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My 2c. Have spent many, many hours on this kitchen stuff. Being on this forum, you are not going to accept the first price offered, which means that you will be taking (emailing) your design to two or three or more kitchen suppliers. There is no data standard that I am aware of for kitchens, so when you take them your design, assume you will be carrying a photocopy of what you want, and they will re-enter it (very quickly) into their software. That photcopy needs to include two key pieces of information - the plan, showing hob, fridges, sink, island etc etc, and the elevation, which shows how many drawers are under the hob, where the bins are. I started off going down the design software route, but after a while I gave that up and bought some graphpaper, pencil and rubber. Did a couple sketches and then got to a scale drawing. (Graphpaper makes it a lot easier!) Note: this is an iterative process. When you take your scale drawing to B&Q or Wickes or whoever, because you have given some thought to what you want, you will find the conversation with their kitchen designer becomes a lot easier. They will make good suggestions. They will give you a priced printout. You then take those suggestions and apply them to your graphpaper :-). You can send the updates back to their kitchen designer, and you can go to get your 2nd quote. (Iterative, as I said). (I have posted elsewhere btw about some independant suppliers who compete with Howdens, Wickes, B&Q etc)

Yup, go to Wickes, Howden's, whereever. Costs nothing. No need to buy their kitchens if you don't want to but all the standard suppliers use the same carcass form factors so the only material difference will be the colours, door handles, etc.

May be worth getting to grips with a basic CAD package. You can do all sorts of designing on that. Most of us that do use CAD packages will have our favourites, but Google's SketchUp is a good start. (It may be worth the 'Forum' choosing a basic open source 3D CAD package and then giving tutorials. Swapping ideas would be easy then Just a thought).

As I've previously discussed we have an MBC Passive Slab and Timber-frame, but unlike most builds, our house also has a very traditional stone cottage-style exterior because the new build sits between our current farmhouse, which dates back over 400 years and a cottage which dates back approaching 200 years, so our planners required that we use the same local quarried stone. So a topic that often comes up is "how do we do the window / door treatment on a timber-framed house with an exterior stone / brick / blockwork skin?" In this blog entry I want to describe how we approached and addressed these issues on our build. Whilst I make no claims about our approach being the only or the best one, Jan and I do believe that this has worked well for us; we are pleased with how it has all turned out and we don't think that we would do it differently if we were doing this all again. So if you are in a similar situation to us, please consider this as one possible approach. There are a number of issues that we considered in designing our detailing: Decoupling the inner and outer skins. In order to achieve thermal isolation of the inner passive slab, MBC also lays a separate outer ring beam for blockwork, brick and stone skinned houses. The inner slab carries the Larson trusses of the MB twinwall frame, and the outer ring beam carries the stone skin. The inner frame is CLS; the outer stone and mortar, and these two have different expansion characteristics so you should anticipate up to 5mm, say, differential movement between the inner and outer skins. So we decided that we should not use the window and door furniture to couple these. Closing the gap. Even so, we still have the issue of the 50mm nominal air gap between the inner and outer skins and how we close this for weather protection and cosmetics. Our solution to thee two points is to move the front of the windows some 45mm forward of the outer surface of the frame. The stonework then sits immediately in front of this,overlapping the window frame by some 30-40mm. Fixing the windows and doors. We have Internorm KF200 Aluclad PVC windows and I agreed a fitting profile with both MBC and ecoHaus SW who supplied the windows. This comprised a box section (something like marine ply would do here) that framed each window opening at the top and sides as follows. there was a 10mm filling gap for fixing the windows there was a 15mm filling gap at the top ditto the windows had to sit hard at the bottom, but I inserted a 44 × 38 tanalised carrier to lift the base above the internal frame base. This was to give adequate clearance to fit the internal cills. Protecting the windows during the build. EcoHaus SW fitted the windows on day 8 of the the frame erection, so by day 9 we had a completely weather-tight and lockable house. The windows had to be in place before erecting the stone skin, and so needed protection from the stone erection process. The solution that we agreed with the ecoHaus technical manager was very simple and extremely effective and one that I would suggest to anyone else doing this. We simply covered the windows in heavy grade clear building polythene, and this served a dual purpose: It provided total protection against the muck and dust of stone erection. You need a slip surface between the aluminium cladding and the stone skin. (Cf. the first point) The PVC does this. Once the stone skin was complete we simply cut around the PVC on the mortar line. All that is then needed to achieve a total weather seal is to run a thin bead of sealer at the join. Minimising any bridging impact. The windows have fire-break socks around them which acts both as insulation and a gap closer. The doors require special treatment. Here prior to slab pour, we had the MBC team cut out 50mm deep slots at the door openings and we placed extra shuttering in to extend these out by some 40mm in front of the outer frame line. These were rebarred and when the slab was poured, these became a 50mm deep concrete tongue that extends out to the front face of the door opening. The doors then sit on a 30mm upstand on these tongues. The upstand acts as a thermal break, but to minimise any bridging through the tongue itself, we used FoamGlass structural bricks to isolate the tongue from the outer cill and the stone skin. If you do the 2D thermal calcs (or at least I did), the thermal capacity of the stone face overlapping the face of the windows materially mitigates the extremes of the temperature variation, and whilst there is a little uplift in the Psi-factors for the window, in absolute terms this equates to adding an extra ½m2 of glass to the house overall, and not enough to cause condensation risks Maximising internal light. Our old farmhouse has thick stone walls with window reveals and these work well. So we decided to ask MBC to do a similar treatment in our new build. In short not only do they work, they work brilliantly. They let in perhaps 10-15% more light than deep squared frames and they help open out the rooms. They are an extremely attractive feature and both Jan and I would recommend them to anyone considering using a twinwall frame. Here is a picture of the slab during the pour. Note the trays for the kitchen French windows and the back door. Here are a couple diagram extracts showing the window treatment and detailing: and some photos of the wall in construction showing the set forward windows and the finished effect (less the porch that still has to go in.). and an internal shot of the kitchen window detail showing the angled reveals:

@jamiehamy look at Telford cylinders through Cylinders2Go as they come with all the parts JTM are good - order a few extra elbows and also a few straight connectors as you will cut something too short .... Decent pipe cutters are a must - Rothenberger are my weapon of choice as you can replace the blades. Elbows in walls are pretty much a given - try and put noggins/dwangs in behind them and pipe clips above the elbow to keep things straight. Don't forget your pipe stiffeners - you will need more than you think as they seem to hide .....! If you are going Hep2O then buy the release keys (or order the demo pack of the Wavin site) and a few extra fittings and cut a few bits of pipe and practice ..! You will see how the stuff goes together and how to demount it without damaging the seals. And above all... Ask !!

You been talking to @MrsRA then? The pair of you could have mentioned it during the planning phase....

My hob is on my island and I find it better as there is plenty of room to set ingredients beside you as you cook. Only con would maybe be extra work and planning getting the likes of cables and ducting to it but it's not much extra. All down to how you want your kitchen to work for you. My island is 2.2m *1m as I love cooking and baking so gives me plenty of room to make a mess. Also gives me a lovely area to sit round and chat when we are having a party.

I used the Ikea one as SWMBO wants an Ikea Kitchen ( not me as can never get anything else to fit IKEA products) Need an account on line and look for 3D planner not the other one. It does not work with Chrome or Oprea. I used Firefox. It is unbelievably slow but does work and produces list of what you need

This is a whole new debate. The average new car in the UK costs £29,000, the average house in the UK costs £220,000 which is massively inflated by London. So the average new car costs more than 10% of the cost of the average house. However, for people who live in detached houses like self builders the average car/house value is probably more like 6-7%. As houses get more expensive the relative value of cars tends to fall. And for some of you tightwads who like driving around in antiquated cars the figure is considerably less In all seriousness I know that driving an old car massively reduces depreciation costs, but newer cars are generally much nicer and safer to drive and sadly there is an intangible feelgood factor that I am happy to pay up for. What I try to do is to drive an expensive car with low depreciation, but basically they're my weakness! BTW I read an article a couple of years ago about people being more and more willing to spend £100k on kitchens. It's crazy. They are usually a little bit nicer but I feel a lot of it just goes into profit margins, commissions etc. So you're right Jack £50k isn't that much at some places, I would still argue it's way more than necessary and certainly one of the first things to go if you can't afford to build the house you would like.

This dropped into my inbox this morning http://events.imeche.org/ViewEvent?e=6474 "Infrared thermography is a key enabler in determining the quality of a building’s construction and identifying any shortcomings as a part of the dispute resolution process. Additionally, a thermographic building report can be used to gain one BREEAM credit. Taking place at the Institution's London HQ, this free half-day lecture will provide you with a thorough understanding of thermography, imaging techniques for non-destructive testing and practical guidance to make your results more accurate." This may be of general interest or even actual use for anyone near London with IMechE membership, I know, that's probably a tiny to non-existent subset on here but I saw it and thought of you..

I must confuse people with my battered old 250k mile Corrado sat outside when we work...I genuinely think people think I'm the labourer if they see me when they pass by. I don't have any intention of getting rid of it either @jackBuy it once, keep it forever. Depreciation becomes irrelevant after 10 years or so.

Funnily enough, I've been looking at this. So far I've done around a dozen (free) thermographic reports for local people, keen on finding ways to reduce their energy bills. Not hard to do, but it does require the right conditions (cold and dry weather with a heated house) to get the best images from the thermal imaging camera and so produce a useful set of recommendations. The worrying thing was going around a local new build estate. A planning condition imposed meant that these were all supposed to be built to the old Code for Sustainable Homes Level 4. A wander around shows loads of missing wall insulation, cold bridging around doors and windows and a generally poor level of performance. I doubt they even met building regs, let alone CfSH L4, in reality. Thermography offers a pretty foolproof way of demonstrating whether a builder has, in fact, built a house to the claimed thermal loss standard, and I think the more it's used the better informed buyers will be.

I am away on site sorting first fix plumbing with no broadband but will investigate when I get home at the weekend. I would appreciate any comments regarding this plant versus that plant etcetc so I can make an informed choice along with others. Yes the Japanese appear to have a market in the pump market so no wonder people use their kit. i think it said on the Graf site that granular backfill was needed which saves concrete/cost but our water table is so high I worry about doing that ( ground anchors.?) keep your comments coming guys

So if there's land available in the North and not the South, then channel all future business development grants to businesses to in the North, that should sort out the population imbalance in the long run!

its complicated

What's thermal mass?