AliG

I think that is just supply, but it does include VAT. This looks like the real finished item

Thanks @newhome. Just had a look at it, the electric tariff is good, but the gas tariff is very expensive. I am considering splitting my electric and gas providers to see if I can get a better deal that way. When I get a quote at the moment, electricity is coming in at around 14.4p/kwh whereas EDF is 12.59, so more than 12% cheaper. But EDF's gas price is 2.976/kwh versus the cheapest quotes at around 2.4p so more than 20% more expensive. My current tariff which runs out in December is crazy cheap - 11.98p for electricity and 2.26p for gas. I totally lucked out when I switched to it.It does have a high 42p a day standing charge, so it only works out cheaper if you are a big user.

It is an odd size certainly, I would think 5.5x5.5 or 6x6 is better. I wondered about the structural engineering. It would seem stupid for it not to be adequately built but stupid things happen. These ones are nicer but the prices are comical. https://solisco.co.uk/configure-stage-1/

Wall mounted toilets so you can mop under them. I believe rimless are easier to clean. Keep wood/laminate away from sinks and baths in bathrooms as they will blow and are hard to clean without damaging the surface eventually. So no laminate countertops and bath fronts. Gloss kitchen cabinets show fingerprints, however they are easier to clean and less likely to stain. My kitchen designer says not to recess the induction hob as dirt builds up n the 2mm gap around the edge. She is adamant that they should be mounted proud of the worktop. A sink wide enough to take a full oven sheet flat in the bottom of it. In our old house the sink was narrow so things stuck out at an angle and you couldn't steep them. Avoid very square cornered sinks - the corners are hard to clean. We have a white silestone sink in the kitchen, it gets easily stained, although cleans with Barkeepers friend, but stainless steel gets easily scratched. A waste disposal so you don't have to collect rotting food for recycling. A full splashback in kitchens/utility room and not an upstand. Washable paint I guess would be a cheaper alternative. Water based gloss not oil based on woodwork as oil based turns yellow faster. Walk in showers to avoid all the various rubber gaskets around doors that need cleaned and look horrible after a few years. A mistake we made - do not get rough surfaced, stone looking tiles. They are a nightmare to clean. Big cupboard in the hall or somewhere else if you tend to come in via he garage or back door for coats, shoes etc. Otherwise they end up lying all over the place. No carpets, especially light coloured. My wife was insistent on light carpets in our last house. On the stairs they looked knackered after a few years. The edges turned grey as they never get as well cleaned as the rest of the carpet. Two dishwashers if you have the space.

I have just emailed Octopus to see what the 3-phase SMETS2 meter availability is. A couple of people say that Octopus have installed 3-phase meters for them in the south of England, so you might be OK @Dan F As I have PV and an EV, and use a lot of electricity, I reckon that I could save £4-500 on Octopus Go or Agile. At the moment the Octopus Go tariff is extremely cheap. They are charging 5p/kwh for 4 hours a day and the rest of the day their price is as cheap as the lowest electricity prices available to me on switching sites. The average price across the day of Octopus Agile might be even lower. I reckon that I can get around 1/3-1/2 of my electricity use to be during the night.

This seems like a very good deal if you are planning on a carport anyway. What am I missing? £5995 for a 24sq metre carport including 3.6kw solar system as the roof. https://www.solarshop.co.uk/solar-carports-and-patio-shading#!/Solar-Carport-24sqm/p/206547638/category=19668082

My architect organised it, it came from a firm of fire engineers so I don't know too much about it. I think what happens though is that the building control officer requests it, so until you put in a warrant you won't know if it is needed.

No problem, the ground floor bedroom doors would probably have to be self closing fire doors too, but that isn't a big deal.

Sprinklers would probably be enough, but you would need a fire report confirming this too I think. I was about £7000 for those two items, plus I have a 1000l water tank so the sprinklers will work even if there is an issue with the water supply.So you will need to put that somewhere. A mist based system didn't seem to be considered as robust although I never pushed it.

Those pictures you have posted are from the US where building regs are much less strict than here. The problem you have is that the kitchen is open to the stairs. That causes a lot of issues with the regs. The issue is, if there was a fire somewhere, could you get down from the second floor and outside. A "protected" staircase is how you normally do this. So we have three floors in our house and all the doors between the hall and living rooms are fire doors. Thus if a fire broke out in any room then it should be contained and you could walk downstairs and out. In your design if a fire broke out in the kitchen or living room, it could stop people getting down the stairs from the second floor as the stairs are open to that room. A sprinkler system as you suggest might get around this. You would probably need a fire report drawn up. That is what we had to do. If you reconfigured the first floor so that the kitchen and living room were one room, then this was separated from the stairs and dining/sitting room then you could get a hall into the first floor which would sort things. I would also then carry on the stairs up to the second floor, rather than put them in the corner with that long hall.

Not far from me, I must have missed he application. Most of the issues are due to putting ASHP in older poorly insulated houses, shouldn't be an issue in a well insulated new build.

I feel bad as I am trying not to insult someone's style choices which are a matter of personal taste. I couldn't decide if the choices here were those of the architects or the owners. If it's the owners, then fair enough, it is their money, but I couldn't help but think they would not have come up with this on their own. Indeed this house broke many of the rules I would set for sensible design - Narrow hall, multiple floor levels, weird shaped rooms, no natural light to the hall, etc. Planning is so random, they would't allow the slim bricks last week as not in keeping but allowed this totally not in keeping house.

MVHR is just a better way of ventilating a house without heat loss, it doesn't move enough air to change the temperature of rooms.

I am glad someone asked this as I had the same thought. I have never seen an expansion joint at a corner, it seems strange to me.

I did wonder about the insulation, I assume was just stuck to the inside, but they are always a bit vague about this stuff

We have a cinema room with a rack of equipment and a projector in it. The heating has never been on in this room no matter how cold it has been outside. With a few people in the room watching a movie the temperature can easily get up to 27/28C. I knew it would be hot so had them make the MVHR an extract to move the heat around, but it doesn't't make any difference. What does make a difference is simply leaving the door open into the hall, but it is a vastly larger area. The AV cabinet is also open at the back to the utility room which is connected to the garage. In the summer I leave the door open into the utility and that really helps. If you are creative about it, you could try to use the waste heat to heat the rest of the house depending on the position of the equipment. Try to ventilate it to a colder area or an area that will need heated.

Just watched this week's episode with the family. We all hated it. I didn't mind the concrete boxes too much, can't imagine them being most people's choice, but the interior was not to our liking at all. Funnily enough one of the owners said that the utility room was their favourite and it was nice. The kitchen was way too dark despite there being lots of windows elsewhere. I couldn't understand the bare metal stair replacing the original stair and the architect saying that they wanted to lean into the dark narrow hall and make it even darker. Painting the front of the house black was a shocker. This is why we have so many conservation areas and planning laws. The week before was OK, although again why paint the bricks.

This seems very odd. If the survey has not been done and repairs agreed to why are they stating to do a repair that makes it more difficult to see what he problems are. I would not be allowing any work until there is agreement on all the work that needs to be done (unless it really has to be done to stop further problems)

In my last developer built house, the roof consistently creaked and made noises from when we moved in. We were not the only people with this issue. Many complaints to the builder and NHBC were fobbed off, they had the roof looked at by the timber frame manufacturer who then wrote everyone a letter saying it was installed correctly. One neighbour who was trained as an architect wouldn't let it lie. She got a commercial property surveyor to write a full report on her house. Another 5 or 6 of us then had the same thing done. If I remember rightly it probably cost around £2000 a house and we got a discount as it was spread across many houses, it was 15 years ago now. Anyway as well as finding numerous small snagging issues, the surveyor found that the roofs were not built according to the drawings. They were supposed to have supports added on site to the factory built rafters. On top of this hey had not been attached the the walls and could theoretically have blown off in a storm. This was why they were constantly noisy and creaking. The only way to remedy it was to strip the roof of all the tiles, put the missing pieces of wood in then retile the roof. Without the input of the surveyor the builder would likely have continued to ignore us. NHBC were an absolutely outrageous waste of time. Much as your issues seem more obvious at some point if they won't do anything about them you will need to get a professional involved who they will listen to.

My architect often says that he prefers a site with some restrictions, I think it helps to define where to start. One of the things I thought an architect brought to our design was that he considered these things. Not just a preference for rooms facing south or west to get more light but also the relationship with the garden and the views as you move around the house. I would be quite disappointed if an architect was not taking these things into consideration considering how expensive they are. The street I live on has large plots and houses, but a lot of the older houses have quite short driveways and garages set very close to the road. The conclusion that I have come to is that they site things near the road to reduce the cost of the driveway, ignoring the fact that the garages are so far from the house that no one uses them and a garage is not the prettiest vista to present to the street. The house we knocked down faced south east at the back despite being on a massive plot. I really have no idea why, it didn't face the majority of the garden on the west side. TBF this is one of the worst aspects that I find of older houses, particularly pre the 1950s where they often have a very poor relationship with the garden.

Welcome, where are you building? I am in Colinton. GSHP is surprising, I couldn't see how it worked due to the high cost of putting in the coils.

Around a quarter of the outside of the building will be the bifolds (excluding the floor which will lose a lot less heat if it is on the ground). Assuming a U-value of 1.2 for these versus 0.25ish for the walls and 0.2ish for the roof, you will lose almost as much heat through the doors as through the rest of the room put together. So if you want to make it easier to heat I would make the bifolds smaller, or better insulated. Changing the wall U-value would make negligible difference to the amount of heat required. Even when considering the bifolds, as it is just one room, spending a lot of money to reduce the cost of heating would not pay for itself. For example improve the U-value of the walls to 0.2 would save around £5 a year, I am assuming you don't even heat the room half the time. However 12000 BTU is enough to heat an entire house, it would be multiple times what is needed to heat this space so you can certainly keep it warm enough.

We have had a couple. I thought I was going to have to get a ladder out to remove one body, but it was gone within two weeks. Kudos to my wife who said this would happen.

I recently tried to price up a double garage if it was built by a main contractor. I was getting to a number in the low 20s with a flat roof and rendered. This assumed a good quality electric double door. The big expense seemed to be the foundations/slab. I did look at single versus double skin and concluded that an extra skin adds maybe £1000 in cost compared to a single skin and was probably worth it for the lack of hassle in the long run. You lose space due to piers in a single skin anyway.

I would look at the planning history for your street and see if anyone else has applied for a similar extension and been rejected. A look on Google maps shows that pretty much none of the houses on the corners have side extensions, a couple seem to have small single storey ones in the area. The council may refuse on breaking the building line, again on all the corners, the side of the house on the corner lines up very well with the front of the house behind it, or due to traffic sightlines, although I don't think this would be any worse than currently. As said the actual objections are just complaints they should have made to you personally and are of no planning consequence.