Woodworking machine

We now own a combination woodworking machine that has a circular saw, a planer/thickness planer and a spindle moulder. Most of what we need to make our own windows. Ric was going to ship his Kity combination woodworking machine up here to work on windows and doors, but he worked out that it would be no more expensive to buy our own. So we kept an eye on eBay. A Kity machine duly appeared but we missed out on it through incompetence on my part – I was working on the south east gable wall and forgot to bid. A few days later, a Robland X26 machine appeared, I strategically bid a significantly higher amount than the current bid and I ended up the owner for £640.

I hired a van and did a weekend dash down to Leicestershire to collect it. It was in the corner of a large workshop, everything that should run did, although the spindle moulder did take a few goes before the brake disengaged. Then it a case of snipping off the power cable. The bloke selling was in his seventies and the machine was a bit of a beast to move, so we struggled a bit. It had wheels and a sort of jack to lift it off the ground so we heaved and hoed until we got it to the back of the van. We enlisted a third body to get it in. We tipped it onto the side, leaned it against the back of the van and with a bit of a struggle lifted/slid it in upside down. I got all the attachments and a set of moulder heads.

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I drove on down to Leamington to stay the night at my daughter’s house, collected a desk that went in the front of the van, then set off a bit after 5am, getting back to the steading mid-afternoon. I was faced with getting the machine out of the van and into the north wing on my own. I used the chain hoist strapped to a strategic big bag of washed gravel to haul the machine out of the van almost to tipping point. I lowered/dropped the end down onto two scaffold boards then used the chain hoist again to pivot it back clear of the van, which I was able to pull forwards out of the way. I laid a trackway of 18mm OSB sheets from there to the front door opening and, with the mini castors I had used to move furniture out of the house in Kessingland under one side of the machine, it was remarkably easy to shuffle it along right up to the front door, do a right angle turn and slide it down onto the concrete slab. It worked well and the van was completely undamaged, I dropped it off the next morning without issue.

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Powder coating – Oven

The first use of the metal folder was to make a powder-coating oven, using three sheets of 0.7mm aluminium. Ric folded a sheet to form the long sides and bottom, with false bottom below that. This housed a 2.5kw cooker element and a fan that drew air down from the middle of the oven, through the heating element and along the false bottom. He ducted the heated air into the oven at each end and folded a lid to go completely along the top. He used a digital controller and thermocouple to control the heating element. The electrics worked first time and we got the thing up to 50c for a sustained period. Ric wrapped it all with 100mm loft insulation wired on to the outside and, at the second firing, just got up to a sustainable 200c. It leaked a lot of heat out around the lid, so we bought a set of clamps to close up gaps. We await our electrostatic spray gun so that we can try it out for real. We have bought 25kg of primer and 25kg of our chosen RAL 6004 powder.

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Powder coating – Aluminium folder

We need a folder that will take full-length sheets of aluminium up to .7mm thick. Buying one would cost thousands, so Ric decided to make his own. We got him two lengths of I-beam (Universal Beam) in two different sizes, a length of angle iron and steel tubes for legs. He used M20 bolts drilled at each end to join the UB together, with  fillet of wood. The top, lighter beam lifts up to allow a sheet of metal to slide between and bolts down to hold it in place. A length of angle iron runs along one side of the lower beam and is hinged to it at either end. The angle iron can be lifted with a handle and bends the metal sheet to up to 90 degrees, with a nice reasonable sharp corner. He even put trampoline springs at either end to make it easier to lift the upper beam when feeding the sheet through.

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New tools

The rotary hammer drill was in use on day 1 and did exactly what it said on the tin. We are using it to drill 18mm holes in granite, to help split stone. The first bit we used did not last long before the carbide tips chewed off, I bought 5 more, just in case!

We quickly put our newly acquired electric hoist to the test, lifting concrete lintels onto wallheads and concrete blocks and granite boulders up onto our scaffolding. The hoist was a shade under £120 and was rated for a 250kg load direct lifting and 500kg with an additional pulley. It turned out to be very well designed, with a safety interlock in the event of the motor failing and cut offs if the load jammed or went up too close to the hoist. It was IP45 rated, so could sit outside when it rained. If it has a fault, it is that the control unit is on a short length of wire, so whoever is using it has to on the platform with it. Ric checked it out and concluded it would not be easy to add extra cable in, so we could use it from the ground. He fashioned a lifting platform for it from old metal pipe, designed to hoist 8 concrete blocks or two chunky granite boulders. He also built a swinging arm, from a piece of scaffold tubing, to let us swing it on and off scaffolding. It was much faster than the chain hoist and quickly became indispensable. The only reason we went back to using the chain hoist was 1) if someone else was using the electric hoist or 2) we needed to make very delicate movements e.g. placing a heavy stone onto new walling that had not fully gone off.

Another indispensable new tool was one of Ric’s creations – a stone trolley for wheeling large boulders and lintels around the site. This used bits of old I-beam, old water pipe and two wheels (from JRD in Ellon). It is much easier to use than the sack trolley and will comfortable take two moderately large granite boulders over roughish ground.

Splitting Granite Boulders

2018 for us is looking like 2 weeks at the steading in the second half of April, a week in July for Andy only, 2 weeks in September and a week over Christmas. We are slowly cranking back up into planning mode. Ric is likely to be working up there over April & May.

One early job is going to be splitting our larger granite boulders to make them shallow enough to build into the outer skin of our new walling. Sawing is not practical, we will use the old fashioned technique of drilling a line of holes along the splitting line, inserting two metal semi-cylindrical pieces of metal in each hole, then knocking a steel wedge down between them, pushing them outwards. If this is done in steps with a break of a few minutes between each step, the boulder should split cleanly apart.

The metal work, according to Wikipedia, is known variously as plug and feather, plugs and wedges, feather and wedges, wedges and shims, pins and feathers and feather and tare. Ric has a set of them for 3/4″ holes (18mm).

Originally in the UK, the holes were made by bouncing an iron bar up and down – percussive drilling. We will use a suitably chunky rotary hammer drill, which will be our contribution to the exercise. The ones we looked at ranged in price between £600 (Bosch) and £1,200 (Hilti); a bit much for us. Ric suggested looking for unused older models, or second hand. So I discovered the Makita 4001c, readily available on eBay for around £400, the newer model is the 4013c at £670.

I bought the very cheapest one, advertised for £335. This was a bit too cheap to be real but having used PayPal, I expected that I would, at worst, get my money back. It did not appear by due date, I left a message politely asking when i could expect to get it. I was surprised to get a message back saying they were working away and would send it when they got back home. Even more surprising was the seller then cancelling the order and giving me my money back, because he would not be back in a sensible time to post the drill.

The new Makita 4001c rotary drill – not the current model, but then it is only a bit over half the cost of the 4013c!

So I went back to eBay and went for the next cheapest, £396. It looked less risky and was indeed despatched the following day and is now in our possession. It is the same general size and weight as Ric’s ailing medium breaker, one of our most useful tools so far. The drill has two modes, hammer-only and hammer/drill. In hammer-only mode, I expect it would be a good substitute for the breaker. I would try it out somewhere on our Suffolk home, but there really is nothing I want drilled or broken! We will find out what it is capable of in a couple of months.

I have bought two cheap (£10 or so) 18mm, 4-blade, drill bits. Also two spare pairs of carbon brushes, since they have a rated life of around 8 working hours!

As an aside, I learnt recently that one can buy SDS Max spade attachments, usually with a 110mm wide spade end. I reckon this would have been really useful whilst we were hand-digging foundations. Next time, perhaps.

Tools & equipment – a refresh…

I wrote a post in the early days about the manly subject of tools and equipment. How has it stood the test of time?

Buy v. Hire? In practice this has been very straightforward – if we think it will cost more overall to hire than buy, then we have bought. I do not regret buying the scaffolding, for example. One thing we did not anticipate was a) how difficult it would be to get George around at short notice with his big digger and b) how much we have used the hire mini digger and hire mini dumper instead. At one point last year we seriously pondered buying a second-hand mini digger for the duration. We did not do so because I did not want to be responsible if it broke down, plus it was a bit late in the day, our needs should fall away over the next year.

Quality? Price is not always related to quality, but often is.

As regards electrical tools: I bought a Lidl cordless drill and spare battery for under £45 and it is excellent for light use, as good as the Hitachi I bought for nearly £100. I do not foresee needing one with larger batteries or all-metal gearbox/induction motor in the next year or so. Another win was my Titan big breaker, which cost £160 but has lasted very well and blasts its way through anything that gets in its way. The £60 I spent on as SDS light breaker, by contrast, was not money well spent. It came with a warning not to use it for long periods and does not have a lock to stop the chisel-tip rotating. So I use it when I am desperate and prefer to use Ric’s 15-year-old Makita medium breaker, which is the real deal. The mid-range tools – Makita angle grinder and Bosch SDS drill – are performing very well and should last the life of the project.

For handtools, I have learnt to look around. Our local hardware store, JRD in Ellon, sell tools from a wide range of manufacturers. The Hilka range, for example, is at the lower price point, yet some of their offerings look suspiciously like their Draper or Faithfull equivalents. Unless I know I am getting better quality for a reason, I am buying the cheaper version.

For disposable items such as cutting disks I have usually spent a bit more for a longer-lasting product. I spent nearly £30 on a diamond blade for the angle grinder, when I could have spent half that, but it has been heavily used and has a lot of life left. On the other hand, I bought some ‘premium’ metal cutting disks from Screwfix and wore through a couple just cutting rebar mesh. I bought a couple of cheaper blades at JRD and have not yet worn through the first.

The right tool at the right time? Not living permanently on site means that I occasionally find that a tool I need is in the other place. Frustrating and each time this happens at the steading, I go into Ellon and buy a second one. It wastes hours and costs money, however, as we build up out toolbox it is becoming less of an issue. I recommend not buying tools ahead of time, on the assumption  that they may come in handy, sometime. It has been revealing how Ric & Geoff have quite different must-use lists of common tools and materials – from us and from each other.

Verdicts on my ‘must-have’ tools/equipment: We did pretty well! Most of what we thought we would need, we bought and have used. The big omission so far is the framing nail gun we bought this summer which should save us a lot of time and effort when we construct out timberwork – there is a lot of it to do! I am also now looking at a drywall screw gun, which makes it much easier for one person to fix boards to ceilings. Ric constructed a couple of very useful bits of equipment, that I never knew we would need, from odds & ends – a soil screener (from scrap I-beams) and a concrete chute (from corrugated steel).

Item	Expectation	Reality
General handtools	Already got. Hammers, screwdrivers, pliers, cold chisels etc. Keep.	Just about right, but we are buying essentials for the steading so we a) do not hold Ric back when he is on site without us and b) worry less about lugging them between home and steading.
Spade(s), shovel(s), pickaxe, sledgehammer, builders barrows, broom(s), handbrush(es)	Buy & Keep	Spot on. We buy more when we need them – we are a three-barrow family now because we needed them for the concrete slab. Also, this stuff wears out.
Surveyors tape, builders pins and line	Already got. For marking out the boundary to the steading site. Keep	I use them regularly for measuring up and for building work. They have been essential.
Level, tripod & staff	Buy on Ebay. For internal floors, drainage & other ground works. Sell  after use.	Spot on again. We use it a lot, a very good buy but I cannot see us needing it once we are finished.
Laser measurer	Buy, cheap-ish. Keep.	I have one, it is really for indoor use. It will be invaluable when we start working on internal structures.
Post hole bar & digger, post driver, fencing pliers, gripple tensioner	Buy. For fencing. Keep.	The post hole bar is my most-used tool ever! I used it to make holes for our bare-root hedging, I use it to break open rough ground, to lever thing apart and to whack things. The post hole digger was completely unsuitable for our ground – too stony and tough for it. It is practically unused. The post driver, fencing pliers and gripple stuff were essential and I use them when I need them. I will hang on to much of it, for future fence work.
Cordless SDS+ drill, heavy duty	Hire. To get electricity meter box(es) in place.	I have not needed it since.
Fish tape	Buy & keep	I had to check what this was. I did not buy one and have not missed it.
Corded SDS+ drill 2-3kg	Buy. For all sorts of things. Decent quality to drill into granite. Keep.	I got a very nice Bosch drill for one Christmas, a joy to use.
Hilti SDS+ bits	Buy. To drill into granite	I bought a small pack of Hilti 8mm bits, which were expensive and are indeed amazingly effective – they have four cutting edges, not two and make mincemeat of granite. They will be heavily used when we work on tying our structural timberwork into the steading wall. I have bought lesser bits for lighter use, but still of decent quality.
Breaker	Buy. To break concrete (probably the £150 Titan from Screwfix). Sell after use if fit to.	Spot on again. This is amazingly effective. The one downside is that I do not think the tips are replaceable. There is loads of life still in ours.
Impact Moler & compressor	Hire. For water piping under the public road	I would have done, if I had been allowed to do the work!
MDPE pipe cutter	Buy & keep	I bought one recently, but am not sure how essential it will be.
Big digger & (normal sized) driver	Hire. For demolition, trenching, foundations.	We use George and his big digger for the heavy work. The rest of the time we hire a Kubota 1.6 tonne mini digger that Ric uses.
Mini dumper	Hire. For moving concrete, spoil, aggregate.	We have hired a 1-tonne Thwaites dumper and used it heavily. Even I can drive it, although I did throw myself off at one point.
Micro digger	Hire. For excavating inside steading ground floor.	We used the Kubota mini digger.
Roof ladder	Buy. For demolishing existing roof and re-roofing. Keep.	We bought two in the end. I needed to be able to work between ladders without having to climb down and move the one ladder all the time.
Angle grinder, 9″ + discs	Buy & keep.	Essential, we use it on stone, metal and concrete.
Circular saw + blades	Already got.	I have not had the need for it yet, but will do once we have the roof on.
Hand circular saw, corded	Buy & keep.	No need yet.
Hand planer, corded	Already got.	No need yet.
Jigsaw, corded	Already got.	No need yet.
Hammer drill, cordless, 18v	Buy. Most people advise Makita/De Walt. I might try Ryobi One+ range. Keep.	I bought a little Hitachi drill. I may need to buy bigger batteries for it.
Drill/Driver, cordless, 18v	Buy. As above. Keep.	The Hitachi does this.
Hand sander, cordless, 18v	Buy. As above. Keep.	Not sure I will need this.
Wrecking bars	Already got.	My big gorilla bar is amazing and valuable. The little ones, I have never used.
Pry bars	Buy & keep.	I bought a decent sized one, it is a good tool but the handle is falling apart.
Scaffolding	Buy second hand on Ebay. Looking to get e.g. 8m wide by 5m high run. Sell when finished	Did that, essential.
Slate ripper	Buy & keep.	Not a good buy. Our slates were held on with galvanised clout nails, the slate ripper was useless on them.
Sack trolley	Buy & keep.	I use it for moving lumps of granite around, v useful. One wheel is wonky now, I may replace it.
Cement mixer	Buy. Sell/dispose when finished.	Our trusty Belle Minimix was a very good buy and is used heavily.
Pin hammer	Buy. To clean up granite. Sell once finished.	At present I am thinking more of using a light breaker with a chisel tip!
Compressor, electric	Buy. For air tools including pin hammer. Sell once finished.	Unlikely at present.
Hand tools for lime mortar	Buy. For pick & point. Keep.	I have some basic tools and will be trying them out in 2018.

I have not bothered with my ‘Might-need’ tools/equipment – a platform and a corded router. What we will do, though, is get a set of heavy duty lockable castor wheels to fix to the feet of our kwikstage scaffolding. We can set up a bay of scaffold and wheel it round over our floor slab and save a lot of time putting it up/taking it apart.

My Top 10 so far!

1. Faithful fence bar – my most essential tool ever!
2. Kubota 1.6 tonne digger
3. Thwaites 1 tonne dumper
4. Ric’s medium breaker
5. Belle Minimix cement mixer
6. Ric’s soil screener – hand constructed from waste steel I-beam
7. Wacker plate – we hired for compacting hardcore
8. Level, tripod and staff
9. Angle grinder
10. Gorilla breaker bar

Getting settled in

Our caravan was as we had left it and we quickly found the value in being able to shelter from rain showers. We assembled the cement mixer and got the level set up & calibrated.

Levelling up for drains: Before Ric arrived, we did an exercise checking levels in the steading itself. It is indeed very level, we will not have any steps up or down within the steading, despite the existing flooring being quite irregular. We checked the amount of slope down to the bottom of our plot, this is of particular interest to whether our plans for drains were going to work. We thought they would, just about. Once Ric was on site, we did it properly. We set up a datum point, with a stainless steel screw, in a corner of the bothy, near ground level. We established secondary datum points within the bothy, then levelled up the paths of the drainage. This confirmed that we could get away with 110mm pipe at 1/40 slope, keeping our inspections chambers at acceptable depths and allowing us a standard septic tank, but with an extension neck.

Checking the warrant plans: We spent most of a day going though the plans in great detail. We had a lot of questions we needed answers for. We drew up a list and agreed we would see if the architect could run through them with us.

Grounds: We had arranged delivery of  a second load of woodchip a couple of weeks beforehand and spent a happy day barrowing it round to the exposed weed membrane in our runs of hedging. Once again it ran out before we got everything covered over, we will need another load at some point. It is wonderful stuff, I recommend it to anyone. It keeps weeds down, it keeps the ground at a more even temperature and it looks presentable. It does not blow away even with gales. A quick inspection of the hedging revealed quite a low failure rate from all three of our plantings – less than 5%. Most of the plants which had put growing tips above the tops of the tree guards had been nibbled off by bunnies/hares, some were clearly less palatable and were growing happily.

Our areas of grass, nettles and other perennial weeds were rampant. The Japanese Knotweed was greatly reduced in area again and was at an early stage of growth. We planned to leave it until September to spray again, when it as full growth and is flowering.

Setting up the caravan: Ric was keen to get the caravan set up, so I acquired a 19kg bottle of propane gas and a variety of fittings to run a temporary water supply using 25mm blue pipe from our standpipe. Once he arrived, he spent a couple of evenings getting the water and a temporary electricity supply connected. He checked out the gas system and got the Morco gas water heater running. The only thing missing being the plumbed in toilet and water waste – these will wait on getting our foul drainage installed, a job for September.

Tools & equipment: A cursory inspection of the areas we need to dig foundations convinced us that we either hire a concrete breaker, or buy one. We hired one the previous year and it worked out about £70 for two weeks. We clearly had a lot of use for one and I had had an eye on the cheap Titan breaker that Screwfix sell. I knew someone who had bought it and swore by it. I bought it, for a penny under £150. We treated ourselves to another wheelbarrow, more shovels, a pickaxe, a fork and plenty of builders buckets.

Working with Aberdeenshire Building Standards: There are a limited number of points at which Building Standards need to inspect our work, the first being the drains. However, our architect advised us to keep records of everything we do, to demonstrate that we are following best practice and standards. So we will take loads of photos of our building activities and have them available if there is a dispute about what we have done.

Before the main event: The grand plan for July is foundations, for September it is drains. Once we had the digger, however, we wanted to open up some of the new doors/windows in our north wall – ‘slapping’ them, as they say…

So Ric pulled rubble out of the wall where our front door needs to be. We quickly twigged that it is immediately where our new water supply comes to the surface. We took care, but suspected that once we dig the foundation out, our water supply will fall into the trench.

We needed another new opening, for a window, where an old doorway had been blocked up. In true Aberdeenshire fashion, the mortar and blocks were just about indestructible. After a lot of trying, the entire column of blocks parted company with the granite either side and came out in one piece.

The third opening was another old door, that we had opened up last year, but it needed widening to break off the cement and brickwork that would otherwise be visible once it is converted to a window.

All an essential step on the way to re-building, but it once again made the steading look even more like a ruin!

Scaffolding

We calculated that hiring scaffolding for the period we needed would be more expensive that buying it. We started looking shortly before Easter and homed in on one of the Ebay sellers. It does look as though many of them are the same person, trading under different names.

I looked for Kwikstage rather than CupLock/ScafLock, because it is quite a lot cheaper (it is painted, not galvanised) and is more available second hand. I believe it is particularly popular with self-builders.

Anyway, we found a package which was a 5-bay run (40′, 12m), of two courses (mostly 9′ 9″, 3m and some 6′ 6″, 2m) for £1,400 inc VAT, which seemed reasonable value. This will cover a full run along the outside edges of the east and west legs of the steading, and about halfway along the north leg. It will just about cover the height of the gable ends.

I found a handy KwikStage guide online and put it on my phone. It was quick and easy from then on. We asked about carriage to Aberdeenshire, the price went up to £1,550 – seemed reasonable and much cheaper than I could have done it hiring a truck. We paid electronically, arranged with the trucking company for an hours notice of delivery, on the Good Friday. We got our notice, drove out, met the truck, guided it down our track and less than an hour later, the truck was on its way. The driver was a fairly young lad and grumbled because we did not have a fork lift. He passed stuff down to the two of us, we piled it neatly on the ground. We had a few moments of comedy when the driver started passing down the scaffolding boards. He got down to a set of them which must have been pressure treated really recently, they were very wet and weighed a ton. He grabbed two of them. got ready to swing them around and nothing happened. He went back to passing them down one at a time.

We had dumped it all on Mr Aitken’s drive, so spent the next hour moving it into our bothy, apart from a two-bay run that we put in the steading under cover. It was in good condition and had been refurbished including re-spraying, with new boards. We had a new set of screw jacks to stand the scaffold on and to level it up. We opened up the KwikStage guide and had a short introduction to scaffolding language as we grappled with Standards, Transoms and Ledgers.

We put the two bays up on the inside wall of the west leg. After a shaky first few minutes, then a short period when I was hammering the metal wedges in so hard that I later had trouble getting them back up, it was all quite straightforward. We levelled it up with the screw jacks and boarded out just below gutter height, so that we would have easy access to the roof. I put two levels of guard rail in – I do not have a head for heights and wanted to feel safe. It was reasonably stable, particularly after we slotted in one of the diagonal braces. I used a ratchet strap, round a fence post placed across the inside of a doorway, to tie the scaffolding in.

I had room to put an extra ledger at about head height, to attach our chain hoist to.

 After 5 days of use, removing slates, I concluded:

• There is room for 5 boards in the 4′ width of the platform, but they do not quite fill the gap. Either you have a gap at the outside edge and worry that the boards will slide back under stress, or live with a gap on the inside edge which means that anything narrow sliding down the roof vanished out of sight – slates and tools.
• I might want to get toe boards, just in case I ever slid down the roof with enough speed to slide over the far edge of the scaffolding.
• I want to get ‘proper’ bits to tie the scaffold in to whatever wall it is against. A select number of CupLock items might be in order.
• Otherwise it is exactly what we need, is quick and easy to set up/dismantle. It feels safe.

Tools & Equipment

Understanding the tools and equipment we will need has been a bit of a discussion point between us.

I have a DIY background, where good/right tools are a bonus but are not usually essential. Not having them is slower and may result in poorer quality workmanship – and I would not profess to be a craftsman even with the best equipment.

My brothers, who are professional builders, definitely have the right tools for the job, mostly well-used. It shows in their productivity. The quality of their work is of course down to experience & skill.

Hire or Buy?

This can be a bit of a dilemma for self-builders. The decision to hire or buy is all about Cost To Buy versus Hire Cost versus Time Needed. Most self builders, even those who get their hands dirty, are active for 1 or two years (evidenced by self-build insurance often only being available for up to 18 months). I have a slightly different problem, I know I will be working over a 6 year period. I will end up buying things that I might have hired for a shorter period. In my opinion, good hand/electrical tools are relatively cheaper and more available now that they have ever been, yet  hiring them is outlandishly expensive, particularly for a single day.

Quality?

Tools invariably come at a range of price points. Accepting that some products or manufacturers sell real bargains i.e. good products at a low price, I expect this is because cheap tools fall apart quickly or work less well, compared to more expensive ones. Does this matter? So Lidl and Aldi may sell a corded SDS+ drill for under £30. Should they be avoided? One argument is that at that at the price it does not matter if it destroys itself after a short while. But then again, it may not. Most bigger suppliers like Screwfix typically sell different brands of the same type of tool – Erbauer, Titan, Makita & De Walt in ascending order of price. Makita and De Walt will produce ‘good’ and ‘professional’ versions.

My approach

1. Tools/equipment which I plan to be single-use or which are more expensive or better-quality than I want to buy, I will hire. For example I need to fix a meter cupboard to a granite wall in order to get mains electricity, so I will hire a chunky, top-quality cordless SDS+ drill to drill into the granite. Thereafter I would have more use for a lighter corded SDS+ drill and a cordless drill/driver. Similarly I would hire a mini digger or diesel compressor.
2. Tools/equipment I plan to use for a long time or where the productivity/quality of the result demands it, will be better quality (mid-range) and I will buy them. If I do not need them afterwards and they have life left in them, I can sell them on eBay. So I will buy a mid-range cordless drill-driver with chunky lithium batteries because it would drive me mad to have to keep changing or replacing batteries and it should be good for 2 years of moderate use. I will expect to buy a stretch of scaffolding because that would be cheaper over a six-year period and I can sell it on at the end.
3. Tools/equipment I do not expect to use heavily and where productivity/quality is not an issue I will buy at lower-end.

Must-have tools/equipment

• General handtools – Already got. Hammers, screwdrivers, pliers, cold chisels etc. Keep.
• Spade(s), shovel(s), pickaxe, sledgehammer, builders barrows, broom(s), handbrush(es) – Buy & keep.
• Surveyors tape, builders pins and line – Already got. For marking out the boundary to the steading site. Keep.
• Level, tripod & staff – Buy on Ebay. For internal floors, drainage & other ground works. Sell  after use
• Laser measurer – Buy, cheap-ish. Keep.
• Post hole bar & digger, post driver, fencing pliers, gripple tensioner – Buy. For fencing. Keep.
• Cordless SDS+ drill, heavy duty – Hire. To get electricity meter box(es) in place.
• Fish tape – Buy & keep.
• Corded SDS+ drill 2-3kg – Buy. For all sorts of things. Decent quality to drill into granite. Keep.
• Hilti SDS+ bits – Buy. To drill into granite.
• Breaker – Buy. To break concrete (probably the £150 Titan from Screwfix). Sell after use if fit to.
• Impact Moler & compressor – Hire. For water piping under the public road.
• MDPE pipe cutter – Buy & keep.
• Big digger & driver – Hire. For demolition, trenching, foundations.
• Mini dumper – Hire. For moving concrete, spoil, aggregate.
• Micro digger – Hire. For excavating inside steading ground floor.
• Roof ladder – Buy. For demolishing existing roof and re-roofing. Keep.
• Angle grinder, 9″ + discs – Buy & keep.
• Circular saw + blades – Already got.
• Hand circular saw, corded – Buy & keep.
• Hand planer, corded – Already got.
• Jigsaw, corded – Already got.
• Hammer drill, cordless, 18v – Buy. Most people advise Makita/De Walt. I might try Ryobi One+ range. Keep
• Drill/Driver, cordless, 18v – Buy. As above. Keep.
• Hand sander, cordless, 18v – Buy. As above. Keep.
• Wrecking bars – Already got.
• Pry bars – Buy & keep.
• Scaffolding – Buy second hand on Ebay. Looking to get e.g. 8m wide by 5m high run. Sell when finished
• Slate ripper – Buy & keep.
• Sack trolley – Buy & keep.
• Cement mixer – Buy. Sell/dispose when finished.
• Pin hammer – Buy. To clean up granite. Sell once finished.
• Compressor, electric – Buy. For air tools including pin hammer. Sell once finished.
• Hand tools – Buy. For pick & point. Keep.

Might-need tools/equipment

• Platform, 5m – Buy. Possibly sell when finished.
• Corded router – Buy & keep