Kelvin

It needs to be dry which can take a while. I left mine two weeks before applying a mist coat which is just watered down emulsion although I actually used Valspar Express Coat rather than watered down emulsion. You can buy new plaster sealer but it’s quite dear so it depends on what area you are covering. Leave it for 24 hours after the mist coat before applying the next coat. There was one wall I was impatient to get on with and it’s been a pain in the arse so do it right and you’ll be fine. I’m still trying to fix that one wall!

The danger is it just gets passed anyway and you get nothing out of it. The development is going to happen one way or another. While Ian is right about not being rushed don’t slow walk it either. The sooner they start the sooner it will be finished. After all you’ll be living next to a building site for a long time.

A few hundred pounds at most and a solicitor will do it for you. It would then be a notarised legal document signed by you and the developer. One important thing is timescales when you want it done by. I’d have a date in the document. Otherwise they might leave it until the very end of the development. Also a legal document shows intent rather than something you’ve knocked together yourself.

Sadly too often the case. Our sliding door was off square by 20mm and 15mm out of plumb. I didn’t need to put a level on it to see it. I pointed it out to them as they moved onto the next window and got a load of waffle about it was just in and they were going to come back and true it up at the end. Who does that. After that I followed them round every window and checked it. This obviously pissed them off but I was passed caring about their ‘professional pride’ at this point. “It’s been years since I’ve had my work checked” etc. My advice to them of never being too proud to have your work checked fell on deaf ears.

There’s no advantage to you in fitting a GSHP. Loads of installers have pulled out of the market and are just installing ASHP now. They may make more sense in larger installations or community heating. For near passive house specs it’s a lot of cost for no benefit and more likely more downsides. We looked at it ourselves as we happened to have a spare borehole that we never paid for so I thought it might have been a way to use it. But it was still expensive, added a degree of extra complexity, was possibly too close to our water supply borehole, and we had limited space inside for the plant needed. Arguably even an ASHP was overkill for us. I heated the place for months with two small radiators. Took a while to get it up to temperature but once it was there it was fine.

It’s crap yes but also normal for fitters to even discard the fitting kits and do what they always do. We used straps screwed to the windows as this is what our window supplier specified. It’ll probably be fine just check the warranty isn’t impacted.

It also said the bar to allow them was high. Whatever that means.

Listen to Gus. When we were buying our rural plot there were no services on-site or nearby other than electricity. The vendor had vague notes in the sales particulars about water could be provided via a borehole on the plot or ‘nearby’ same with sewerage (treatment plant and soakaway) I made it a condition of the sale that they had to find a plentiful supply of potable water ‘on the plot’ and carry out a land survey to ensure the ground was suitable for a soakaway located within the regulations although, in the end, I carried out the land survey. The plot was worthless without these services easily (cost effectively) being available.

😂 I am planning two bridges!

Won’t affect material costs as much as you’d think unless suppliers have over stocked. A lot of stuff is imported. It will reduce margins however and labour rates. We’ve built in the inflationary year but are still well under £2500/m2

Good luck. Post pics of finished result.

You might know this already. Strip all the top soil from both the area you are digging out and building up first and put to one side. Create your bank/graded slope and then add the topsoil back.

You can grade the land gently back and create a slope. We were going to do this instead of putting a retaining wall up our drive but I wasn’t happy with that long term. Was an expensive decision.

Free draining is just that not getting very wet with all the rain i.e. the water is draining away freely. Given the slope it’s likely draining away following the slope. You might find a neighbour at the bottom with a wet garden. When building retaining walls they retain the ground but water can build up behind them. Generally you add a drain behind the wall (a pipe with holes in it) and weep holes in the wall. If you add drainage it needs to drain to somewhere which is often a soakaway (a big hole filled with gravel/stone then covered back over with earth) Google retaining walls it will be clearer. If it’s all quite free draining then weep holes in the wall might be enough. It also depends on how you propose to build the wall.

How wet does it get and is it free draining? When you add drainage you need to drain it to somewhere.

What you’re suggesting will be fine. Draw out the space on the ground where you think the various items might go. It’ll give you a really good idea for the size you need. When my kids were little I created a garden area for them. It was a small vegetable plot. My daughter especially enjoyed it. Son preferred the creepy crawlies. Now they are adults neither of them have the gardening bug though but was fun at the time 😂

Everything is achievable. Why is it you want to change it? Presumably to make it more useable? If so do you need to level all of it? You could break it up into sections to add some interest. When it stops pissing down I’ll show you what digging out 1.17m looks like on our driveway.

Rather than level slopes it generally better to try and use them to your advantage. I’d therefore look to create some terracing and/or some banked areas with the lawn area in the middle. 1.17m difference is a lot to try and level even if you split the difference and cut and fill. To give you some idea hammer in some sticks to where you think the final level would be and put some string between them. It’ll highlight how much earth you need to move.

Great idea. Lots of old stone buildings do that. There are lots of little details I love about our house this view of the wall inside to outside is one of them.

Thick walls look nicer too in my opinion. Our walls are 490mm thick from outside face of the cladding to inside face of the painted wall. It’s given us deep reveals internally which is partly why we chose this build method. Everything has a more substantial solid feel about it.

Building materials are still dear. They have either stopped going up or are going up more slowly. You are more able to play suppliers off each other though as demand appears to have reduced a bit.

We had holding tank at the previous house shared between 8 houses. This was due to the distance to the main sewer. It was oversized which caused us no end of grief as the tank only pumped when it was full enough. The problem arose that the top would form a crust and the pump then displayed an error and stopped pumping. We solved it by simply lowering the level that the tank would be pumped at meaning it would pump more frequently. It was quite dear as was the pump control system. The other issue we ran into was lenders trying to treat it as a septic tank. This caused significant delays for some of the owners when they sold their houses. I realise your situation is different but worth being aware of some of the issues that can arise.

This is the upstairs one so yet to bulkhead around it. Even just as it is like this it’s not going anywhere. You can also use self-tapping screws through the plasterboard and into the metal frame. Check your instructions as it might already suggest that.

Ours (Geberit) came with adjustable top brackets that secured the top of the frame to the back of the wall. I added extra bracing and strapped that to the wall half way down the frame then some CT1 for the face of the plasterboard. I don’t think there’s any danger of these frames not being secure my concern is more about the tiniest movement popping the tiles off.

I love people that have the balls to try such different build methods and ideas. Our is ‘advanced’ compared to any other big builder new house built but it’s still a very traditional rectangular build using traditional materials although the insurance industry has a different perspective. Had money been no object I might have been braver I guess and gone the whole bespoke route building into the slope and only having a small footprint of the upstairs showing hidden with a sedum roof. We very briefly considered this. My other half’s dad was an architect (sadly departed so didn’t get to see our finished house) and he encouraged us to think about it. He drew a few ideas for us. However trying to get a handle on the cost proved difficult. A tiny part of me regrets not exploring the ideas further and in less inflationary times we might have done it. I wonder how easy that house is to insure and get a mortgage on.