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I just put all our kitchen waste in the DeLorean...

I'm literally ordering my HEP20 pipe as I type this - single runs to each outlet from the manifold - no joins anywhere that can't be accessed. Will hopefully spare me from years of worrying that I didn't quite get a join right somewhere!

Both our hot and cold water come from the same pipe, in effect, and both are potable as there's no cold water tank or hot water tank for any bugs to grow in. The design of our Itho three way mixer means that water at around 105 deg C flows through a silicone pipe that runs up the centre of the mixer outlet, so very effectively kills any bugs in the thing. We went for the stainless version, with a pressurised under-plinth heater (hence the higher than 100 deg C output) and it really is brilliant. Itho do a mixer kit that means you can do away with the hot water feed and get the hot water via a TMV from the boiling water tank and cold feed, but we didn't find out about this until after we'd bought ours. I think the combined three way units look a bit neater than the stand-alone boiling water taps, and I wasn't exactly taken with the aesthetics of the Qooker, which is why we went for the Itho. This is what ours looks like; the normal hot and cold mixer is on the right, the boiling water knob is circular, with the locking button, on the left:

A staircase with a shallow slope is one of the great hidden luxuries that makes a house feel sumptuous imo, even at the cost of an extra square metre of space (or two). It is like getting the orientation right - people who instinctively like the house may have trouble noticing why. And it makes a significant difference to whether people can keep going upstairs easily when old; we reckoned our parents found it convenient for an extra 5 years+. And far better for the fat people we are all becoming. I lived with the one below for several decades. It is a magnificent bruiser of a thing - Jacobean oak and pine with a gallery but sooooo comfortable. The shallow angle allowed my parents to keep going upstairs comfortably for a few extra years. Originally it had about 28 layers of paint from the Victorians onwards and we had two slaves architectural students who spent a whole summer restoring it. There were 18 steps between floors, which were a little shallower than usual and I think the angle was under 35 degrees. Suggest go for roughly that. And a generous half landing with a window seat, or space for a resting chair, is good :-). But that is more difficult in a modern setting. My other favourite is generously shallow and wide open well circular staircases. Suspect also that when falling down shallow staircases less damage is done as you go down less height for a given length of horizontal travel, as do half landings and curves (you stop quicker hitting the wall or floor less hard). That is just me guesstimating but feels about right. Looking at Jack's numbers, I think I might try for something like 165-70 rising and his 270 going if the house could take it. Ferdinand

If we are talking kitchen gadgets people should also consider an Insinkerator waste disposal. We have one and it is constantly in use, no food waste rotting away in a recycling bin. They are quite cheap £2-300 depending on model.

We have a three way boiling tap, and it is pretty hard to accidentally scald yourself. The boiling tap handle is locked, with a spring loaded push button to unlock it, plus the handle itself is spring loaded to close when you let go of it.

Ended up painting the spindles white as with an oak for we thought it was just too much oak so needed to break it up. The dog sits there and watches the front door ready to attack and lick visitors to death.

this thread is great, I plan to install a "boiling tap" as well.

What would the approx price of a qooker type tap and are they difficult to install

I can confirm that the pipe MBC uses fits the Wunda 16mm UFH manifold fittings just fine.

Despite his general lack of culinary abilities, my husband makes very good soft boiled eggs using a kettle. The only problem is when the shell fractures and the albumen leaks out - doesn't half make a mess of the insides of the kettle.

Keep it quiet - But when my wife moved here she may have tried to boil milk in the kettle to make hot chocolate. In a way I can see why she thought it would work. My American mother in law has a stove top kettle. I haven't seen one in the UK in years. Quooker is where its at. This is genius if you think about it, for saving a few minutes a day we are prepared to buy what is basically a fancy kettle for 40x the price.

High flows are the ones where you'd get pissed if they dropped in pressure / went of of mixing balance when someone turns on a shower or started running a bath: the main sinks, the baths, the showers. The low flows are what they say and flow rate isn't that important: the toilet cisterns, the hand basins, bidets, etc.

I went the same way (wundatrade). From memory, MBC uses 16mm pex-al-pex, and the wundatrade stuff connected directly to that without the need for special adaptors. I did ring the supplier before I ordered to confirm compatibility.

Arrgh! It's all coming back to me!!! I had a series of heated discussions with my wife and our architect about stairs while we were finalising our house design. His original plans had stairs that I thought were too steep. The rise wasn't so bad - 190mm, or something like that - but the going was far shorter than I felt comfortable with. Having lived in a few Victorian houses with narrow, steep stairs (and having slipped on the third last step of one while carrying my 3 month old son - he was fine, my elbow took the impact), I was adamant that our forever home would have comfortable stairs that wouldn't have me worrying about walking down them bleary-eyed in the morning. My architect thought it was all a waste of time, as the stairs he'd planned for us were within regs. My attitude was that the regs were a minimum compromise for safety, not an ideal standard for comfort and safety. With a lot of looking at various international guidelines and commercial regs, we ended up with about 182mm rise and 264mm going. I find this ratio extremely comfortable and never think about my foot placement. I'd have preferred an even lower rise given we presently plan to be here until we kick the bucket, but we had some other constraints on length that meant we couldn't manage this. Our stairs are about 950mm wide, from memory, and that's ample for passing in a domestic situation (assuming cake consumption in the house isn't too high!)

@pocster. Seek and ye shall find. Search the forum for hep20 and you'll see some active threads on all this -- including mine.

No probs - it's partly what I do for a living and there are elements of the regs which are often 'grey' areas where different Building Inspectors interpret the regs in different ways. Eg I rang up a very experienced L.A. Building Inspector in London today for a judgement on the surface spread of flame regs for a job we're doing with them and he didn't know the answer - he's gone off to ask a fire specialist in their department.

For part M, better to have a ground floor WC than not. As long as your changes make it no more unsatisfactory than before, you are fine.

My downstairs toilet in a new extension is not Part M compliant and no one raised an eyebrow as it in an existing house. So ask the question but you should be fine to do as you please. FWIW, most of the internal doors are only 30" and a couple including the original bathroom, previously the only WC are only 27"! I probably couldn't even make the existing doorway, where the old house and new extension meet, the correct size for Part M.

Do away with all cylinders etc and just fit an oil combi ? They're exceptionally good at producing DHW and you'll have a single box solution with no G3. Youll get a tidy Grant for around £2k Internal or chuck it outside in a coal shed External Seriously, it's a contender, unless your ever fitting PV.

Just like the term 'engineer'

Pin heads are small places. And self-builders have been know to err on the side of being assertive, @Mrs H. May I suggest a way into this market; a way which has low barriers to entry, and might be worth a little bit of investigation? I am willing to bet that there isn't one self builder who isn't welded to their computer - without the Internet, we'd all of us keel over and scream - it would hit us right in the bank balance. The Internet can be seen as part of the Gift Economy. Consider the many online channels you could employ to give some advice and assistance. Think about what types of support you could offer online (have a look at say, Emplaw, the Employment Law website as one model) There are many models; have a stand at the NSBRC in Swindon, attend self-build shows all over the place. Offer to give seminars and talks to self-builders. Link those activities to a developing Social Media strategy, and get yourself known on line as well as in person. Build a reputation for connecting with customers. There are lots of good media companies who run free courses on how to build an online presence. A few thousand pounds will see the job done well. Or you could look at a few small companies known to you and copy the Social Media model they use. For next to nothing. Whatever you choose, I wish you well. Ian

Hep 20 is recommended by our resident professional plumber and having received a sample from the company I am sold on it. I was a Luddite and used copper only as it was " bound to be better than plastic" but I am now converted, being able to feed long lengths in and out of joists etc is far better than lots of soldered bends and Joints and although plastic fittings are more expensive you use far fewer of them. Yes copper where it shows or next to boilers.

I would take a little care to say "main entrance" in your Planning App, just in case :-) .

It's probably just when you think about it a lot, but I suppose the term 'Front door' is specific to the front - really, the question is - does the main entrance door have to be at the front?

Well, I am prepared to be a convert...only used my sisters a few times. It's 5 years old and the biggest ring is smaller than her frying pan so my salt and chilli chicken wasn't cooking at the edge of the pan. The touch controls took a bit of getting used to as well. Power level 9 was not enough but the next one up was 'P' which was too fierce. Also was using a frying pan instead of a wok as twas a stir fry. However, everyone enjoyed the dinner in the end?. Sounds that from what @jack and @SteamyTea say these grumbles have been sorted by better hobs.

Going to put my 'Chefs' hat on now and be really blunt. A decent induction hod is so much better than any other method of cooking. They are more controllable, easy to clean, and at work, the lack of excess heat produced in the kitchen is a real bonus. The new pots and pans do not have to be expensive, my set at home cost about 20 quid and work fine (if you are worried about sticking/burning, learn how to cook). Lidl are selling a pretty good non-stick frying pan at the moment, makes frying eggs easy. Think it was about £15. One advantage with induction pans is that they do not need to be heavy, makes a difference when you have to juggle them all night. If you are going to spend £10,000, £20,000 or even £30,000 on your kitchen (in your new self build that may cost you £150,000 or £300,00), then £50 on a new set of pans is lost in the noise. As for features, the one I like the most is the temperature setting. Set something to say 140°C, and that makes frying easy, or at 80°C to let something simmer. I notice that this is not available on some models. The next best feature is the power setting, but takes a bit of getting used to (a gas hob is fixed temperature with variable flame size, an old electrical hob is variable temperature with fixed size, an induction is generally fixed power with pulsing to control mean power). Personally I dislike noisy timers at home (though at work we can't get ones that are noisy enough), so make sure you can vary the volume of these if they are fitted. I also dislike knobs and buttons, so some method of touch sensitive control is good. These do seem like a bit of Voodoo and take a while to trust them, but makes cleaning easy. And if you do have to quickly remove a flaming pan, you can just slide it sideways off the heat, nothing to get in the way. If you fit anything other than an induction hob these days, you are quite mad.

Exactly right. Get your spreadsheet out. Network.

A builder with experience in converting something similar will get you to the quickest, cheapest, ball-park estimate. If it's a conventional Barn conversion I would have thought it would be possible to find another locally that has just been finished (possibly up for sale), or in progress, find the builder and invite them to come and look at your barn to give advice and outline costs with a view to quoting on the conversion once a full drawing pack is available. It will only be a budgetary figure, but to get anything more accurate will require significantly more work and investment. One thing to bare in mind is that a conversion will very likely be more expensive than a new build. They are, typically, less efficient with floor space, assuming there is a some original structure that the LPA wishes to be preserved and identifiable in the converted building which often leads to double-volume spaces with vaulted ceilings. This has to lead to higher £ / m2 figures. I'd be going with that higher figure from the architect, plus a bit more,

I work across a few local authority (LA) areas (as an architect) building stuff. One LA has a Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL), other LAs do not. This is a tax on new homes which developers pay to the local council. As a self builder you can get exemption. One of my self builds is affected and there's quite a few bits of paperwork to get right or it will cost £1000s. It's vital to find out if a CIL applies as you have to do all the paperwork to gain exemption BEFORE starting any building work.

This is all far from easy. Preparatory work is almost never wasted. Some basic considerations (forgive me if I write about an issue that has already been covered) What's the end-in-mind? How will that be financed? How soon do you want the work done? How much time do you have to run the project? How much and what type of support do you have in place? I am always amazed by the level of commitment and energy shown by BH members - many of whom do a full time job. There is a core of BH folk who are old codgers like me: retired, recalcitrant, pig headed, determined. We have time. We are probably not too fussed about schedules, and likely can finance our way by selling our current house. Some are more fortunate than that. And we are unlikely to be building to sell and move on. Many combine standard 'normal' family life with self-building. Energy levels off the scale, fantastic personal organisation, significant technical understanding and experience, and a network of mates 'who-know-how-to' [...], loads of grit and determination. How they do it, I honestly don't know. Some do it serially. Guessing between the lines (let alone reading between them) it might help at this stage to write a simple cash flow forecast, set a budget, ask for fee proposals (for example some or all of these: SE, architect, architectural technician, solicitor, building planner, soil survey, topographical survey, ecology survey) and then take some decisions. At this stage forget the Builders' Merchants: too early. There is much to be gained by networking both on and offline. Read the PP with very great care. How with the foul drainage be sorted out? No off mains drainage no house. How long has the barn been on the market? Why? Ian

Hi @MrsB yes it can be frustrating but you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs!! We have spent north of £3k - not including the land obviously - and are no way near to digging the ground as yet. On the plus side, we have full planning permission, the Solicitor has been paid and we are confident and comfortable with our budget for when the time comes. Sadly, at some point you are going to have to break those eggs!! PW.

If it were me, I start by meeting up with the architect, you can't do anything without plans and it's sounds like the majority of the original plans meet your needs and only need tweaking with your additional requirements. The architect should be able to advise what additional proffesional input, Structural Engineers etc, will be required. Once you have the revised plans you could send them to one of the on line quantity surveyors, they will provide a detailed breakdown of what is required to complete the build. The one I used, based just outside Manchester, charged £120. The end cost will depend on how much you're willing to do yourself.

That's annoying. I'm pretty sure our old ISP had this and the one we're now with here (with a slow VDSL2 connection), PlusNet, have the same, it shows how much you've used when you log in to your account. Any reason for sticking with BT, rather than using a reseller? It seemed to me, when I was looking around a few months ago, that generally BT weren't the best value. Mind you, trying to make a fair comparison was not easy, it was a bit like trying to compare energy suppliers. I've come to two conclusions: a) The price comparison web sites are pretty useless, and I get the strong feeling that they steer you towards whoever is paying them the most. b) The pricing strategy of all these companies is deliberately designed to be as confusing as possible to customers so that the best deals are really hard to find.