Big J

If I go into the saw shop in the same outfit, twice in a row, I get laughed right out of there. I won't apologise for my impeccable fashion sense, from the top of my scruffy head to the tip of my Birkenstock clad toe! ?

With a kit house, the drawings are ready to be submitted so there is no delay. The chap at the Danwood stand at the housing expo said that a typical build time from the point of order is 6 months. That's 12 weeks for it to be built in the factory and 14 weeks on site until it's ready to move into. Most normal self builds are 3 times as long on average.

400 plus miles apparently. Have faith! The end of internal combustion cars/trucks is nigh, and I can't wait to be electric only ?

If we were able to navigate planning in a fairly expedient manner, we'd just go with timber frame and straw bale construction. It wouldn't attain passive standard, but it would be very environmentally friendly, require fairly minimal heating and the vast bulk of the house would have been grown in a small radius of the construction site. I'm lucky to have access to huge amounts of very good quality timber, that I can cut to my own specification. A kit house is however a pretty good compromise, as whilst there are some slightly dubious materials in the walls, they overall environmental impact is minute compared to an older house, and the construction time is only 14 weeks, start to finish. I do wish that UK planning law would make special exceptions for very green buildings. There has to be something to incentivise green building.

I'd be waiting for the electric pickup from Rivian: Looks so cleverly laid out, and 750bhp and 1124nm of torque would might light work of towing, say a medium sized artic trailer.

Too rustic for my liking. You forget that I'm half German and require straight lines and order. Form follows function and function is king! ?

I do supply a few timber framers, and I have had discussions....

£50 a month including VAT. Unlimited calls, unlimited texts and 100gb data. I listen to a lot of podcasts and such like at work, as well as spending 1-2 hrs a day on the phone, so I'll make good use of the allowances. I think my old EE plan was £24/month, but that was Sim only. Factoring in the cost of the phone, the Tuff phone plan costs £33.33 a month with an extra 60gb of data compared to EE (you can get it with lower data tariffs, I should add) so it's not a big price hike.

It looks to me like more of a replacement for the Disco 4.

Yeah, they are difficult to work with. Ideally you don't want any windows in the roof itself, rather a good overhang on the eaves and gable ends, and windows contained within the wall.

I've discussed this statement with my wife, and the issue is that the bulk of modern houses are so badly built that in part, what you say is true. However, it is possible to build houses far better than anything that has historically been built and in terms of keeping cool in summer in warmer climates, it comes down to a few things: Thermal mass. This is where older houses often score well. They have a longer lag time between the start of higher external temperatures and the house heating up. This is easily achievable with new builds, and requires a insulative envelope around a body of thermal mass, such as unfired clay bricks, or concrete floors. Solar shading. Most new builds are built without any consideration to the movement of the sun, the angle in the sky and the heating effect it will have in summer. Solar shading means minimal direct sunlight in the house during high summer (when you want to avoid that thermal gain) but that you still get plenty of light in winter when the sun is lower in the sky. MVHR - good ventilation, including a heat exchanger will really help. Ventilate the house extensively overnight when temperatures are lower, and less through the day. There are lots more points to make, but yes, I agree, a lot of old houses are good at staying cool in summer. Our 1840s house isn't one of them though!

My Dad's house is something similar, but it does get warm in summer. He's about an hour south of Poitiers. France has an enviable winter. Really quite short, but cold enough to be a considered a proper winter

Not entirely. Equally important are thermal bridges, a continuous insulation layer, thermal mass, air tightness (which does come into windows and doors, but a badly constructed wall will leak air too), moisture permeability of the wall, and the condensation point within it, as well as the moisture gradient within the wall. One of the main advantages of a well insulated house (from my perspective) is the ability to keep it cool in summer. You can usually heat a house to the point of being comfortable in winter, but a badly insulated building is difficult to keep cool in summer.

I personally don't have any issues with changing the facade, but planners and parish councils generally aren't keen. Having been to your house, I can attest to the fact that it's beautifully finished and detailed, and I'm sure that the attention to detail in the insulation which you can't see is of a similar standard. Most people don't have your cabinet making/joinery skills, and many don't have the means to commission someone else to do it. It's just a lot more expensive to work within an existing building. A reasonable example would be a house that we rented for 3 years near Aviemore when we were doing a lot of work up there. We shared it with friends. It was an old croft house, two bedrooms with a very large stove that I installed and electric heating. There was no insulation in the roof, though it did have double glazing. It was almost entirely unheatable in deep winter. Aviemore is subject to some of the coldest weather in the UK, and when it was properly cold (just below freezing through the day, minus 10 at night), with all the electric heating going, and the 15kw stove on full blast, you'd maybe get the bedrooms up to 10c if you were lucky, and 15-16c max in the living room with the stove. The house was also very exposed on the north east face, so any beasts from the east dropped the temperature inside further. What it needed was the roof completely rebuilding and completely cladding and externally insulating. And I reckon that would have cost as much as knocking it down and rebuilding. It was in a beautiful spot though, with one of the best views in the Highlands. The front garden stops at the road. The daft thing is that the whole way the house is orientated, there aren't many windows on the aspect that overlooks the loch. All that view and you couldn't see if from any room unless you got up and walked over to a window to look out. Demolish and start again!

Possibly, but many old houses simply don't have the internal space to insulate, and external insulation would completely change the building. I actually worry more about the post war construction than what was built before it.

In the interests of continuing the discussion from the other day, but on a slightly different tangent, I thought I'd start another thread. I've never been a fan of old houses. Cold, damp, draughty and usually not built for someone my height. Ongoing maintenance issues too. Obviously, many of them were built to the standards of the day, and I don't think that they are bad per se, just out of date and in many cases fit for replacement. We're in the process of trying to find someone to live. Whether that is buying a house or building has yet to be determined. We went to our first house viewing yesterday and is was broadly disappointing. A pretty spacious Victorian house, that ticked many boxes, but looking at it, all I could see was huge heating bills, subsidence in the floors, potential damp isses and potential rewiring all (not especially well) hidden behind a veneer of reasonably recent decoration. We've lived in three houses in the past 11 years. All fitting the type of small farm houses/cottages. 107 sq metres (5 years), 127 square metres (5 years) and 95 square metres (the last year). In that time we've burned just over 200 cubic metres of firewood, which equates to about 70 dry tonnes. Each kilo of wood (as deduced from Google searches, please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong) releases around 1.65kg of carbon dioxide on combustion, so it's reasonable to assume that we've created around 115 tonnes of Co2 in that time. We've also burned around 7000l of oil too, so that's another 19 tonnes. In the scheme of things, our houses haven't been badly insulated, especially considering their vintage. The second house (127 sqm) was assessed with a thermographic camera by a thermographer friend of ours, and he said he was surprised how well it performed. Anyway, my point is that many older houses perform so badly that ecologically speaking, you'd be better off demolishing and starting again. The embodied CO2 in a typical new build is around 50-80t (depending on sources online, and size of house). An ecologically minded house would be less, and a timber heavy construction can bring this down further. Taking an average of 65t, it took us just 5.5 years to produce that amount of CO2 heating in our houses over the years, and when you consider that the average house age we've had over the past 11 years just under 200 years, that's a huge environmental cost over the centuries. I realise that older properties can be upgraded to a point, but they never come close to modern standards. Additionally, measures such as cavity wall insulation have created huge issues in affected houses with damp, as the cavity was intended in the first instance as a control measure for moisture. I'd be interesting to hear your thoughts regarding realistic ways to improve housing stock in the UK. The present crop of dreadful "only just up to regs" houses being built by the mass developers isn't helping matters.

I think it would be beneficial for your research to offer a lot more detail as to what you expect to be doing with your sawmill. At the moment, your question is so vague you might as well be asking "what should I be expecting to pay for a car?"

You could also say that Boris keeps trying to get out without a lead (anagram of deal) despite his custodians repeatedly telling him how daft it would be ?

Maybe, maybe not. I guess I'd have recourse to cancel my contract if it's found that they aren't providing an adequate service. It's barely any more expensive than EE, and can't be much worse? That is to say, EE isn't that bad, but there are large signal black spots.

I'm guinea pigging myself with the new T500 phone on the multinetwork sim from Tuffphone. The idea is that it runs mainly on 3, but when lacking signal, jumps onto vodaphone or O2. Preliminary reviews seem to be good, so I'm optimistic. The site where we've been working has lacked signal on EE at the foot of the hill, so every time a machine needs attention and you need to call someone, you have to drive off site to find signal, make the call and return. It's a huge PITA. I had to replace the phone too, since running over my trusty old Kyocera KCS701 tough phone 7 weeks ago, I bought a Doogee S30 which has been awful. Laggy, glitching and constantly crashing. The multi network sim seems to be quite new to the UK, but for many of us might be very useful, and given that I only found out about it recently, it's worth mentioning here incase it's useful for some of us: The advantages of the TUFFMultiNet SIM WWW.TUFFPHONES.CO.UK Extend your limits with unprecedented network coverage across three major networks with TUFFMultiNet. Tuff Phones launches new multi-network SIM - Farmers Weekly WWW.FWI.CO.UK To help limit phone signal dead spots in the countryside, Tuff phones has introduced a multi-network sim card that can operate on any one of three major

Chatting to a much more experienced forestry colleague than myself, I was reminded of the treatment of spruce with urea after felling for the reduction of butt rot. Just wondering if any of you lot had any thoughts on the matter. What is the overall effectiveness of it, do you routinely treat, are there any circumstances in which you wouldn't? Most of my experience has been in hardwoods, but most of our upcoming work is in softwood and I need to make sure we don't miss anything.

I don't think that there would be much of a market for willow furniture. Best to stick to biomass IMO.

Yes, you would be mad. The weather is terrible. The midges will bring you to the brink of insanity, and the rain will make you rust. From inside a forwarder or a harvester it doesn't matter, but hand cutting in that is awful. I can ask one of my guys to relay his experiences if you like. Years on the west coast of Scotland, he's now cutting down here in Devon.

No idea. All have undersized engines with the exception of the Ranger, but having test drove the Ranger, I thought it was massively underpowered. I have a 130bhp Berlingo which is markedly quicker than the Ranger. V10 Touareg? Big American pickup? 79 series Landcruiser pickup? With the average customer never towing anything, the manufacturers are all chasing mpg and emissions. As regards new, probably a V6 Amarok, but you're at £40k plus VAT for that.