AliG

It seems entirely random. On this site the current permission is for something that looks like the house next door, we don't particularly like it. Yet across the road when a house was built in another listed house garden they insisted on something modern and not a "pastiche". The funny thing is that after years of argument, they approved a modern house across the road. Someone then bought the land and reapplied for a much less interesting, cheaper to build house and it just sailed through with no argument. I am still suspicious that in fact the planner was going to approve our house and his boss stopped him. In the immediate vicinity of 7 or 8 houses, there is a render and brick listed house, a sandstone listed house, two rendered 1930s houses, a render and zinc 2015 house, a red brick 1980s house a render and stone 1980s house and a pebbledash 1970s house.

We have employed a planning consultant and are going to redesign the house in line with the planners concerns. I seriously doubt that the new design will be as attractive or as unobtrusive, but the planners seem dead set on the house being on a certain part of the plot. In fairness the architect is very good at design and it may be that I am just comparing something I have seen to something I am just guessing at. So bizarrely given the choice of an unobtrusive single storey house they appear to want a two storey house that is more obtrusive but covers less ground. We are going to try to design something mainly one storey with a a guest bedroom upstairs. The argument seems to be that it stays further to the side of the listed house next door, but you wouldn't be able to see it anyway, so this is just odd. They also have an issue over the conservation area being described as open, despite the fact that the plot is actually entirely enclosed. The consultant's view is that it is best to look as if you took their concerns into consideration. He does, however, think they may just not want to approve anything different to what has already been approved. Our single storey house was much more well received by the locals, but this seems to be of no concern to the planners. And of course this is taking a lot of time, whilst my parents aren't getting any younger.

I do like the design of the house. I don't think that bedrooms the ground floor are a problem. If you had a young child they could be next to you up stairs and older children could be downstairs. When I was a teenager this was a big positive to the layout of the house my parents bought. I would, however, be worried about losing the TV room downstairs which is a nice feature. I would also be concerned re having the mezzanine all the way across the upper floor. Between this and the vaulted area around the stair, you have already lost around 25 square metres, taking this up to over 30 square metres is a lot of space to waste if it is limited. A big hall is nice, but this may be too much relative to the house. One thing that could work I guess is moving the bedrooms downstairs and making the mezzanine so large that it becomes the TV room, this may or may not work for how you live, it would be noisy and have people travelling through it. As @Ferdinand says though you probably could do better on the upper floor. Bed 3 is shown as 2.45m wide ex the wardrobe. This is just unusable as a double bedroom. By the time a duvet hangs over the side of the bed you would not have much more than a foot down each side. I like the idea of an upstairs laundry, we have one, but personally I would look to move it and put the Bed 3 wardrobe there. Then you have a 3.1m wide room. This would require moving the flue, can it not be horizontal and go out the side rather than up through the house? I have 2 gas fires with horizontal flues, but tbh by the time I had spent money getting the gas supply to them, getting the flues installed etc they were a lot more bother than they were worth. That flue will be very expensive and will need unsightly inspection hatches along its height. I think you could either put the washing machine in the boot room or steal some space off the dressing room if you really want it up the stairs. It also looks like there is a laundry chute down to the boot room so I am a little confused. I like the large bathrooms and would keep them, but the dressing room seems unnecessarily large to me if you need space for an upstairs laundry. Of course you may have a lot more clothes than I do! Out of curiosity why the feature wall and corridor in the master bedroom? I sometimes see this design when there is a dressing room or ensuite behind it, but this just seems to create a wasted space as these areas are separated by a door.

Hi @Powerjen I have just read your original post. It sounds like you really want to do something for your parents which is great, but I just don't know if your timescales are realistic. Have you confirmed that the work is PD? Checking the rules, dormers on the road frontage of a house are not PD, not is work less than 0.3M from the edge of the roof. I really like what the architect wants to do upstairs but I don't see how all those changes to the roof would be PD. It could be worth checking with the council whilst you are thinking about things. Assuming not PD and considering the amount of work to the roof, I think you'd be lucky to be finished by next summer. Looking at your QS estimates, I do not think that they are as excessive as suggested. If you are employing a man contractor to do things then it is not cheap. A lot depends on the spec of the ensuite, kitchen, windows etc. I would also be worried that in an old building with stone walls, extra costs could easily come up once you start digging around. If you want things done quickly and cheaply, would you consider just doing the downstairs work at the moment? This is probably faster, cheaper and PD. I know you have a tight budget, but what is your view on your return on investment. I had a quick look and would guess that house values in Dumfrieshire are £150-200 a square foot, so for example converting the outbuilding to a dining room may not actually pay for itself. You said that you want the second bedroom if one of your parents gets sick, this is quite a personal decision, but I suspect that if they are that sick they won't be in the house for long and the second bedroom may not be necessary. Admittedly it is not that difficult to do, it is just costly. I would consider an ASHP and doing away with oil fired CH. It may make things easier. Do you intend your parents' space/future let hot have a separate boiler and heating system? Is there space to add a carport at the north side of the house? It seems a shame to shade the south side. Could it replace the outbuilding there? The downside at this end is that access into the house is not easy unless you have the dining room and go through there. In terms of the ground floor, I think your parents' area works, and the one or two bed option is down to you. I would make sure that the en suite layout works for old people. I think @Ferdinand's layout is the cheapest way of getting an open plan room that works well. If you move the carport to the other side then you could combine the two windows on the south side to get more light in. You could also make the porch area larger and put the utility room there getting a larger lounge area. If you want a carport there you could make the porch/utility room the back of the carport.

If you want to move the door I wouldn't worry about it being opposite the french doors at all. If there was cold air being directly opposite wouldn't make a big difference and presumably you are only likely to open the french doors when the weather is nice. Cold air blowing into another room is not a consideration, after all you could close the door. I too wondered what the layout is. Is that the lounge at the right and you have to go through it to the kitchen? I guess just the compromise necessary in a cottage. How tight is the budget? I would guess that the cost of extra steel to avoid the pillar is maybe £2-3000, but I am no SE.

So I am guessing that part of the south wall is the current garage wall hence the width. You won't want to change that as you would need new foundations also. Considering you said you are on a tight budget, I guess you probably also want to keep the pillar, in which case I would definitely be thinking of moving the island to be a breakfast bar with the pillar at the end of it and moving the door to where the window it. Pillar in the middle of the floor would absolutely drive me crazy.

It will weight approx 400kg, as people say it's not going anywhere.

I did think about that, but that goes along with making that area wider and moving the door to where the window is.

Can you lose the pillar by using beams, it really impacts on the space, it might cost more, but will likely give a better room. If not incorporate it into the island, see below. Plan out what furniture you want to put in the room and see if it works. That space outside the mud room at 2.9m wide is a little narrow if you wanted to put a table there for example. I think if you made it slightly larger you could get well defined sitting and eating areas. Personally I hate internal windows as it makes it look like you added something to the outside of the house without doing it properly. You could have another door and make the door/s into the kitchen glass to allow light into the hall. If you made the window the door into the room it would give a more open entrance into the room. At the moment you walk into the end of a cupboard. It would be a lot neater to have the cupboards go to the end of the wall. An island is nice, but only if you have enough room, it looks like you are showing it only around 80cm from the hob. Imagine you are standing at the hob and someone wanted to get something out of the cupboards/drawers in the island behind you, you'd have to move out of the way. I would say you need at least 1.2m and ideally enough space to open things opposite to each other which is more like 1.4m. It might work better if it was a breakfast bar between the utility room and pillar. This also removes the pillar from the middle of the floor if you cannot get rid of it. Roof lights are good, they bring in a lot of light.

Celotex have a calculator on their website. If you use 150mm of XR4000 and PL4025 (37.5mm thick) you get a U-Value of 0.15 for the roof. This is the minimum level in the Scottish building regs for a new build house or an extension (unless the extension is to a house with wall U-value >0.7 and roof >0.25 then it has to be 0.11 or better, but your original spec wouldn't have achieved this so I guess this does not apply) If you use 150mm of XR4000 and PL404 you get a U-value of 0.13. I suspect either would be acceptable, it depends how low a U-value you want, there is maybe a minimum target listed on the spec. It won't make an enormous difference to your heating bills.

So Boris Johnson is suggesting raising the 40% tax threshold. You can debate whether or not this is correct. A lot more people pay 40% tax than used to. I do love that it is called a tax giveaway to high earners, of course it is actually taking less of their money from them. I doubt it is a vote winner anyway. But he has said that this will be financed by increasing employee NICs. So effectively a tax cut for rich pensioners and people living off investments. How stupid is thatm they are already massively favoured in the tax system. I am very suspicious that politicians know an inordinate number of people who own BTLs, live off investments and consider themselves self employed versus people who simply just work hence the lack of fairness in the tax system.

The benefits system in the UK is very generous to people with children versus everyone else. I have seen some data where the UK is one of the most generous countries if you have children but one of the least generous otherwise. I also looked at some data recently on US tax progressiveness, the US tax system starts less progressive than other countries, but the big difference comes in benefits. The lack of benefits is shocking compared to here, also the requirement for middle income people to pay for healthcare out of taxed income. This is what gives them one of the least progressive tax systems.

Slightly off topic rant re ever more progressive tax policy. I decided to check actual tax rates people pay including allowances etc, assuming their earnings are taxed as income. The now generous tax free allowance has quite an effect on effective tax rates. The other thing that has a big affect on effective tax rates is that people past retirement age don't pay any NI, even those retired people below the now high retirement age likely make most income from pensions and investments and pay no NI. This seems to me to just be a tax bonus to old voters. Of course you can then go into arguments about taxes paid out of taxed income such as VAT and council tax which is fair enough. Anyway - Gross earnings - effective tax rate - tax rate if retired 12000 - 3.4% - 0% 20000 - 14.3% - 7.5% 28000 - 19.4% - 11.1% 40000 - 23.2% - 13.7% 60000 - 27.8% - 19.1% 100000- 33.5% - 27.5% 150000 - 39.6% (There is a big jump as you go over 100k due to losing your tax free allowance) 1000000 - 45.9% So the tax system is already extremely progressive if you are actually paying income tax. It does get less progressive if you include council tax, but this is offset by universal credit and child benefit, actually the tax system is probably somewhat less fair on people with no children. The issue for me is the number of people avoiding doing this, either by claiming to be self employed, something now being cracked down on or by being being retired. As the percentage of the country that is retired increases I suspect something will have to be done about their dramatically lower effective tax rates, of course this is politically unpopular. Statistically retired people are now on average some of the wealthiest in the country, so why do they get a big tax break. Everyone knows that NI is not put in a fund to pay pensions, it is just another form of income tax. How can we justify asking young people to pay ever higher rates of tax, much of it going on care for the elderly who aren't being asked to pay their share. As am I in my 40s this argument doesn't affect me much either way, having spoken to my parents eventually even they admitted it was odd that they don't pay NI. Just out of interest - I have a lot of time on the train - I went to calculate what the effective tax rate for someone with kids on universal credit is. Using an Edinburgh post code, a couple with 2 kids under 5, 1 adult earning 20,000 a year would receive £220 a week in universal credit and £34 a week in child benefit. Thus they have a very negative effective tax rate. In fact they have the same take home pay as a single adult on £36500 a year and a -58% tax rate. Assuming rent and council tax on a 3 bedroom flat of around £1200 a month they would still have around £17000 a year in cash to spend.

I have thought about this issue too. If they jacked up taxes on the rich and property taxes on large houses then the value of my house would drop. As I can show how much I spent building my house, there would be a strong argument that the land was actually worthless. There is also a lack of joined up thinking on various different proposals. It seems that they believe that they can raise income and property taxes on people with higher incomes. Surely you have to look at the total amount of tax being paid and at some point there is a limit, I don't mind paying my fair share to help run the country, I do mind if that share starts to be over 50% of my earnings, currently I basically pay 48% income and NI in Scotland with some dividends at 38% so an average tax rate of around 45-46%. As ever I would start with the people not paying the actual tax they should be for example sports people paid in offshore image rights and BBC employees paid via service companies rather than just blindly raising tax rates. Raising tax rates penalises honest people and encourages them to try to avoid tax whilst benefitting people abusing the system even more. Hence my catch all idea that inheritance tax is offset against the amount of tax someone paid whilst alive. Thus if you paid your taxes then fair enough, nothing more to pay, but if you avoided taxes then it catches up with you in the end.

I had a bit of a read. It starts of with some interesting and sensible suggestions re the ownership of property, but then descends into increasingly socialist ideas where ever increasing amounts of power are given over to government agencies, something which seems to be labour policy in most areas despite never ending evidence that this does not work. Actually the changes already made to the tax relief on BTL have somewhat reduced its attractiveness and further could be done. I think a lot of BTLs are now owned in corporate structures which continues to confer tax benefits not available to owner occupiers. Only on Friday night my wife's hairdresser, hardly a billionaire investor, was talking about buying a place to rent out, it is incredible how attractive this continues to be to people. As ever larger deposits are required for mortgages, rental property has taken up the slack and this issue needs to be fixed. The notion that you can force down valuation multiples is bizarre though, multiples rise with lower interest rates and people will often try to maximise their borrowing to get the most property they can buy. People will always try to work around this. In London a lot of buyers are cash buyers and thus don't care about valuation multiples. Many of these are foreign investors looking for a safe store of cash. Doing something about this would help, particularly making sure it is not money laundering. The hoops I have to go through to do anything compared to the apparent ease of people whose money seems to come from dubious sources of buying property is very strange. Basically we could tighten up loopholes and run the current system more sensibly without upending the whole system. The same could apply to the whole tax system such as the avoidance of employers NICs by the self employed, the lower rates of tax on dividends and CGT and tax relief on payments to charities. Every time someone creates little special case or loophole it gets exploited and costs everyone money.

Well remembered @Ferdinand My dad was terrified to use the shower in my parent's new place and almost hurt himself it was so slippery. It was a steel tray and you could barely stand when it was wet. I ordered these from Amazon- https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B017O89SG2/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 They are very pleased with them and have had no issues since we got them, I think I got 64 of them in the end and they spaced them out every few inches on a 1.4m wide shower tray so that anywhere you stand you will always be on one Less obtrusive than a mat and they can't slip. I'd get a picture from their shower but they are on a cruise, here is the picture from Amazon.

The guys in Edinburgh building control were surprisingly helpful when I had to get an extension on my last house signed off to sell it. As long as they have approved the drawings you should be fine. The main test they usually like to carry out themselves is the drain test, although they may accept your video. Usual issues are safety and access related. So for example I had to upgrade my smoke detector system to be interconnected which is the current reg but was not when the house was built. They will want to see electrical sign offs, certificates for fire doors if any etc. They were quite reasonable about accepting common sense explanations, like the 6th toilet, upstairs in my games room not having to be accessible.

It might be that an architectural technical is the person who can help. Presumably you will need someone to draw up the house anyway

TBH I think this is where you need to speak to a SE. Timber based build routes are lighter so an out of line upstairs wall would be easier to support, but I think the simpler thing is to alter the shape of the house slightly. The issue of being open plan should be workable with a couple of beams across under the walls on either side of the flexible space upstairs. They can rest between the outside wall and the study wall at one side and the utility wall at the other. These would just be 4-5m long so should be fine. I think The issue would be that you will start to have criss-crossing beams if you also have to hold up the outside wall upstairs, once you fix that issue, the rest should be OK. Good point on the vents, I have a neighbour with a utility room at the front of the house and exactly that issue.

I didn't even know there was a bathroom one.

The installation guide says you have to drill a 24mm hole in the edge of the door. The latch is 29mm wide including the frame on the surface so it should just fit but will need to be well centred. There seems to be quite a bit of technical detail on the web page.

The internet suggests that you add 2 inches to the width. BTW that is narrow for a workshop door.

The wall along the balcony will be heavy due to being an outside wall, likely a wide cavity wall in most constructions. If an outside wall on the first floor is not directly on top of an outside wall below it then I would expect it to need supported on steel beams below. You cannot normally support an outside wall off the first floor joists. Further depending on the shape of the roof, the roof load will also be transferred down through this wall, further increasing its importance. I am by no means a structural engineer, but I think this would be an issue. This wall looks to be approx 9m across, but there is no point at the left hand end to take the weight. Generally steel beams sit on the ground floor wall plate. So you would need an 13m beam to reach across the kitchen as well(I am estimating these lengths from the drawing which seems to be 1:100). Not only would such a beam be very expensive, but it would also be very thick and difficult to hide in the ceiling. The build would be much simpler and cheaper if the upstairs wall was in line with the downstairs wall, but this would leave the shape of the house as somewhat boxy which I am guessing you are trying to get away from. Alternatively you could make the kitchen and bedroom 2 wider and then have the lounge and upstairs wall in line with a similar shape to that proposed. You will get similar issues with placing the joists for the upstairs rooms, there are relatively few walls down the stairs to rest the joists on, so they may well need supported in other ways. I am guessing the utility room is around 1.8-m wide and 2.5m tall. You cannot put cabinets on three sides as there won't be enough room to work in the space in between them. By the time you open the door on a washing machine you need 80-90cm at a minimum to comfortably work and ideally more. You could probably do an L shape along 2 sides, but not three sides. I might be inclined just to use the long side. As I say you can alter bathroom/utility room layouts from what are shown, but in general if you leave gaps of less than 90cm to pass through it could feel quite cramped. Also in all of these rooms you have to be very careful with window positioning, at various points you have windows above a bath, sinks and utility cupboards. You may want to make these windows smaller or they will limit where you can place things in the rooms. I see you just posted about getting an SE. That is a good question. An architect designed my house, whenever i asked if things would be difficult to build, he said it would be fine - we ended up with £100k of steel. Normally an SE will advise on a finished design, you could then go back and adjust it if he thinks it will be difficult or expensive, but I think generally people just try and keep things in mind at first with the initial design.

SO my Bosch battery works on this tool https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bosch-Battery-Multi-Purpose-Additional-Oscillation/dp/B072KH9K91/ref=pd_rhf_dp_s_cr_simh_0_1/259-7715631-0054117?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B072KH9K91&pd_rd_r=25855299-2796-4528-8362-aaa6f1fb2109&pd_rd_w=49DiN&pd_rd_wg=SNK2o&pf_rd_p=cd656a79-125c-4ac8-931f-bdf9f90841fb&pf_rd_r=2RS4MXRSDAC0RTZ99KC3&psc=1&refRID=2RS4MXRSDAC0RTZ99KC3 I am not clear if it works on the blue professional tools also such as this, it says it works with any Bosch 18V battery, but it doesn't look the same. In fact I am pretty certain it is not. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bosch-Professional-Cordless-Multi-Cutter-StarlockPlus/dp/B01LZA2C4F/ref=sr_1_3?crid=3F958T0MY18PR&keywords=bosch+multitool&qid=1558865742&s=diy&sprefix=bosch+multi%2Cdiy%2C155&sr=1-3 Are the professional blue tools appreciably better? Would you dissuade me from the Bosch Starlock system, does this mean buying more expensive blades?

For a minute I thought that all I had was a Bosch drill driver and the battery is an old style they don't use today, but you have reminded me that I bought a Bosch cordless hedge trimmer. It uses the 18V Bosch battery so I could get a Bosch tool