AliG

In this case @jamiehamy is well within his rights to take them back. The comment about taking the last strip back though made me laugh. When I was at university I worked in a supermarket. We had one customer who was constantly at it, the management used to hide when he came in. He would buy a big pack of something and then bring the last one back looking for a "refund and replace". I remember him getting 24 oranges to replace the last 1 of a 12 pack. A few stores in the area had banned him. This is the kind of idiot who ruins good customer service for reasonable people.

Did you not see the story re the BBC using money from a fund to boost TV presenter diversity to train Dion Dublin to present the show. I'm sure that's what the money was meant for!

I found the planning application. I don't feel I should post someone's application without them knowing about it. They are putting a parking area with retaining walls right next to the road and then building the house on a flatter area further up the site. The main issues seems to be grading the site for access to the area where they are building, they won't be removing much earth. The path from the parking to the house will be pretty steep. Due to the layout of the street it looks like the house faces a gap between houses further down the hill so should have a nice view of the river Clyde. Indeed it looks like the plot that hasn't been built on may have one of the best views in the street.

We've all forgotten Laurence Llewelyn Bowen and Changing Rooms. I didn't even bother checking to see if he's an architect. To be fair it's an interior design show, I just felt he deserved a mention amongst the other luminaries.

I don't know, but I really miss the original House Doctor. She was so no nonsense, yet i felt she really did care about people under the frosty exterior.

Yes where architects are often good is thinking about the house relative to the site, where we tend to think of the interior practicalities. It may be that this has caused them to make some sub optimal interior design ideas. I thought the house to the east would mean you cannot have windows so close to the boundary, but I seem to remember from someone else's design that a derelict building/empty piece of land has no right to not be overlooked. The council may still want to try enforce their local rules re how close windows are to boundaries. When we designed out house I was more exact in giving the architect the size of the rooms that I wanted. Maybe if you show hime the room size here and give him 280sq metres he will come back with a more efficient design. I would also consider making part of the upstairs one and a half storeys high to create some variation and interest.

Very well put @jamiehamy . To be fair on architects they don't know how you live and what would be most useful for you. We went and designed all the bathrooms and kitchen before we finalised the house design as it would have been very disappointing to find they would not fit if the house had been approved before we finished the designs. And TBH our en suite is still too small. I have even decided what goes in each drawer and cupboard in the kitchen.

With that design you could create a really nice sight line from the front door through double doors into the kitchen and out the windows at the back. You could even move the family area over slightly and perfectly align the front door with the centre of the roof above the family area and the double doors into the kitchen. I far prefer entering the kitchen in a circulation space between the table and kitchen area. If you turn the island through 90 degrees then put cabinets behind it you can make the kitchen a bit smaller and the hall shorter so waste less space. Or you could fit in a study. I think it would be hard to use that space behind the island as is when you already have an are for a table.

OK, i have to say it now @Barney12 has said it, I didn't notice the en suite was missing a window too. The architect has done a really poor job. It's your house and I am sure you are really excited about it, but really the effort the architect has put in is so disappointing. You could probably find an off the shelf design from a timber kit company that is better.

I knew someone would want to try and build their own funicular once they saw it!

Hi, As others have said, the upstairs design makes pretty poor use of the space. Bedroom 2 is bizarrely long and has no wardrobes. There is room there for a wardrobe and an ensuite. Considering you asked for 2 ensuites, there is loads of room for one in any of bed 2, 3 or 4 so I don't know why you didn't get one. I am not sure why the Master Bed has a Dressing Room and wardrobes separately. Bedroom 3 and 4 at 2.9m wide are a touch narrow. Again Bed 3 is very strangely proportioned in length versus width. I would make the garage maybe deeper to make the rooms above wider. Maybe an extra 0.4m. A kingsize bed plus duvet hanging over the end is around 2.1m long so you only have 0.8m clearance. Bedroom 4 should not have a wardrobe at each end. You could take the Bed 4 wardrobe and store and make an upstairs laundry room, or just try and make the house a little smaller. A 4m garage door in a 5.9m wide garage is not optimal. I would always recommend having as wide a door as possible. There is room for a 5m door which will be much more comfortable to get 2 cars through. The wall between the house and garage should be shown as insulated, this may just be an oversight. As has been said you could get a study out of the cupboard and part of the snug. Then have an understair cupboard. You would need to screen the window from next door if you did this. When you say £300k budget are you including architects fees, floor finishes, kitchens etc. All in I think you'd struggle to get below £1200 a square metre, although it is not an overly expensive, fussy design. Why is there a window in the garage, unless you plan a workshop in there, that is a pointless waste of money. In Scotland I always like some kind of protection around the front door, I would maybe try to set it back from the outside wall to create a porch area. (I see you requested this)Unless you use Corian or a similar material you cannot have a 3.5m island without a join in the worktop. I would hate to have a join in an island. If you have a large kitchen/family/dining room I prefer not enter the room in the kitchen area. It creates a tight entry into the room and if dishes are piled up on the island for example they will be the first thing that people see. If you do want to keep costs down, each bathroom adds quite a bit of expense. If I had a second ensuite I would maybe make the family bathroom smaller. The suggested layout for it is strange, although I would consider it quite preliminary at the moment. I think you could probably redesign the house to be 10% smaller to reduce the build cost for little less usable space. Don't believe what the architect says about costs, they are often optimistic. Oh and finally, they seem to have forgotten to put a window in the bathroom!

Sorry @Oz07 I missed your post that the merchants will cut it into strip, if so then that's all good. Actually I am being daft. I was thinking it is awkward to cut 25mm strips from 200mm thick board, but cutting 200mm strips from 25mm thick board is a lot easier.

My floor construction is exactly the same. It would hold in place better the way you have suggested, but I don't think you can buy rolls of 25mm thick insulation that are 200mm wide(I might be wrong). It would be a pain to cut lots of 25mm strips from a 200mm thick board. If you can get the insulation or cut it from thick boards then your way would work.

On my site the removal of earth to equalise a 1m rise across the depth of the house was a surprisingly high cost. They are going to be paying a lot for simply dumping the earth they remove. As @JSHarris asked is there access at the rear? There are certainly houses further up the hill. There are quite a few houses in Edinburgh built on hillsides like this. There were no access rules when they were built, but I for one would hate having a house where there was a large number of steps up from the street or the garage which is often built at the bottom of the slope. It is just too awkward. My in-laws have a site that slopes by around 3m from the road to the back of the house. This works OK as they simply added an extra storey underneath with the garage in it. This looks like around 10m judging by the fence panels. That is some slope.

This thread got me thinking. In the extension on my current house the pipe is run behind the stud wall between the meter and the boiler. I wondered why this wasn't being considered as an option. I did think it was unusual at the time it was done and I did wonder if there were issues with it. So from reading up on it now, you can run it inside a wall but it is not ideal and it should be vented to prevent gas build up in the event of a leak. I believe that the wall my pipe is inside is open to the loft above. However, it has now got me thinking the same question in my new place. The gas will come in next to the boiler, but there are 2 gas fires 30m away at the other end of the house, how do I get the gas there? I will check with the builders tomorrow, they either already have a plan, or haven forgotten that they need to get it to the fires. Reading up on TracPipe it seems that it is rated for being buried directly in concrete/screed. Only the ends where there will be joints need to be in a ventilated area. This is where the meter and boiler are so should be fine. So in option 3 as suggested above the TracPipe would not have to be in a ventilated duct, it could be inside the concrete floor so there would be no issues with air tightness. Is this correct?

I don't believe that their are private building inspectors in Scotland, although we did have the recent issue of failing walls in PFI school buildings which seemed to be self inspected by the builders. As was already pointed out though building control give a lot more hassle to self builders than developers and don't seem to inspect all developers houses. We had a house here were the roof wasn't tied to the house, it could have blown off in a storm. Building control had signed it off and weren't' interested in the issue.

@PeterW How exactly did they propose banning you from someone's house?

It does seem that the time has come for better legal protection for new homebuyers. We had a long snagging list when we moved into our current house. It seems pretty much standard. However, the builder was pretty good about fixing them. It seems that is the main difference between the good and bad builders. Reading the story and the catalogue of issues with Harron, I cannot believe anyone would buy a house from them. I still remember in my previous house there was no light bulb in three places. I didn't put it on the snagging list, I just put in bulbs. The two places in the house the light switches were upside down and the third place was the garage. The garage was not next to the houses it was at the end of the row of houses. When I put the bulb in I found they had not connected the garage to the electricity supply. They had to dig up the road. Clearly someone realised the problem when they tried the bulbs. They could have fixed it but instead left me to find it. It's just a level of general laziness and lack of pride in the job. Presumably if they knew that legal comeback was easier then they would take more care like for most consumer products. The UK could also do with a lemon law for cars in a similar vein. I think it is to stop people pulling out of these large purchases for small reasons that they have less legal protection, but this is exploited by many businesses to provide a substandard product. When I have had problems the NHBC have been utterly and totally useless. If I was buying a house off a developer I would seriously consider getting a full survey on it at completion today. It may seem like a waste of money but finding any issues straight away would make trying to get them fixed somewhat easier.

Progress finally seems to be a lot faster, although we are around 10 weeks behind the original schedule. The first floor slab is on and they have strapped out the underside for the ceilings. The first floor walls then went up on top of the slab and the slab for the second floor games room went in last Friday. Last week the steel started to arrive for the roof. I was shocked to see how heavy duty it is. The steel you can see at the left hand side of the house is for an area that is 1.5 storeys high. The architect says that the SE tried really hard to make normal attic trusses work but we had to have steel. It makes you wonder how all the old houses manage without loads of steel in the roof! The trusses are on site too and will start to go in after the steel. The roof structure should be finished in around three weeks then we can put the sarking on. The windows also start to arrive and go in next week. So between these and the roof we should be basically watertight in around 5 weeks. Kitchen sitting area looking west to the terrace. Kitchen table area looking south. Bedroom two and garage below. Front porch, hall and looking up to the second floor slab.

@ProDave I was going to ask the same thing. Maybe you can buy them at the same place as "quality insulation"

That's fair. They can't sell anything worse than an A+ now. I wonder if without this rule people would accidentally buy stuff with that kind of high costs. An A+++ is much cheaper theoretically than A+ but it is a saving off a small amount so maybe that is why people are less bothered. I suspect that many people have larger fridges and freezers than they need also as they look flash but this increases the cost. I just changed the spec for my new place as it was going to save a fortune and otherwise we would have ended up with a massive fridge that was empy most of the time.

Do you think people really care what the energy rating of fridges etc is? A fridge freezer uses £40-50 a year of electricity. i don't think people care whether it uses a bit more or a bit less. Clearly if it used £100 they would probably notice. I am tight as anything and have no idea of the specific rating of any of my appliances.

Yes I saw the same thing. the prices are insane. It is just a curtain track with a small electric motor. How do they get to hundreds of pounds. I found these on eBay which are a bit more reasonable but can't comment on the quality. Looks like they'd do the job. http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/2-7-Meters-276-Remote-Control-Electric-Curtain-Tracks-Free-Fast-Delivery-/231807878284?var=&hash=item35f8d3848c:m:mGz0EjgWbi6Os-ZH9bKzqeA

Re case storage, recently when I have been on cruise they have raised the beds so that you can shove cases under them. Makes a massive difference as they can take up a lot of room and you can just unfold a big case, leave stuff in it and push it under the bed.

Joe at The Media Factory did my current cinema room and they are doing all the media in my new place. Currently I have Octava HDMI over Cat 5 but as you say @Barney12 HDMI distribution is a pain/expensive and I am trying to avoid it in the new place. Previously it saved on Sky Multi room subs, but Sky Q doesn't charge extra for multiple rooms so I have moved to that and cheap Fire TVs