AliG

The moderators decided to lock this thread as it continued to get off topic and personal.

For a small room like that I would consider removing the dividing wall and making it just one room. It will free up a lot of space. Then I would consider whether I need 2 doors to outside. I would lose the backdoor. Then the kitchen units could form a U around the left hand end of the room and the table could be in front of the window. A lot of course depends on your budget and what you want to achieve.

This is the problem with eaves ventilation, made worse by the house not being timber frame. At least that would ensure insulation to the top of the wall and not have dot and dab plasterboard. Looking at the picture, it appears that you have cold air getting behind the plasterboard at the top and the insulation ends before the end of the ceiling. The question is can you actually get it into the cavity without blocking the vents. Also if those vents were working you wouldn't;t have condensation in the roof. Sealing the top of the dot and dab should be relatively easy. If you can access the top edge of it you could seal it with spray foam from there or by drilling small holes and injecting foam. It won't be perfect but should make a big difference. Clearly the loft insulation has to extend to the edges also. Due to the issue with the eaves being ventilated, I wonder if cutting pieces of PIR to sit between the ceiling joists would be a better idea. Looking at the pictures it also appears that despite their claims there is not enough insulation in the walls. If there was you wouldn't be able to see all those voids.

If it’s only above the roof line and nothing else then no BR. I thought the plan was to remove the rest of it also on one side which would need BR. Looks like a BR application is being made anyway.

The price seems fair, but does the architect actually have expertise on this stuff? A heating and ventilation company would probably be your best bet for the MVHR, ASHP and heating. I don't see the architect adding much there if at all. The architect should be able to do the other stuff and detail drawings will likely be necessary for some of it. But you could be paying a lot for simply a list that says new windows to x u-value, insulate floor with PIR etc.

They could take a good stab at it from your electricity consumption. Consumption over say 2x the 2900kWh in the price cap and no rebate as you either use electricity for heating or don't need the rebate. Of course then someone with an EV will pipe up that it's unfair on them and it starts again.

I assume you weren't paying the architect for any kind of supervision during the build if he won't now provide the certificate? Otherwise, I would be asking for some kind of refund as he can't have his cake and eat it. If he didn't visit and you didn't pay then I guess the retrospective certificate might be cheaper than the architect was anyway, although you would have been able to reduce your mortgage payments sooner.

I wouldn't get hung up on the kitchen it is only going to vary the budget by a few thousand. A simple rule of thumb buying from a kitchen place is probably around £5-600 fitted for a cupboard and £1000 for drawers. You can definitely do things cheaper than this, but that gives a rough idea. Drawers are indeed much more useful but much more expensive. Drawers for your own use and cupboards for resale!

It shouldn't need planning unless you are in a conservation area or it is a listed building. It will require building regs approval.

We have Dantherm MVHR units, nothing fancy and do the job just fine. I don't even use the auto humidity sensors, nor do I use the different timed programmes, I found that they always ran faster when it was damp outside. I just set them on the lowest setting and leave them. I did have to turn them up when we had 9 people staying in the summer as the house got too hot.

It could actually be you yourself. Everyone knows what decisions they feel comfortable with and sometimes budget means you have to just make do with something which is fair enough, but I don't think this is the case here. Our kitchen designer drew it up with £12k of Gaggenau fridge and freezer. I would have felt absolutely scammed spending £6k on a fridge, so it can also be that you feel you have spent too much. But equally if I had built a stunning £3m house then skimped on the last £20-30k to get some nice fittings I would feel that I had let the house down and not done as nice a job as I could have. So it is just a matter of finding the right spot where you are comfortable and balancing costs with what feels right for you and your house. In this case I think @miike has the right idea for the look and there are ways to keep the cost of that down such as an ex display or used kitchen but it will still be part of pushing the cost up. Often I have found that I can get some of this stuff quite reasonably on line, we bought a most of our lights on AliExpress at a fraction of the cost here, but the fitting costs are often more than the cost of materials. I was only talking a few thousand on the kitchen and tiles, the roof is likely to be the biggest variance versus the budget.

On prelims, when you use a main contractor you end up paying maybe £1500-2000 a week for their time. Having built two houses, I found despite having main contractors I still spent an enormous amount of time looking for things, answering questions and so on. In fact on the second one I often felt I would have been as well doing it myself. How do you plan to manage the build if you are busy working? Is it far from where you live? The more you can be on site the better. It is extraordinarily time consuming. Lusso Stone stuff is nice, nice bathroom fittings seem to be a lot more reasonably priced than nice kitchen fittings. Are the basement people putting scaffolding up all the way to the roof level and leaving it when they are done? My parent's house and someone else on here at around half the size were quoted between 12 and 17k for scaffolding.

Clearly people can do whatever they like with their own house. I’m sure plenty of people disagree with my choices. Nevertheless the OP has asked for opinions so it is not like it is unsolicited advice. People would expect to find fittings in a house somewhat commensurate with its value and it can make things feel a little off if you don’t do this.

TBF I think you'd get a Siemens built in oven and built in microwave for around £2500 But you are looking at a minimum of Siemens/Neff appliances. Hob - £2500 Two Ovens - £2500 Fridge - £1000 Freezer - £1000 - More if you want ice etc Dishwasher - £800 I'd expect a Quooker at this price point - £1000 Then there is washing machine and tumble dryer - Another £1500-2000 I really would not go any lower end than these prices in this value of house. Everything we have is Siemens apart from WM and TD which are Miele and much more expensive and our house is in this price range. I see a lot of Miele/Gaggenau etc would would be more again.

If you look at someone like Pear Stairs https://www.pearstairs.co.uk you can get accurate pricing which you need to add fitting to. Our builder was quoting more than double what we paid with them. I think we paid around £8k for oak/glass and 3m of landing balustrade. I thought flat roofs were supposed to be cheaper and was horrified by the price. I think that would be a false economy in this value of house. Sounds like you won't be stuck if you go over budget which is the main thing I would worry about.

If you are suggesting putting costs on credit cards it does not sound like you have much room to manoeuvre. I think the cost is unrealistically low for what will supposedly be a £3m house. You cannot skimp on material quality on that value of house. As well as some of the individual figures being low, there are the inevitable small items that you don't realise you need until it is costed. A few things - 1. Fire stopping for the timber frame. £5k+ 2.Powder coated aluminium around the roof edges on the pictures. that will cost £50-100 per linear metre fitted. Looks like you might have £10k there. 3. Flat roofs can be surprisingly expensive especially when you include parapets and any features such as water outlets, concealed gutters etc. Plus the cost of boarding the roof, firing strips to create water runs and so on. I think you could be considerably more than your estimate. Depends how much of it is part of the frame. 4. £25k for a kitchen. Maybe doable if you get a used kitchen, the trouble is getting one that fits the plan. A new kitchen for this style of house would have around £10k in equipment in it alone. 5. Presumably you will need 2 stairways. I would be looking at something maybe wood and glass in this style of house, plus balustrades. At least double your estimate depending on the amount of balustrade. 6. Decoration - Assuming that half the floors are tiled/engineered wood. That is £80 a square metre, so £20k, You will have around 100sq metres of tiling in the other bathrooms/en suites so that is £8k. Your £14k estimate might cover the painting for this size of house. Maybe some of this is in the floors/ceilings number. 7. Do you plan on having any fitted wardrobes and a utility room - Maybe another £5-10k. 8. SF Joiner - Doors plus ironmongery plus frames and fitting will be at least £500 a door. Including skirting this number might be more like £15k. 9. Landscaping can be extremely expensive depending on the area of driveways, walls, garden etc. Assume around £100 a sq metre for hard landscaping. 10 Vapour membranes, air tightness tape, silicone etc can run into a good few thousand. Plumbing and heating look OK. Net net I think the £2000-2500 range is a much better estimate. Best thing to do would be to try and get some firm quotes for the larger figures especially the roof.

We have done render on renderboards on my parent's house. Main reason was that we were limited on the width of the house and this saved space. Also we have a mixture of wood cladding and render and it makes it easier to see the wood behind the render. Looks great, however the cost of battening the frame and putting the boards on was crazy and I think it ended up considerably more expensive than blockwork would have been.

It was this plan here which I discussed on p26 and 27 of the thread. https://www.theguardian.com/business/nils-pratley-on-finance/2022/aug/30/wanted-a-new-energy-contract-for-renewables-and-nuclear-projects The basic suggestion was that generators currently making excess profits would agree to new CfD contracts at around £162 per Mwh. The current CfD contracts last for 15 years and it was suggested that these new contracts would be at least as long or longer. The argument given was that generators would give up short term profits in exchange for longer term price certainty. My point was that £162 was although apparently cheap at the time was vastly above long term energy prices and we would simply be locking in a temporary issue for the next 15-20 years. My suspicion was it was a plan suggested by energy producers who knew what was going on. Politicians of course can be easily attracted to plans that make things look better today whilst giving someone else a problem in the future. Anyway, so far I look correct with wholesale prices already well below the mooted £162. There was a review going on that was supposed to set the new contracting process for renewables that would get away from them being priced against gas. I have not seen any results from this, I need to look. I believe that already new capacity is priced in a different way and as capacity continues to increase more and more capacity will not be impacted by the gas price. I have forgotten now though as I read about this in August.

We were away on a cruise last week and in Dubai at the end of it, so probably not watching as much news as normal. I doubt they were as excited about this news in the Middle East.

I'm more of a Sky News guy.

Great news, not reported, is that wholesale prices continue to fall. At this rate I would expect around a 40% drop in prices next winter. Electricity futures are around 16p, this would equate to around 20p/kWh at retail. Gas futures are around 127p which equates to around 6p/kWh at retail. Due to the lagging nature of the price cap it may go up a little before it goes down. The funny thing is that these prices are still well above three years ago, but will feel like a bargain relative to recent prices. I have to note that some idiots wanted to reconstruct with generators last august which would have locked in those prices for the next 15 years costing over £100bn. Prices are already down around 80% since then. It seems to me that the massive spike last summer was caused by Germany setting aside money to guarantee that they filled their storage. People knew they had to buy whatever the price and took advantage. ]]

The long term assumed solution for this problem is hydrogen. At the moment hydrogen is expensive, wasteful and inefficient but the research that I have read forecasts that in 10-20 years cheap excess renewable energy can be used to produce hydrogen which can then be used as a cheaper way of storing or transmitting electricity. In all cases you can just do the maths. What’s cheaper new cables, battery storage, pumped storage, hydrogen etc.

Very interesting article. Thanks The banning of onshore wind turbines in England was ridiculous and its reversal is well overdue. The siting of turbines where it is cheapest for producers with no benefit or indeed a net detriment to consumers shows once again how often legislation/regulation is poorly designed and then taken advantage of.

I had various discussions re doing this on my parent's house. In the end I could not get people to agree to put things in the same trench and also it was nigh on impossible to manage timings to do so. On top of this the sewer trench needs a considerably larger, probably deeper trench and is considerably more expensive to dig, seemed like roughly twice the cost per meter.

There is no general requirement for warranty length on repairs. I suspect they won't be interested after eight years, I would go to the factor and ask them to chase the repairer up. At first I thought that this would be covered by the Consumer Rights Act 2015 which is UK wide, but then further considering it, you presumably paid the factor who instructed repairs so this might be covered by the Property Factors (Scotland) Act 2011. https://www.gov.scot/publications/code-of-conduct-for-property-factors-2021/pages/section-7--complaints-resolution/ Unfortunately the Property Factors Act is a lot less specific about this kind of issue than the CRA. Basically you need to complain to the factor as a first port of call then escalate it if you don't get anywhere. If the factor agrees to do something about it they would probably have to get a report on whether or not the repairs had been done to a good standard and then use that to sue the repairers. Not that you want to hear this, but I have this kind of discussion with my parents all the time, someone should have complained as soon as the roof leaked. The longer you leave this things the more difficult it becomes to get something done about them.