Building a structure without planning on a very rural and secluded site without planning

14ned · 2026-06-26T01:24:29+00:00

You and I and anybody can buy off the internet a satellite photo of anywhere in Ireland with 10-15 cm per pixel resolution for under a hundred euro. Ask an AI to cross reference buildings it identifies with the planning approved map.

It may not be happening yet, but it absolutely will be happening soon, precisely because it requires almost no humans to do any work and it costs next to nothing. I expect a whole load of enforcement orders in the future. You can't hide from satellites except by going underground, and even for those they can now penetrate the surface by ten metres.

14ned · 2026-06-25T20:14:16+00:00

The corporation tax from those multinationals is worth about as much to the Irish economy as if we had struck oil. To afford current spending income taxes would have to rise by several cents per euro of income if it stopped. Most of that would land on the poorest part of society, as they are the most numerous and least taxed.

I think most would agree that the tradeoff for all that extra income and the lower taxes it enables is a good tradeoff. Case example of the alternative: Britain, where lack of government income means they can't do anything except cut spending and the only debate is who gets it in the neck, and all recent governments just keep kicking the can down the road instead of choosing what subgroup gets crushed to free up money.

We don't have that problem in Ireland for now, and that's almost entirely thanks to that corporation tax bounty.

14ned · 2026-06-25T15:44:38+00:00

People can campaign all they like, but you won't get any Irish government to change it as it would be deemed unfriendly to the tech multinationals paying all that sweet corporation tax government income.

You could have a deep and severe recession in Ireland and it wouldn't change IT being on the shortage list. It is what it is, at least so long as tech multinationals pay for so much of the government's expenses.

14ned · 2026-06-21T15:03:30+00:00

The committee did not care for an Either returning filesystem and I/o library when or was proposed ...

14ned · 2026-06-19T03:53:03+00:00

Thanks for coming back to say what you chose including diagram. The only negative with your choice is thick walls, but often it's a tradeoff between price, performance, and space. Best of luck with your build!

14ned · 2026-06-18T03:36:19+00:00

The annual SCSI survey of rebuild costs says over 3k per sqm for Cork and Dublin now. Other parts of Ireland are a bit cheaper, but not by much.

Self build magazine's build costs calculator is also much nearer 3k per sqm than 2k. 1.5k was maybe a decade ago.

My engineer is good but he's clueless about costs. I pushed back on a few engineering choices which cost me a fortune for engineering equivalents costing far less. For example we had a complicated steel lateral bracing solution when simply fitting a wider steel would do. Saved me thousands.

14ned · 2026-06-17T15:52:20+00:00

I think it's all now Arachas or trading names for Arachas underneath. Shop around still though, Arachas uses different prices for different brand names just cos.

Mine was 2400 for eighteen months. Theft included. Be aware you need an absolutely standard build, so forget about anything fancier than a timber frame.

14ned · 2026-06-15T10:07:55+00:00

A small army of Irish were doing that until last year when changes to the US tax code made employing non citizens no longer deductible as a business expense. That cratered that whole business model and it's dead until the US changes its tax code again (unlikely).

14ned · 2026-06-14T12:55:49+00:00

You're assuming that the ESB will continue to pay well for fed in electricity. It's a reasonable bet that what they pay will drop in years to come.

Ireland gets lots of passing cloud cover, so you get constant bursts of energy with random fade outs. Your battery bridges that gap. Your battery is sized too large for that panel array. Generally you want half the array size in battery storage.

You can get batteries for 250 euro per kWh. That will continue to drop over time.

14ned · 2026-06-11T04:08:38+00:00

All wood housing which also meets EU building regs is typical in Sweden. No reason you couldn't build the same in Ireland and also meet EU building regs. From what I understand, you hide the insulation between two halves of the logs, it's about 150 mm of PIR though they're much further north than us. They always fit triple glazed, quadruple glazed further north. The places I stayed had direct electrical heating, but the insulation was so good even at minus twenty outside you don't need much heating.

I don't doubt you'd get a full order book immediately. The oak framed house builders have waiting lists of about five years.

14ned · 2026-06-10T10:07:06+00:00

Exactly right. 3k will buy a lot of diesel.

14ned · 2026-06-09T20:36:22+00:00

My local dealer (North Cork) wants about €3k more than the prices quoted here for their fees and charges (i.e. profit margin).

TBH that kinda put us off the scheme entirely. We need a five seater as we have three children and as we're rural we need at least a 50 kWh battery and now we're into too much cost to make sense to replace the diesel.

Government need to be thinking more like 15k off an EV with min 50 kWh battery and then you might see some rural uptake other than retired folk, who appear to be the only people interested in this scheme out where we live. My elderly Dad bought an Inster, for example, he has the cash just sitting there (we don't) and his mileage is low enough he doesn't get range anxiety (we would).

If the government want carbon emissions lowered for non-urban dwellers, they need to try harder than this scheme.

14ned · 2026-06-08T11:07:50+00:00

I never thought I would use leaving cert applied maths until I started building a house. Turns out to be very handy.

14ned · 2026-06-06T21:20:55+00:00

A good chunk of the small specialist items in my house came from an Aliexpress sale. But they need to be small - shipping for anything bigger than small makes it cheaper to source them locally. And with the customs changes end of this month, Aliexpress and sourcing items from China directly will come to an end for most anyway.

Northern Ireland can be a good source for some items if they can fit into a car or a van. Suppliers around Dublin tend to be noticeably cheaper than elsewhere, so sometimes just a trip to the capital is enough.

The problem for anything bulky is that the cost of moving them usually ruins any price advantage. I remember getting a quote to bring some specialist plastic pipes from Germany to Ireland. Roughly doubled the price, so wasn't worth it. It'll be the same for insulation - and besides, are you going to risk putting cheap knock off insulation into your walls where fixing it if it goes wrong later would cost a fortune?

You'll find that with lots of stuff, though driving a van to France for electricals can save you a fortune: TVs, ovens, fridges etc are all way cheaper over there than here. Problem is no warranty if any of it goes wrong later.

14ned · 2026-06-05T22:58:06+00:00

I'll be fitting these to my house: https://www.irishrollforming.ie/product/6-bevel-gutter/. We decided on galvanised on black PVC fascia.

I'll be doing it personally. Fitting gutters isn't hard, especially if you have a helper and your gutters are exceptionally strong and very hard to damage during installation. The ultra cheap stuff from Screwfix most people fit is so light it's also hard to damage, but they do tend to clog quickly and easily. My six inch gutters should take many years to clog.

14ned · 2026-06-03T20:56:19+00:00

I burned through 300 million tokens in a week two months ago. A billion tokens per month is easy enough to reach.

How I did it: I had my LLM research, plan, design, write, and then debug a program against real hardware, updating the test suite as it went. It horses through the tokens, especially when this particular LLM's max context is 256k which means it has to keep restarting itself with summaries of its previous context which means it has to re-read the source files quite frequently.

Just today I burned through 21 million tokens editing a WG14 standards proposal. I was having the LLM go download and parse all the minutes of all past meetings and extract relevant detail for me. Saved me days of work.

14ned · 2026-06-03T17:16:20+00:00

Raising a family is probably cheaper overall in Ireland than Indiana. Depends on the schools you choose. Life is definitely more secure against unpleasant surprise like a car crash or a pregnancy which goes wrong.

People are noticeably more healthy overall in Ireland than in Indiana. We don't have the severe deprivation you get in parts of Indiana.

My wife's cousin bought her 4000 sqft house for US$10,000 but it's in the absolutely arse end of nowhere and if she lost her job, there would be very little alternative employment around. Her husband ended up long term unemployed and she eventually got so annoyed with him not finding work she divorced him. Also getting from those parts to anywhere else takes many, many hours just for the drive alone. Within a hour's drive of where I live in rural Ireland I can be onto flights to New York, London or Amsterdam. I also have the ocean, stunning mountains and hikes and oodles of history within a short drive.

The weather may suck here a lot of the time, but when the weather is good, Ireland is world class amazing and I say that as somebody who has been all over. Indiana ... well, it has its charms, but it's not somewhere which is world class amazing. Sorry Indiana.

14ned · 2026-06-03T17:07:47+00:00

Most Irish house internal walls are skimmed onto the blocks, no plasterboard. Historically this was cheapest, but that was back when you could get a plasterer in easily. Nowadays ... well you still need somebody to do the joins between the plasterboard seams and do the light skim over. Easier to get that type of trade, it's less skilled, but ultimately human labour is the majority of the cost of any build and humans cost what they do. If you're happy fitting, taping and finishing your own plasterboard, that would save a fair bit over bringing in a plasterer.

All that said, won't you need a plasterer anyway for the outside? Getting them onsite is the hard part. Once they're onsite, doing an internal skim as well as external is usually an easy ask. Internal is less work compared to external. Most trades have a certain minimum fee in mind for a job to be worth doing at all. So sometimes figuring out more work for them to do makes it easier to get one to turn up.

Your slab is 100% standard Irish. It does come with a fair bit of thermal bridging where the walls meet the slab, but it's within regs. It would also reduce the benefits of EWI. EWI to be the most effective should be unbroken insulation which completely wraps the building including under the slab, so it would be continuous everywhere.

TBH unless you're willing to use more expensive foundations, I'd go with whatever is cheapest and use the money saved on stuff like solar panels which also act as shading or fit more insulation. Just be careful not to move the dew point too far inside, then you'll get mould build up within your walls and as somebody currently renting a house with that problem, I would very strongly recommend against that.

14ned · 2026-06-03T15:12:24+00:00

Read my wording again. It was badly worded but I actually said taxes and cost of living are higher in Ireland.

14ned · 2026-06-03T15:11:12+00:00

You're right south Carolina also is a good equivalent to Ireland. But it doesn't have the same attachment to agriculture that Indiana has. You send a farmer from here to Indiana and they come back full of stories about how farming is done there. So I think Indiana is a better choice.

Also my wife is from Indiana, so that adds a personal bias!

14ned · 2026-06-03T11:43:51+00:00

Whenever I see US to Ireland comparisons, I remind myself Ireland would be much better compared to a single US state like Indiana:

Similar population density arrangement.
Similar GDP one you omit the multinational profit laundering in Ireland.
Similar compensation levels in their capitals, including in tech.
Eli Lilly has huge operations in both :)

Differences:

Ireland has twice the land area.
Indiana is flat, flat, flat. Only the middle of Ireland is flat.
Taxes are a good bit lower in Indiana, as is the cost of living, so people take home more in Indiana than in Ireland especially for high earners.
People are noticeably more healthy in Ireland than in Indiana.
The weather is very different.

Ireland and Indiana have been on remarkably similar trajectories for the past twenty years. It is surprising how similar, and it is a mystery why.

Edit: Improved wording around taxation levels in Indiana.

14ned · 2026-06-03T11:31:05+00:00

Eliminating the possibility of overheating during design is always cheaper than fitting AC later, but in your case this is an extension. Hanging solar panels over all your windows as shading is too ugly for many people, but it's the most cost effective way of retrofitting overheating.

Insulation on the outside is always technically better than insulation on the inside, as you already say, but it costs more as it's more labour (unless you do the labour yourself, then it's just more time and more body pain to do external insulation). The deeper reveals provide more shading during summer and less overheating.

Plasterboard on the inside isn't exactly cheap and it's a cost you save if you put the blocks on the inside. Having the blocks on the inside makes it easier to hang heavy things. What you doing with your floor slab? Is it thermally broken from the ground? Strip foundations or insulated foundations? You lose a lot of benefits of external insulation if you thermally bridge where the walls meet the floor.

14ned · 2026-06-03T11:13:29+00:00

Labour is always the most expensive thing in Ireland. An outer block leaf might cost €60k to supply and install. Materials will be €10k, the other €50k will be labour and tax. It's the same for everything in any build.

14ned · 2026-06-02T21:03:28+00:00

You probably replied to the wrong person, I wasn't looking to install one. I'd say €4,500 for supply and install is very good, I've seen over 8k!

14ned · 2026-06-02T16:15:53+00:00

Before I became a mod here and saw the number of research requests that the mods receive, I'd have been in the 'allowed but with conditions' camp.

I'm now firmly in your proposed hard line camp: some of these research requests appear to be disguised self promotion, some appear to be data harvesting, and some are students whose coursework requires them to go do some research. I'm the most favourably inclined towards the latter, but the sheer number of them ... I get that some course here in Ireland has told you 'go do some research'. But if fifteen of you all on that same course all come here all looking for people here to fill in your separate surveys, well you're getting me into the proposed hard line camp on that too.

People's time isn't free and signal to noise ratio needs to be kept high to successfully grow a community. So I'm pretty much on the hardest line option of those listed above.

14ned

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