Kelvin

Good advice on the timing. It took 7 months from beginning to end to get my supply connected including the meter installation. The sooner you get on with some of the stuff the better.

Running extension cables across the ground or even in a trench on a building site isn’t a great idea. What a lot of us have done is rather than creating a temporary electricity supply on the plot then moving it to the house (so increasing the cost) we just build a permanent kiosk/meter box on the perimeter out of the way and leave the meter and fuse there then run SWA to the house. It’s what I’ve done and it’s worked out a very cost effective solution for us. My kiosk has the meter, fuse, a small CU, and four 3 pin plug sockets.

Local word of mouth. Also have a look at builds going on around you and see who the builders are.

It’s really clear in the documentation you get what you need to do if you are going to make any changes. We made some non-material variations to ours after gaining planning approval, spoke to the planning officer who said they were fine, submitted the changes and paid the £200 fee. It seems to me they reckoned they could get away with building what they originally wanted and once built the council would accept a retrospective planning amendment. It’s right and proper this was refused. I’m surprised such a large monstrosity ever got approval in the first place.

I’ve been speaking with North East Contracts in Arbroath to fit our Catnic metal roof.

Lovely house and view of the Angus hills. I may well have driven down your road when the house was under construction when I bought a second hand chainsaw. Who fitted your standing seam roof? There’s definitely a balance between a house looking cluttered and looking burgled where they stole everything. 😂 We have friends who live in a similarly empty house. They’ve lived in 20 odd houses and built 4 of them. They says it makes moving easier when you don’t own any stuff. They do have a single picture on a wall of their current place so they may be putting roots down.

Based on a (expletive deleted) up on our planning and warrant application by our architect that I literally just found out about 10 mins ago I can tell you building control don’t look at what planning has approved…grrrr

Boarding it out with insulated plasterboard was something I am intending doing afterwards for a few reasons. It’s not exactly easy to do but it is doable. The size of the slab and how to detail for rain runoff is well in hand and very clear in all their drawings. The slab should match the dimensions of the kit so that the cladding overhangs the edge of the slab to let rain runoff. It’s more the build up and perimeter I’m trying to understand.

I'll soon be starting our garage build ahead of the house construction. I considered all the various options to build it before deciding on a insulated steel building. It's 40mm PIR in roof and walls with an insulated sectional door. I have an uninsulated foundation design but wondered if it's worth insulating under the slab and how best to do it especially at the perimeter. While it's a garage it'll never be used to store a car and will be used as a workshop so I want it to be useable all year round.

I would argue always add a sub on any system. I was anti subs in a Hi-Fi setup especially as my speakers have a well controlled bass response. However I took a punt on an SVS-SB3000 during lockdown and was blown away by the difference it made. I happened to have a pair of Fyne Audio F702 and a pair of PMC twenty5 26i on loan from my local Hi-Fi place so was able to compare my setup directly against some current well reviewed speakers. My setup plus the sub blew the other two out the water so it was a much cheaper way to transform the sound of my Hi-Fi.

Trying to be reasonable and the bigger person (not necessarily friendly) is rarely ever a mistake. Buy the house next time it comes up for sale. Problem solved. We have one near neighbour. She died a few months ago and the house is sitting empty. We are considering approaching the family later this year with an offer to buy it. It’s in a right state internally but has an acre of land and a bit of potential.

Closing this off. Try as I might I couldn’t get anyone to quote on building a suitable door. Tried four different places. In the end I’ve ditched the idea and will have a dog washing bath thing in the garage beside all the plant for the borehole. In addition we’ll have an outside washing area for quick dog feet washing off.

Well it sounds like a nightmare neighbour scenario. No way would I want to build a house there knowing all that unless it was far enough away from their boundary that I could put up my own boundary screening and never know they were there.

Unfortunately you’ve hit the very first hurdle most aspiring self-builders hit and never get over and that’s the availability and affordability of suitable plots. The reason you can buy a £300k house of a size you’d like to build is the big developers get land far cheaper than you could buy it, break it up into tiny plots and then have the economy of scale to build as cheaply as possible. Some builders on big estates will offer up a few plots to the self-builder so worth looking around to see what’s going on near you. There’s a lot of information out there on finding plots of land but you need to make this as much of a project as building a house is. Unfortunately £300k isn’t likely to be enough to buy a plot and build a house with all the associated fees etc. Land is much cheaper in Scotland which is the only reason we can afford to do it. We looked at several plots in Cambridgeshire, where we used to live, and even made a few offers on plots both of which went for £100k over the £250k guide price and this was in 2012.

Remove the roots on your land. Put in a root barrier. Build your wall. Make the Mexicans pay for it.

Going legal is a big a fight. It’s your choice. You’re not losing 2 feet of land. You’re building a wall that protects the rest of your land and your build that you have complete control over.

That wall could stay like that for a long time certainly the three years you plan to build your house. Anyway looks like you want to get into a big fight about this so good luck. Don’t let it consume you though.

That’s a good price. Who is it with?

Listen to this. Sage advice.

To be honest that doesn’t look too bad. The reality you face is that they aren’t going to do anything about this. You could go legal but no one ever seems to win in neighbour disputes. It’ll be protracted and it’ll cost you one way or another. You could go all technical on them as suggested above but they’ll ignore that. Assuming it is them that have committed the criminal damage on your property you know the kind of people you are dealing with. It’s like Newton’s 3rd law the more you push back the more they’ll react against it. Therefore what to do? What’s the most important thing in all of this? Presumably building the house so that’s the focus of all your energy. As suggested you could build something along the retaining wall to contain it without touching the wall.

ergo it must be enabled on the SIM.

Yep. If our burn was bigger we could have hydro power 😂

Shared services work if everyone plays ball. It can become insufferable when people don’t. I lived in a group of barns that had some shared services that we ran as a collective through a mgt company. Never again. This time around we are nearly off-grid.

Happy to. I’ll post elsewhere though rather than here and let you know.