AliG

Wouldn't acoustic insulation roll be better? PIR is poor in terms of sound insulation as it is light and rigid. The point is correct though, if noise is a concern it can be dealt with in the design. I would have thought someone getting out of the bed is more disturbing.

We have three MVHR units, despite my request one is in a plant room and two are in the loft. One takes about 2 minutes to change the filters, one takes about 20 minutes of faffing about with ladders etc and one cannot be changed and needs to be moved. I wish I had really insisted they put them somewhere easy to get at. One unit is in the loft directly above our bedroom, I have never heard it running. Any kind of enclosure at all such as suggested and you will not hear the actual unit.

Assuming that you cannot lose the 40mm in the door frame, I would cut the bricks and raise the internal lintels. It is not a big job at this point compared to compromising your house. In our house I remember one of the door lintels was put in one course too low by mistake. It was not a big job to cut out above it, move it up and then pack below it.

I think @Ferdinand is pretty much spot on. Sadly in your case, the rules are unlikely to help you out. Is their rear extension also going to be two storeys? I might be more worried about it blocking sun from the south west when it is higher in the sky than the side extenson blocking it from the west as this may already be blocked by the current house and hedge. The south end of the side extension might also be an issue here. If you think about it though, the windows are entirely shadowed by your house presumably until the afternoon. Only around 2pm would the sun come out of the shadow of your house. Is it appreciably brighter at this point than earlier on? If not the extension will likely not make much difference but the suggestions re narrower frames etc would help at any time of the day. If yes then you have more to worry about. If you wanted to circumvent the rules you could try and get a local councillor onside to call it into committee. They often ignore planners and the rules, although this could be overturned on appeal. However I would ask that you consider my point above and whether you will actually be disadvantaged as much as you are worried about first.

These people can do a double glazed roof-light with around a 1.2 U-Value or triple glazed at around 0.9. https://roof-maker.co.uk/rooflights/lanterns/slimline-rooflights/ they give you a price instantly on the web-site. They can make a 5m2 lantern light. I would be worried that as well as having a poor U-Value that rooflight would be very noisy. The 3.0 U-Value on door D3 seems to be an assumed value. It is covered up by the word Draft, but if it is a steel fire door it may have a U-Value more like 2.2.

I'll raise you another 5 inches for a Model X, it and a Range Rover are the widest cars you can buy. A Transit is only a couple of inches wider.

Once they actually connect ours up, my assumption is we will leave it open during the day and close it at night. We get at least one delivery a day and I don't want to have to constantly be opening and closing it, I wouldn't be surprised if some delivery drivers just give up if you don't answer immediately. I checked, it is 3.5m, 3.4m is as low as I would feel comfortable with, but I am very paranoid about scratching the car. The Tesla that we have is a very wide car. I also wanted people to be able to get vans up to the house if they come with a large delivery etc, you can get a 7.5 tonne lorry through if you have to. Actually the builders got a cherrypicker stuck in the garden just as they were finishing off the house, they brought an artic up the driveway to tow it out, but they then hit one of the gate posts and dislodged it on the way out. They had only built them the week before. As it needed rebuilt we moved it over another 100mm.

We have a sliding cantilevered gate and a pedestrian gate. If I did it again I would just have one sliding gate and no pedestrian gate as it is very expensive and the pedestrian gate will probably hardly ever e used. I notice that most of the gates around here pu tin recently are solid wood infill. I personally feel they are a bit unfriendly so went for a powder coated steel gate that you can see through. Really though it is a matter of personal taste I would say. I am always worried about scraping the car and we have taken our gate to 3.5m. Our car is very wide, but if you approach the gate at an angle it still feels tight, particularly if someone parks opposite it. I tend to swing over the other side of the road then turn into the gate.

I found this on the Plasmor website - A couple of things - 1. It looks like your build up has a U-Value of 0.25, I would check the SAP calculation has this data and not generic data. 2. You can get that down to 0.18 using Xtratherm CavityTherm but it costs £26ish a square metre compared to about £6 for the Dritherm. The uplift for using insulated plasterboard would be more like £8 a square metre compared to £20 here.

If it isn't ordered yet and you don't need the island to be 1200, I think changing it to 900mm would sort you out in the simplest way.

We don't have a vestibule. Unless you make it so large that a few people can comfortably stand in it, they just get in the way a lot of the time. I think they are a relic of poorly sealed and insulated front doors. I'll give you the utility room route one, I always look for the routes around people's plans to see if they have issues like this. I cannot see any obvious way to have done it better. You are right in that I think people often draw an island with a table next to it and it needs more space than you would think. I reckon when planing a table position, ideally you want to think how far out will a chair sit when someone pushes it up to stand back and then you need another 800-1000m behind this again for circulation space. This means that a table should be at least 1.6m from an island. But it is the kind of small compromise you sometimes have to make. Have you tried the table all the way to the right so that you can only go between it and the island and not around both sides. One wide space might work better than two smaller spaces? I guess that would require moving the lights.

Lol, you are asking for it when it is already built. You have done a great job there, I wouldn't want to be negative about someone's house but really I cannot see any issues at all. There are more radiators than I would expect upstairs, is that because you are using the ASHP and running the water through them at a cooler UFH temperature?

I priced up building a double garage and reckoned it would be in the low 20s, this is a 50% larger building with insulation, but you are getting to close to the same price just for the slab. I put up a thread asking about garage build. The house will be timber frame with render board on the outside. The architect mentioned maybe we do this for the garage, but when you price it up, a cavity block wall is really cheap to build which is what people suggested to me. If you don't expect this room to get that much use, I would be looking at building a basic insulated building, basically a garage with Rockwool in the cavity and standard strip foundations unless there is a reason for a raft. Not sure what the cheapest floor build up would be but a raft seems like an expensive way to do it, maybe you just need an old school suspended timber floor with insulation. It is a single storey building so shouldn't need major foundations. I wouldn't be recommending this at all for a house, but for a building with infrequent use the extra cost would never be recouped in running costs. Maybe you plan to use it all the time, but I would question how much use a building 50m away will get when it is cold. As suggested a timber garden office type of building is another option, but unless you can build it yourself, a block built building will probably be a similar price and more durable.

You can get a room sealed wood burner. The issue you would have to watch for is they can generate too much heat in a very well insulated house. As you don’t have a site in mind yet I would just keep to a room schedule and a list of wants. The specific plan of a house would be incredibly different plot to plot.

@PeterW is correct. A wider cavity is probably the cheapest solution, if you used 37.5mm insulated plasterboard on the inside you would also get the U-Value down to 0.2 or thereabouts. This is simple if you already plan to use plasterboard but more expensive. I don't know why most houses in England still seem to be built this way, it would fail the minimum regs in Scotland

I agree on keeping a bedroom cosy, I think the way to think about them is the sleeping area, storage/wardrobes, relaxing space and then an en suite. Each of these requires some floorspace. So the sleeping area with the bed in it probably only needs to be around 3.3x3.3-4x4m, more than this and the space starts to be wasted. Then if you want storage that is extra space, then if you want a sitting area that is more space again and then you have an en suite. My daughter's and main guest bedroom are very large as we planned to have sitting areas in them for example, without that they would just be a bed sitting in a pointlessly large space. I suspect that if you default to the family bathroom versus the en suite to relax at the moment, it is because it is a nicer room. My wife loves to spend hours in the bath and getting our ensuite right was very important to her. No change was made to the house design after we started to build, except our ensuite which we redesigned three times. The bath is in an alcove with a TV in the wall, not only does she love it, but our daughter prefers it to her en suite and likes to use the bath so she can watch the TV.

I thought this too but wouldn't worry about it too much. Certainly avoid very bespoke things like 2.2m doors or 2.8m ceilings if you want to save money, but built dimensions are unlikely to be exact enough and a lot of fittings as well as tiles actually benefit from not fitting exactly, eg framing around kitchen cupboards and tiles are usually laid with a grout line in the centre of a room and cut at the sides.

Welcome, As people have said you can probably save a lot doing all the work yourself. Many people are coming in the £1500-2000 a square metre range when using a main contractor and high end finishes and insulation. More modest tastes can probably get you in the £12-1300 range and doing as much work as you suggest yourself could well get that down to £1000 a square metre. I really would caution you on the time it will take you though. That is a large house. If you got a builder to do it I would expect them to take over 6 months after the shell was finished. Doing a lot of the work yourself could easily take two years. On a personal note, I am going to retire next year after working away for 18 years. I very much look forward to spending time with my family. The kids will be grown up and away soon enough. I would avoid a basement unless it is the only way to get the floorspace that you need as they are expensive to build. If you can get the same size of house on the plot above ground then do that. Using the roof space on the other hand is cheaper space if you want a larger house, a nice alternative is high ceilings upstairs in some spaces. At the moment, I would just plan and plan and plan. How all you use rooms, who will be there, where will the furniture be, what way does the window face? You can always redecorate etc, but once the fabric of the house is built you are pretty much stuck with it, so that is the key thing to worry about. You have a nice spacious footprint which is good, but I think you need to work on the layout. Overall the man issue is that the allocation of space between rooms seems odd with bathrooms larger than bedrooms and 2 rooms that are only 3x3m then 2 that are 2x3m Downstairs - 1. We wanted a grand stair which it looks like you have gone for too, but it is too close to the front door. It will make the hall feel cramped despite being large. 2. Study seems about right, but the snug/tv room which would expect to have more people in it is too small. We have a cinema room and everyone just ends up in there watching the TV on the big screen anyway, so I would worry it wouldn't be used. 3. Is that a pantry or utility room? Fine for a utility, too large for a pantry. We considered a pantry but it didn't fit neatly into the floorplan. Now when I consider that all the food in the house fits in the fridge, freezer and two cupboards in the kitchen I think a pantry would just lead to storing lots of stuff we don't use. 4. The kitchen is too narrow. You would struggle to get a sofa in there next to the table and feel comfortable. Keeping circulation room around furniture is important to have a feeling of space. 5. The gym is too small. We have been using a larger room (4.3x3.5) than this since lockdown and find it too small. What we have though is french doors in the room, so we often exercise between inside and outside which works really well. I would want access to the garden from a gym. What I would do is combine the snug and library into one room like a very formal lounge/library. Then I would make the kitchen lager so it has a proper sitting area using space from the pantry.I wonder if you designed the house from the outside in. For our house I gave the architect a list of rooms that we wanted and the rough sizes then he designed the house around them. 6. 5.2m is not deep enough for a garage, I made this mistake on my last house. Plenty of large cars are around 5m long. You would barely be able to get it into the garage and not be able to get past it. I reckon you need at least 6m and ideally closer to 7m if you can. As the garage is 10m across I would probably put the car area at one end or the other rather than in the middle. I would also consider putting the utilities in the garage to have more space the house. Upstairs, that hall will be really nice, we also have an upstairs laundry, it is great. 1. Especially as you say you may sell you really need to have en suites. 2. I would reduce the size of the bathrooms and add in ensuites, maybe losing one of the small rooms. I think this is enough detail for now. I suspect you could go back and redo the plan once you hear people's input.

Hi @mjward Part of the reason to build your own house is to have things as you would like them, so if that is really what you want to do go ahead. As for my input, I wouldn't even consider buying a house without an en suite. At the size of house you seem to be building, 300sq metres, people would consider it very strange indeed. This size of house normally has two en suite plus a family bathroom. So if you plan to sell at any point I think it is a bad idea. As to the very large bathrooms with a lot of floor space. I do like a generous bathroom, but I have been in a couple of houses with similar bathroom layouts to what you suggest. A large square room with bathroom equipment dotted about actually feels quite odd. You need to design interest into the rooms.

PV beats solar water heating, but the SAP calculation is the real issue here. I don't quite understand what you mean by failed the SAP calls, what is the minimum target? We have gas for heating and hot water and our expected SAP was 88 I think, we have added solar PV since then and will be borderline an A. The problem is maybe the assumed 5m3/h/m2. With very modest attempts at air tightness you will be well below this, but you need an air tightness test to put that lower number in the SAP calc. The other problem could be your walls. What is the exact build up, full fill 100mm Rockwool with brick and block has a U-Value of around 0.3? This is the absolute minimum to meet building regs in England. The easiest way to improve this without changing the design would probably be insulated plasterboard on the inner face. The best way to spend your money is probably on improving the insulation, not PV or an ASHP.

My house has 4 metres between it and the boundary so I didn't impact next door's trees. I would rather it was 2m off the boundary and I had more garden on the other side. At the price of land in this street I have lost the use of around 150sq metres which would be worth around £60,000. It is not the same as a ransom strip, I own all the land. As someone said, if people plant a tree next to the boundary they should know that they risk losing it if the neighbour cuts it back to the boundary, That would be a better law, your neighbour can cut a tree back to the boundary and if it dies tough, it was on their land. If this was the law people would be a lot more circumspect about planting trees right up against their neighbour's property which would help everyone out. Really you should be trying to stay around 5m away from the boundary. As to the OP I would try v hard to contact the tree owner, however, if I couldn't get them I would cut the roots all the way back to the boundary. If the tree dies the only liability is likely to be for the value of the tree. This isn't America and it won't be worth the cost and expense of someone suing you as this is all they are likely to get, especially if it is not protected and anything special. They cannot really argue any loss of enjoyment when they don't live there. If you cut it back to the boundary would you have space to install root protection and a small fence or brace to keep it away from your house whilst hoping it dies or falls over due to cutting away the roots.

@craig Thanks for your helpful input. As is typical of architects, he didn't really seem to have considered where we might get the windows until I started to look around. We were planning to have a window schedule, I was just thinking is there time to send one out to some people before we sign off on the frame in case we need to make changes. Originally the plan was to do it afterwards. I like to try and do my own homework on things before contacting companies and the limits on window sizes are available from some and not others. It just happens that we have Rationel on our house, but they seem quite limited size wise for sliders and opening windows. They have a limit of 2398 on tilt and turn and 1798 on side hung/guided which made me worry that if we wanted a few of the downstairs windows to open we might have a problem. It might just be though that they have lower limits than some other people. As it seems Gaulhofer might have the sizes we want available, and you guys are reasonably local, which I like, I might be in contact once I have spoken to all the people involved.

Sorry, yes it was not an exhaustive list

Thanks for the comments. The main issue is with the height of the sliders, if they were a more standard 2.2m high I would not be so concerned as I could get them from Rationel or many other places, but from the companies I have been able to find a maximum height on a sliding door for, only Internorm can supply a slider this tall. I have checked Rationel, Velfac, Nordan, Ideal Combi and Internorm but not Gaulhofer or Norrsken. Someone did post quotes on a similr sized window from Internorm and it was more like £9k. Breaking up the windows might be necessary. For the two large fixed panes, again from the companies that I could find that produce data on maximum window sizes you start to run into trouble when a single element is above 5sq metres. So if the windows were 1.5m wide x 2.63m tall it would be OK, I have some windows around that size, but over 6 sq metres is outwith the normal scope for many companies often they run into a maximum weight limit. Similarly opening windows are often limited to around 1.8m in height, so after that they would need to be either fixed windows or broken up. I have run the heat loss calculation using JS Harris spreadsheet. the large amount of glass does increase the heating requirement, but not enormously so. The windows will account for half the heat loss for the whole house. It still only comes out as probably requiring around 9000kWh of heating a year which is very low. I have been thinking about overheating on the lounge and kitchen windows but have not made a decision yet. We will probably have the ASHP rigged to be able to run in cooling mode, and might consider internal blinds or a heat reflecting film/tint.