AliG

I had to dig out some elevations you posted earlier. Almost every window in my house is a single unit. But almost every window is taller than it is wide. The only windows that are not taller than they are wide are split, so that the portions are taller than they are wide. Looking at your elevations, your windows seem to generally be wider than they are tall and seem to be drawn as split up. I think this is the usual thing to do, indeed window elements wider than they are tall are very rare unless it is a slot shaped window. I also think it would look odd to have some that are single units and some that aren't as it would create a jarring mixture of ratios. In fact a window that is 2400x1050 might be better split into three which would give a similar ratio for each segment to a 1810x1200 window split into two. If you want the 2400s to be single windows, then I would rather that they all kept a ratio of being wider than they are tall, but as you say I don't think you can get a single opener that size for the smaller windows. Looking at Ideal Combi as a top hung window gets wider, its height starts to be limited. I suspect it is a weight issue as @Temp says. Triple glazed windows are very heavy. Rationel, which we have, lists the same maximum sizes with a weight limit. I think the inside colour is just personal preference. Googling it, it didn't seem too bad if that's what you want. It may not go well with all colours.

Most cars have a turning circle between 11 and 12m, so 6059mm for half a turn seem tight but correct. You actually have a bit more space than that as the circle is not tight to the house and boundaries. It looks like you have redone the plans since you put them up previously. Any chance to see the new ones?

Ah right, then yes I would say it works in terms of meeting the planning requirement, but I would just show two cars one behind the other parallel to the house, there isn't enough room to turn around at the end and I don't think there is an issue if one car blocks another in. You definitely could get in and out, it just wouldn't necessarily feel comfortable to everyone. I have been reading your thread about the "garage" and might have some more comments on that now I understand the situation.

Sorry, I am going to ruin the chill. This is the kind of nonsense that my builder came up with. Firstly, If the start date has moved from early January to Feb 24th, how exactly is the end date the same? Were they planning to finish 6 weeks early previously. How often do builders finish early. They are not able to start because they are over running 6 weeks on their previous job, why won't your job also over run. Maybe they have a better idea now that the contract has been written up, but I would seriously question it. Secondly, they have already slipped from what you originally thought, so in three weeks you just have a fence and they are already 1-2 weeks behind the schedule that you thought you were on. My builder did this all the time. Every time he was delayed he said he would work faster to finish at the same time. Yet the evidence at that point was that stuff takes longer than he says not less time. I am not saying that you need to worry or hassle the builder. You just have to realise that they are notoriously optimistic with timing and there is a very good chance that you will be finished later than expected. What exactly does the contract say about them over running? They will just blame the weather etc and say they couldn't help it.

I struggled a bit to understand the diagram as the curve looks like a stair. I assume that the fine lines at the front and sides are the hedges? If not then everything else I am about to say is wrong! I think the space looks OK in terms of turning and driving past the front of the house. But then turning around at the end of that area would be very difficult indeed. You'd have to go back and forward 4 or 5 times probably and it may not be possible, that car looks pretty wedged in on the diagram. People would need to park parallel to the front of the house. The problem is therefore that for both spaces you would have to back out, I am surprised that the planners have allowed it actually. Here you normally have to be able to turn around on your property so that you can drive onto the road forwards. In our driveway, which is way bigger, it amazes me how often visitors park themselves in the oddest fashion and then struggle to get out. A lot of people won't want to try and reverse out of your driveway especially if they feel they are squeezing past your car. A lot of people don't like to reverse far full stop. Where is the actual street, it is where the fine grey lines are, or do you have a bit more distance due to hedges? If you do you could cut the hedge back around a metre and allow people to drive in straight in front of the toilet. Then you wouldn't have to pave over the area in front of the living area. Alternatively if you have visitors you could park in front of the house so they can pull in in front of the carport as you'd be used to it and they wouldn't feel like they were squeezing past your car. My consistent view is I don't like squeezing the car into awkward spaces that I am not used to when a small scrape can cost £1000 to fix, even if in reality the space is probably more than enough.

You'd need planning permission to do away with the mullions as that is not a straight window replacement. Are you in a conservation area? I doubt you'd get permission for such a change on what looks like quite an old building (from the IR pictures). The great thing about secondary glazing is it would provide a break to the mullions which are creating more heat loss than the windows. It would also reduce condensation on the inside of them. You could buy some cheap plastic film and tape it over the area to get an idea of how much benefit you would get.

So is there actually a stone surface on the inside too? I assumed it was just stone outside and plastered or covered in plasterboard on the inside. If it is stone all the way through then I see the problem. If you don't want to lose the stone, would secondary glazing right across the whole area not be a better and cheaper solution?

We have stone mullions too, it is the lack of insulation on the plasterboard on the inside that is probably the issue. On the second picture, taking the plasterboard on that wall off and replacing it with insulated board would probably make a big difference, the walls are older than the windows. Also when you take it off you can make sure that there are no holes around the frames. On the first picture I think the problem is the placing of the radiator. The heat appears to be rising right up into the Velux window and not getting anywhere else in the room. Assuming that you aren't going to move the radiator or replace the Velux windows. You might try blinds across the windows in the winter and see if that reduces heat loss. You might want to try a shelf above the radiator or one of those fans that you attach and use to send heat into the room.

Are those ground floor ceiling joists or the underside of a flat roof that we can see in the pics? If there is no roof insulation to go in between the joists, shouldn't there be PIR at the wall between the ends of the joists and also along the joist at the end?

It appears from a bit of Google work that you can indeed now just use the phone SIM on EE. There is a limit of 1000GB a month and they say that they will consider more than 12 devices to be commercial use. Not clear if they mean simultaneously. Not sure why they offer data sims if this is the case.They are much more expensive. Three is cheaper at £22 a month for unlimited here including the router, plus £60 cashback. But I don't know what their signal is like in your area. https://store.three.co.uk/view/content/mbasket?ID=1666&ty=aff&link_id=fc&link_ref=M2jgsvXi5djSBFc0XIs*NE*Hu3SDTTR&aff_id=128

I think everyone can see the quote looks high. It seems that consistently each figure is a bit higher than you would expect. I know you don't need the £6200 of services listed, but Open Reach doesn't charge for a new phone line so where did £1200 come from. It is obviously an extension to an existing house so you have to wonder why this is even in the quote. £400 + Vat for a skip, they cost less than £200 where I live. Insulated plasterboard £35 a square metre, it only costs £20. £900 a week for labourers, they get paid closer to £400 a week. The £28,800 of labour on top of labour for each item is bizarre. On my build a foreman was charged then labourers were charged out as part of the labour involved in specific jobs, not on top of that. What exactly would they be doing for 12 weeks. That number on its own is over £700 a square metre+VAT. £80 a square metre for self levelling screed before finished floor fitting over the entire floor area is comical. It didn't even cost £10 a square metre in my house. £2500 to decorate 40 square metres, come on. Clearly a builder needs to mark up costs to make money, but many of these markups look very high indeed.

It was just the layout of the kitchen, I knew it would be a slight issue. They are not under the hob, I tried to only have stuff under the hob that you would likely use on the hob. It is to the left of the hob, but the issue only arises if two people do food prep at the same time. I think you will nearly always run into this issue somewhere if two people work in the kitchen at the same time tbh. I did manage to get the bin cupboard to a position where it was not in a well used space as this was an issue in our old house. I have now figured out a way to fix the issue, so can sort it in 10-15 years when we get a new kitchen.

Having had a wooden knife block for years, we have now moved to slotted in drawer. I like it as it is neater, but it does take up a reasonable amount of drawer space. We have it in the same drawer as chopping boards. Can't say that I have noticed a meaningful effect on sharpness. The main issue is that if two people are working in the kitchen someone has to get out of the way to get a knife out of the drawer.

I know this isn't what you asked, but gas/oil boilers will eventually be banned and ASHPs will become the normal way to heat a house and people will have to get used to the look and sound of them. Is the issue that you don't think the neighbours will like the noise or that you don't like the look of the ASHP. When you say you have no back garden, you would only need the width of a walkway behind your house which I assume you have as you say that there are houses on each side, but I could be wrong. ASHPs are permitted development and neighbours cannot stop you putting one in if you meet the criteria. The quietest pumps are only 45dB at one metre which really shouldn't disturb anyone. https://www.planningportal.co.uk/info/200130/common_projects/27/heat_pumps/2 However, you mentioned needing aesthetic approval from the other freeholders. Is there some kind of joint freehold where you need approval to do things? You can get slatted wooden covers which hide an ASHP, I do not know how they affect the efficiency. Also I would get that loft insulated as soon as possible. You are going to be losing a crazy amount of heat from there. An ASHP would not be a good idea until the insulation is sorted out. You would probably need new larger radiators also. It might be worth trying to figure out how many kW of heat you were using with your old oil boiler as it sounds like 5.5kW struggles to heat only part of the house at the moment.

The one in the video looks like resin bond, the water doesn't run through it. I wonder if this is why it is so dirty. This also presumably wouldn't meet the regs on a new build if you were asked for a porous surface. Ours is resin bound and you can put an enormous amount of water on it and it just disappears and runs through it. It seems to be holding up pretty well it mainly just needs some twigs swept up at the moment. Our off white render and very porous sandstone is another matter. I need to get out and clean some of that.

I would say that the normal thing to do is have it fitted into the WM and DW area(Assuming that they aren't there when it is fitted) and fitted short under the cabinets , people don't generally worry about what happens to the floor under the cabinets, in most kitchens it is just bare chipboard. It is unlikely to get wet enough to worry about it. They did this in my last house and only laid the ply up to the kitchen cabinet feet (or level up to there if the floor is concrete). I bought it from a builder so the kitchen was already fitted before the Amtico was installed. You only really need to worry where you have an item that you might need to take in and out, so a washing machine mainly, followed by DW and fridge freezer. It makes it easier to get them out if they need repaired. If you ply the whole floor or it is concrete then they will bump over the Amtico easily and it will not lift at the edge, the adhesive will run out under the unfinished edge probably and is very solid. Amtico itself ranges from £20-45 per square metre ex VAT. You can then probably add £30 a square metre for fitting including the cost of ply or levelling compound. So if you want the whole floor covered in ply or levelled you won't save the full per metre cost, maybe only half of it depending on the style of Amtico you have chosen. You shouldn't be paying more than £50-75 a metre ex VAT depending on the style including fitting.

You can get £60 cash back on that on Quidco.

5G will be worse for use indoors due to running at higher frequencies. The higher the frequency the less well a signal penetrates solid objects. In the US the Verizon home 5G service needs an external aerial which needs line of site to the node. They currently run on a much higher frequency called millimetre wave which cannot penetrate walls, trees etc and has a very short range, but will be moving to a similar frequency to the UK in future.

How well does your phone work in the house, we get very slow 4G speeds inside as insulation and triple glazing cut out most of the signal. You would probably need an external antenna to get a decent speed.

When 5G comes along this will be a very good option. But I think you could be talking a few years outside of city centres where they want to install it to reduce network congestion. A lot depends on how much data you use and what for. We run Netflix etc constantly, 4G should be fast enough for this. What you would notice using 4G is the latency will be worse so it might take a few seconds for a website to start to load etc. Do you actually have a phone line installed, it can be a bit of a hassle to deal with Openreach and get it organised? If you do have a phone line I would use that and then compare the 5G deals when they come available, if putting in a phone line is a problem, then 4G may be a better option. Three would give you a 5G router if you had 5G home broadband so you wouldn't have to buy this box.

That would probably be a mobile phone Sim, they won't let you use that in this kind of product. Three will give you an unlimited phone sim for #18 a month and you can tether that to a device and use the data. But if you put a sim in a non phone it needs to be a data sim. Their data sim is £29 a month for 100GB.

You'd still need a data sim for it. You are probably looking at around £30 a month for unlimited data. Data sims seem to be more expensive than phone sims as they know that you are likely to use more data. You'd still only get whatever speed is available on the data network in your area which is probably anywhere between 20 and 80Mbps. It might well be faster than on your phone as it will have a better antenna, but I'd start by seeing what speed you get on your phone. Of course speeds can very a lot in any given area by network. Assuming you have FTTC available you would probably pay around £20-30 a month for a similar service with a lower upfront cost.

Is the only way to test this trial and error? There are the various arguments re leaving the heating on all the time running at a low rate versus only heating the house sometimes. I am not sure I have seen good evidence of what is right and I assume it depends on a lot of factors specific to the house. Do all the rooms heat at the same rate under this scenario? I had set up my heating with different rooms warming up at different times depending on their use, so bedrooms would come on first thing in the morning and the study later for example. What I then noticed was that in my case the gas boiler was on for hours heating just one room sometimes. I then adjusted the thermostats so that all the rooms called for heat at the same time in the morning and it reduced my space heating bill by around 30%. So if you have some rooms with a higher heat loss they may be causing the ASHP to run off and on all day when other rooms don't need it, it might be cheaper to heat the floor to a higher temperature and run the ASHP less often. The other thing is whether or not to set the temperature back during the night. Again I had the system set back by 2C during the night, normal overnight heat loss seems to be around 1C as I didn't see the point in heating up bedrooms during the night, in fact I prefer it cooler. But again I found that some rooms, particularly the ones with wooden floors where the heat transfer is slower then take hours to heat up again, causing the heating to run constantly from say 6-10am. I have thus changed the set back to 1C during the night and am considering trying some rooms at 0 set back as the extra time running overnight may be less than the extra time required to heat them up during the day.

These are our gates. It took so long to get these made it wasn’t funny. I scoured google images for different pictures of gates and found something similar being sold by a company in Canada on Etsy. They refused to sell me the pattern. Eventually I found the owners and paid $300 for 90 patterns as they wouldn’t sell me one on its own. Anyway what you are looking for is a cnc pattern that can be cut from sheets of steel which are then powder coated or painted. I wish I could tell you how much this costs but for us the quote was just for gates and we would tell them how they should look. Etsy is a good place to look or Google images. Lots of people sell patterns for just a few pounds if they have what you are looking for available. Some people do sell this kind of panel on line. If you can find someone selling it ready made it will be a lot easier.

We used the leveling compound which from memory was the cheapest solution. A fox then walked through it during the night putting some paw prints in it!