimate? Presumably if you are outside those you are safe.

Rather than pursue this thread, I have brought over a long "lessons of experience" posting that was well-liked from E-Build, and given it an appropriate title. Ferdinand

This post has reposted from an Ebuild thread called "Planner's Commission". It is reflections on the use of Expert Advisers, which ones may be needed, and how to get the right people, and how to reward / incentivise them, based on the experience of taking a larger project (site for several dozen houses) through planning, and other aspects of the Planning Process. We used a full gamut of advisers, through an excellent Planning Consultant. It is based on experience of taking a larger site through Planning. I hope there are useful insights for smaller projects, too. My aim is to help others avoid elephant traps which are not obvious at first site. The context is a question from poster Grifter74 about a Planning Consultant asking for a substantial percentage bonus in return for them "covering costs": These are my reflections on the real costs likely to be involved in a larger Planning Application, and some of the risk/reward balances and elephant traps with which you will need to deal. In a largish project, there are a lot more people who get a pound of your flesh than the Planning Consultant. On a 10 acre site the fee for submitting an Outline PP application to the Council will be around £18000 in 2015 - that is merely to cover the Council's cost to process it. If you are going for Full Detailed PP that fee will be more like £40k-£50k. Your whole Planning Application and Appeal budget will need to be more like £600-1000 per potential plot for Outline. Perhaps that figure if you are doing Detailed. That is your stake in a game of Planning Poker, and you need to be able to afford to lose all of it without crippling damage to your finances or family. A large developer can lay that risk off across 8 or 10 applications per year. Are you in a position to take it on personally for a single site?See http://www.planningp...neFeeCalculator .On top of that you have everything from Bat Reports to Tree Reports to Traffic Surveys to (potentially) Ground Sampling to Flood Simulation to Entrance Design to blah de blah de waffle de gubbins. We had about a dozen consultants and their reports. Don't forget the Woodlarks and the Nightjars, and if somebody found a bronze age arrowhead 3 miles away in 1864 an archaeologist may be involved too.Our Planning System can be well described as "Teutonic". It also changes like a Kaleidoscope month to month, and only Pros can keep up. An important role is for the Planning Consultant to notice that any one of the 436 people involved in processing your plans in the 40 different organisations consulted has c*cked up a detail and said no because they didn't read one of the 437 documents properly wrt to current Guidance, and to get things back on track - ie attention to detail followed by polite, knowledgeable bullying. That is one reason why success fees can be a helpful incentive.Your key role wrt everyone is to make sure that your consultants are going in the right direction and making sure that your detailed knowledge of your site and its history (which your team won't have) is folded into the process effectively which may involve insisting that certain things are checked because of your gut feel. I have had a small number of occasions when stuff I know from decades ago has turned out to be significant, which might eg be proving previous land use from family documents, or knowing where a fence was in 1986 and the current address of the previous neighbour who can make a sworn statement about it.I would suggest that going for Outline on eg a 10Ha site you need to budget £100k plus a £25k contingency for Planning Application plus a possible Appeal as a minimum.If you are going for Detailed that budget needs to be at least doubled.You may not need it all (but you will need half of it), but it needs to be there at short notice when it is needed. Since you may lose you need to be willing and able to afford losing it all. Giving your Planner a share may help manage your downside risk. Only you can judge the balance.You don't say whether your site is controversial, or where it is. If PP is likely and the area is popular with developers (read roughly: South West of a Line from the Wash to Chester in 2015) or is metropolitan or posh, then you may get a developer to take it on from scratch, but they are all hugely risk averse. They *will* want 25% or more of the uplift and a 5 or 7 year option. That may be a good deal depending on umpteen factors.What is worth more to you - 100% of a field with cows or 50% of a £10m housing site?Your Planning Consultant is perhaps trying it on if it is a likely site eg if it is in the Local Plan. If it is a difficult site it is very high but if it is your only option then that may be acceptable.You need to know *precisely* what "covering costs" means. It does *not* mean Section 106, which will simply be deducted from the sale price by the potential purchaser eventually. It will mean your Planner's Professional Fees (10-20% of total budget); it may or may not mean fees of consultants (50-70% of total budget); it is unlikely to mean the Council Fee (20-30% of total budget).The process will take 2-4 years overall. No developer will do more than talk until the dust has settled after the Election unless your site is gold-plated, but you should take 6 months investigating and ruminating anyway unless there is a specific reason. Depending on the next Govt, you may be able to sell it into some sort of State Housing Programme at a price yet to be determined.Our deal with our Planner is that we have covered fees, including his, but there is a (small) percentage success fee on sale from which the planner's own fee is deducted. That caps our fee exposure.Your suggested share agreement seems to make you potentially liable for paying your Planner before the site is sold.Then you have to sell it :-). Not easy always.What you should do.1 - Above all, stop and think and take your time.2 - I'd say take advice from someone you trust or who is beholden only to you. That is probably the *senior* Property Expert of an experienced local firm of solicitors or someone who routinely advises on similar projects. You will get an initial meeting free, but if you want a report with advice expect to pay £1000 to £2500 (write a one page spec. and get a quote) for an exploratory assessment report which briefly assesses the site, the context, local policy and your options to go forward. It will be a lot of work because the system is complicated. Listen to them about the process. It will be a legal or property professional, or Chartered Surveyor, not an architect.3 - If you get any Planning Consultant make sure they are used to these big projects in your locality. You will be working with them for 3 years. Look back through similar sites. The right Planning Consultant may be your adviser, but you need to get the right one and there are quite a number of .. er .. w*nk*rs out there, often refugees / early retirees from senior positions in Council Planning Departments. Find out how many Appeals they have won on your type of project; if they can remember them all easily it is not enough experience. Be aware of their motivation and manage them accordingly - our Planning Consultant enjoyed winning the battle as much as getting the application. and could have been a good Barrister as an alternative career.4 - A national planning consultancy may be a good idea and will be more likely to be professionally reliable and have subject experts to call on, but you still initially need your independent expert you are paying to advise you.5 - Consider local reactions. You may have demos, petitions, and Facebook groups. You may lose lots of friends and be in the local paper as the local selfish capitalist barsteward concreting over the Green Belt.Given our Planning Politics, this is the highly honourable and ethical activity of helping young people off the homelessness list and onto the Housing Ladder.6 - You also need advice from a suitable accountant. The expert in 2 would advise.There are people out there who invest risk capital in this sort of process, but you will need to find them and they all want a requisite reward for the risk they are taking, and it is not a game of leapfrog.The two balls you need to keep your eye on in evaluating everyone's interests are Risk and Money, and the tradeoffs between the two from each viewpoint. Those two getting out of balance for any party is a red flag.Ferdinand

One for another thread but it would be a devil to make work, since e.g. a Condition of Tree or Bat evaluations or work could add an elapsed 4-6 months just on its own if a PP came through in say April. Would that Council caused delay be added on to the 12 months or what? What happens if Land prices tank by 25-50% overnight as in 2008-9. when the Section 106s were deliberately impossible to untangle? That took several years for the Govt to address effectively. What's to stop foundations being dug, and covered up again? Ferdinand

A few months mulling it when out site was excluded from the Local Plan at a very late stage - options to wait and hope it would change, with the prospect of waiting 15 years until the next cycle or do PP App now. 6 months to Outline Planning App from deciding to do it, including reports (approx 12 :-). 6 months for Council to process it (incl about 3 months of extra requested delays) and refuse. About 2-3 months to create, submit and win Appeal. 2 years and a bit to sell it, including 4-5 month delay because a public body (the County tier of Govt) with neighbouring land refused to engage on an issue which they said they would only consider at Detailed stage. We just had no leverage when they sat on it. Ferdinand

I'm going to have a look at the Tower Bridge Houseboats if it is open - I think that may be where Jo Cox lived. Hopefully there will be a donations in memorium plate if so. A couple of weeks ago I got my Diamond Status with Hilton so I will have a nice room on the Executive Floor, which will work well. One hotel I'm trying is the Docklands Hilton where you go across the river on a private ferry. Ferdinand

After 4 years of Planning and Marketing processes I finally sold my former family smallholding for housing to a developer this morning, with exchange and completion. That means I may be in a position to do a small project or two in the next couple of years. I'll also say a bit more about lessons and prices, and the psychological mincing machines involved in this process. Phew. But first thing tomorrow I'm off to London for Open Garden Squares weekend. Ferdinand