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Hi all, Can anyone provide some advice on setting out angles for footings? I have an unusual design with some angles, with some long runs of 10m, which is causing me lots of issues. As you can imagine if I am a degree of so off with these angles I end up being > 100mm off at the other end of the 10m run. I've just not been able to get the angles and correct lengths to match up. I have been using the 3,4,5 method for checking 90 degrees, but I'm still having issues with the other angles. Do you have any advice? Maybe I can use a laser level for this, but I've not been able to find a laser level which measures angles? Any and all advice is appreciated as I've spend 2 days on this already and am stuck! Thanks! Ben

Our site is bordered by a wiggly little rural lane and so there's no chance of taking a reference off this for the location and layout of the new build. The groundworker needs to dig out for the piling system as well as the slab foundation so I need to make sure that everything is the right size and in the right place. I'm assuming that I need a surveyor to do this, which will cost me a few quid, unless anyone can come up with a genius, money-saving alternative. Also, do I need them to set out in 2 stages, i.e. first for the piles, then again for the foundations?

I ran out of white line marking paint on the final wall. When the JCB driver turned up he tossed me a can of his standard colour, no prize for guessing which colour he prefers. I found white is ok but yellow is wrong for grass. The JCB driver stopped a few times mid job to over paint my yellow lines in red.

Hi All, Simple question; but a bit drawn out, regarding my planning permission and the setting out and heights of said proposal onto my site. As an engineer I work with CAD on a daily basis, everything is mm perfect, everything very precise - now come to my site and the location for my new garage - this seems to be a little bit, rough shall we say. I know from my drawings that the garage sits 800mm in and parallel from one boundary and 400mm going up to 1200mm on the rear elevation (site is not square and it made sense to align the garage with the side elevation boundary). So I go out and start to work out the physical location and bang in pegs and what not so I can see where I need to dig out and dig services trenches. Now the boundaries of my site are set out in traditional estate wrought iron fence which have been there forever, so I am going to use these, as my physical marker of boundaries. Now the question is this, if I measure 800mm out from the side fence, check it is square to said fence then measure 400mm in from the back fence and bang a peg in I now have the completed outside corner of the garage location, I can then measure 5000mm across and at that point 1200mm out from the back fence, by ensuring the 5000mm line is square to the side fence I now have the opposite corner of the back wall - the rest is the case of staying square to the side fence and marking out the site. That all sounds fairly easy and with some careful measuring and squaring off it will be fine - however, old fences are not perfectly straight and things do undulate a little, with care and attention I can allow for this and I will be fine. But really what I want to know is how much out could something be and planning would not care, and secondly, planning don't actually come and look do they? How would they ever know if I, through genuine error, ended up 40 or 50mm off course? The next part of this question is regarding ground level, from the front of the garage to the rear of my garage the ground slopes down to the rear about 450mm. My plans show the soffit at 2.4m, if the site was flat then all elevations could easily enough be built to have a ground to soffit height at 2.4m however I cannot do this, I am going to have to have the back end of the garage about 2.8m from ground level to soffit, I may be able to re-grade the access to the front of the garage a bit to lower it, maybe go down 100mm and put the slab in level at the front bringing it down a bit at the back but what is deemed as "ground level". I don't want to build this thing as I said above, only to find that planning say I am too high at the back. Thanks