AliG

We had a tree survey done before we started, I had to have it for planning as its a conservation area. We have around 30 trees and one was identified as problematic. It was growing across the pavement and towards the road at about a 35 degree angle. I had to get some trees on the boundary trimmed before we started work and decided that as the guy was coming I didn't want to be responsible for this tree falling over on someone one day. It was vastly cheaper though as only 9m tall. Now that I have the loppers hopefully I can keep things in check myself. I do need to pay a guy to cut the hedges though as they are around 4m tall so that you cannot see in from passing buses.

I am also considering one of these to clear up. A Karcher sweeper, owners seem to swear by them. https://www.viking-direct.co.uk/en/p/6362001?cm_mmc=Google-_-pla_gen_cleaning-and-catering_gosc-_-cleaning-and-catering-_-6362001&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI6Nr3psTX4AIVirHtCh3I2Qi2EAYYASABEgIYo_D_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds This whole having trees to look after is new to me. I got a letter from the council telling me to cut them back from around lamp posts. I spoke to the next door neighbour and she paid £140 to get it done. I bought one of these loppers that @JSHarris mentions. What an awesome piece of kit, can cut branches over 20ft up from the ground. https://www.screwfix.com/p/fiskars-telescopic-bypass-tree-pruner/4166t

No one had cleared our garden in 3 years due to the building work. I wanted to get it ready for the grass to go down in a few weeks. I bought a Black and Decker Scorpion saw a couple of years ago on Black Friday. We cut any extra branches too big to squeeze in the chipper off using this. 90% off branches would fit in the chipper. Every time it is windy we seem to lose a few. Any branches too thick for the chipper, we chopper up with the Scorpion and then gave away to someone with an open fire. The chips went back around the edges of the garden. The chipper blocked a few times, mainly due to putting stuff with leaves in it, but it wasn't a big deal. It took about a minute to clear it out. You don't need to cut every side branch off, most of the thin ones I just squeezed into the sides of the main branch and pushed right through.

I bought the Screfix one three weeks ago. Last weekend spent 5 hours over 2 days shredding up to the 4cm odd limit branches and it coped admirably, I was scared to put thicker ones in, but it seemed like it will cope with anything up to the thickness of the hole that you can push them into. First time I had ever used such a device. The only drawback of a smaller chipper seems to be that you have to cut branches off any wider bushier examples that you have.

Hi @Jude1234 How have you got on with sorting this out? I suspect since it has been much warmer it hasn't been an issue.

In the old place we had a corroded waste in a basin. It was a pedestal basin. I suspect that they put in the basin, connected up the fittings then put the pedestal in. Then we tiled around the base of the pedestal. I couldn't see any way to change the waste, so I just gave up and built a new house.

My fault, I thought when you said you didn't have spanners you meant you did have a socket set. Anyway, looks like @cherryfountain has the right idea if you can't tighten it by hand.

Good call £4 with free delivery on Amazon. https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/B0015NSTU4/ref=dp_olp_new?ie=UTF8&condition=new

A lot depends on how far up you can get your hands and how much purchase you can get. The angled spanners might work but it will be difficult to exert a lot of torque using one, a long socket would be better. As it is a one off use try and borrow one or find the cheapest piece you can find that does the job. These at £5.05 on Amazon would probably do the job assuming that you have the wrench that fits into them. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Amtech-I6400-Sockets-4-Inch-9-Piece/dp/B003XKIGR8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1550860851&sr=8-1&keywords=deep+socket+sethttps://www.amazon.co.uk/Amtech-I6400-Sockets-4-Inch-9-Piece/dp/B003XKIGR8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1550860851&sr=8-1&keywords=deep+socket+set

Here is the installation manual. http://www.noken.com/recursos/pdf/idm/files/100130995_IDM.pdf But yes a long socket pushed up over it should be exactly what you need. You'll never get up there with a spanner.

On this week's Grand Tour they went to Inverness. Clarkson just called render, but it would actually be what we call "harling" in Scotland or "pebbledash" in England "batter for houses" I have laughed out loud quite a few times on the train home.

Thanks for the extra info. If you are on a budget, I would be definitely building standard wardrobes not fitted furniture, I don't know if that is just the way you have shown them. I would keep the sink in the utility room to wash your hands etc if you are working in the garden. You have tended to show doors hard in the corner of rooms, usually they need to be a little way out to allow for the frame and architrave. I am no structural engineer, but you have an area in the centre of the house where you will maybe need steel across between the study and the snug to support the upper floor joists. If the door to the snug is opposite the corner where you would support the steel you will maybe have an issue. Also you have a considerable number of stud walls above the centre of the kitchen, I don't know if this will have issues in terms of supporting them below. The first step on the stairs is also maybe too near to the front wall. I would get a kitchen designer to look at the kitchen for you. There are quite a few things you could do, for example moving the utility and pantry doors to the ends of the wall so you can have a single longer run of units. Are you planning on just giving your design to a TF company? I think you should maybe pay an architectural technician to look it over first.

I am now worried that it has some sinister purpose

Not a bad idea, I certainly feel that I prefer the downstairs toilet not to be a bathroom. You could certainly go all the way and eliminate the toilet in the bathroom, especially if space is an issue. This is how houses were often built in the past. We designed my parent's house on one floor to have 2 en suites and a WC which we though was better than a bathroom and en suite.

Fair point, sometimes compromises have to be made. I don't know your layout @ProDave but maybe you use the main bathroom for guests. The main things is when people design large open plan 2500sq foot plus houses then relegate the WC to a tiny cupboard. This is probably due to not thinking enough about which spaces get used and how.

I have a Heatmiser system which is excellent for setting up the heating as it charts the temperature at every thermostat over the course of a week. I have four rooms where the heating never has to go on, three of these have the UFH manifolds in them and one has all the AV equipment in it. The waste heat from these is enough to warm the rooms. Sometimes you get funny issues due to the specific place the thermostat sits, if it is on a tiled wall the temperature may be a little lower and if it is on an outside wall also, so you may need to set the temperature lower than the room temperature otherwise you will heat the room to a higher level than you expected.

The basics of the design and room layout seem good. There is little I would change. Most charges are detail. This may be the first time ever I have seen a house with too may cupboards. You seem to have marked up the plan with fitted cupboards everywhere. This will be very very expensive. Ex the kitchen and wardrobes you probably have something like £30,000 of fitted cupboards there. Wardrobes in spare rooms are probably better built from plasterboard with doors not fitted furniture unless you really like the look of it. Changes to consider - 1.The cloaks area outside the WC should not have a door as this will turn it into a dark small space, use an arch. or just leave it open As mentioned WC may not meet disabled access requirements, you need room for a downstairs shower. 2. The door to the snug is in an odd place in the corner of the sitting area, it would be better at the end of the stairs. The cupboards in the snug seem unneccessary. 3.The kitchen design with equipment split across two legs and an island in between will be awkward. It would probably be better to turn the island and table round 90 degrees and keep all your equipment on the island and one wall. Put the hob in the island looking into the room, not at a wall. 4. My wife wanted a pantry and I know some people love them, but we get all the dried food we have in the house in one cupboard in the kitchen. Not quite sure what you would use so many cupboards for. 5. Utility/MVHR space is fine, but you are going to have an area with lots of unsightly pipes, valves, pumps etc. It might be better to put this in a totally empty space and have a smaller space with cupboards and a sink as the actual utility. You might make the pantry smaller and create three separate spaces. 6. The upstairs plant room might be better as a washroom and bedding/towel storage. Put cupboards all the way along one side and across the end, it will be easier to use than the current set up. 7. One ensuite appears to have a window to another room, I assume that is an error. Put the shower across the end of the room and WC/sink next to each other not opposite each other as it is much more spacious. Put the shower on the inside and the WC at the outside wall so the stack can go down the corner of a downstairs room. 8. I assume that the other en suite is actually a shower room, it is quite small, I would make the bedroom a little narrower and give the space to the room. As mentioned it is not ideal for plumbing as it is in the middle above the kitchen. 9. Is there a view in the master en suite? Is it exposed? I wouldn't want to be on display when I stand up in the bath. I would have a larger shower, in general get a bathroom place to design these places for you.

Silly, but serious topic. When the heating designers drew up the plans for our house, they put the WC on the same circuit as the hall. We have 25 heating thermostats, one for every en suite and spare room where the heating is never on, yet not for the WC, a room multiple people use multiple times a day. The WC sticks out from the main house so has more exposed wall/roof area than any other room in the house and it would not be quite warm enough when the hall thermostat turned the heating off. This had my wife complaining. Luckily the hall has 3 UFH circuits one of which is mainly the WC and a cupboard beside it, so we fitted a wireless Heatmiser today so that we can keep it warmer than the hall. The hall is way way bigger and I wouldn't want to heat it up to the 21-22 we may want in the WC. Anyway this got me to thinking, I often comment on house designs where the WC seems forgotten. There was a lovely design the other day for a nice spacious house with the WC basically stuck in a cupboard under the stairs. I don't know about other people, but after the kitchen, our bedroom and en suite and the TV room the WC is probably the room people spend the most time in. More time than we spend in the formal lounge, dining room or main bathroom often. So why do people think it is acceptable for this room to not have a window, double up as a cloak cupboard etc. It is also a room that every visitor to your house may use and it is a room that will give them an impression about how well built your house is. So don't skimp on the WC!

This is the old breaking every window in the country and then fixing them makes GDP grow argument. This is why gambling is legal as it generates tax revenues despite creating a lot of misery. Of course if people did not spend money on these things they would probably spend it on something more productive which in the long run would be better for the economy. Breaking then fixing cars is an awful way to spend money, relative to for example spending that money on new more efficient cars. This seems to be beyond the timeframe that politicians work to.

Subsidies should only really be necessary when the new technology has societal benefits but costs more. Things like solar panels and EVs started with subsidies which got smaller as the cost premium rose. You are right, no one buying a Tesla needs £4k of subsidy, but if everyone creates a spreadsheet of the costs of an EV versus a combustion engined car and the EVs are more expensive, they will never get enough volume for the costs to drop. Don't forget in the case of an EV if it cost more than a similar combustion engined car then you would have paid quite a bit more VAT. Actually the incentives to buy EVs and plug in hybrids as company cars are insane. My architect is getting a Mitsubishi outlander which will save him something like 60% off his company car tax and cut his corporation tax bill and get a free loan from the government. It is a petrol plug in hybrid that may not even have lower emissions most of the time. I think the vast majority of these cars are run as company cars, the tax savings are a scam. I just found a government website that gave a tax saving of £10k over 3 years running an Outlander instead of a Audi A4 with a similar list price. In 3 years the tax difference will rise to £5000 a year. This is the kind of incentive that turns into a scam. For a while everyone in London was buying hybrids Lexuses to avoid the congestion charge for example. These cars have basically the same real world ruled consumption, people are just buying for the tax saving. The key thing is to get the incentive to be enough to incentivise purchase and offset extra costs but not so much that people do it just for the incentive like some of the RHI scams. On the other hand with some things such as insulation or log burners legislation is probably the best idea. Usually I am in favour of less government and regulation but if people are doing something that is bad for society but makes no difference to them then you need to legislate it away. If the data on log burners really is correct they should be banned or controlled. Similarly if people won't built better insulated houses, even though they are incentivised by lower heating bills then you have no choice but to legislate it in the building regs. In my earlier example, why not legislate larger parking spaces. It would makes peoples lives easier and massively reduce the cost of parking dings. I have personally shelled out hundreds of pounds over the years and wasted a lot of time fixing parking dings. The government passes all kinds of waste of time legislation like the term time holiday rules, why not pass some things that help people.

Just that they like to always do things the same even if there is a better way, so will need some persuading. Your planned floor is just like mine and not unusual. Most larger builders will have some experience of concrete planks. They simply won't have experience with some of these suggested systems and often they don't want to learn.

This is almost exactly the upper floor build up I have. Exactly as above, without the insulation your UFH will be trying to heat almost 300mm of concrete/screed and react extremely slowly. Ideally use liquid screed and keep the thickness down to 60-70mm, just above the minimum to cover your UFH pipes. This way the system reacts faster and you spend less on screed. You need the screed to put the UFH pipes into, to get rid of it you would need some kind of cast in situ floor, you can do that with the Thermofloor above but this is the kind of unusual way of doing things that builders don't like.

I can't remember if this was already posted, but it looks like they may be banned due to particulates anyway. They are nasty things that I know some people like. We had one in an airbnb, difficult to clean and constantly worried that you would burn yourself. I am all for induction. If houses were well enough insulated, small ASHPs would suffice and you could easily do away with gas. Considering the cost getting gas pipes to a house, putting in a boiler etc it would be a lot more efficient to only use one energy source. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/17/cooking-sunday-roast-causes-indoor-pollution-worse-than-delhi Not sure about toast though, I like mine just barely brown so I think I am OK. As long as they don't ban barbecues! The whole issue of particulates are air quality is interesting. I never had any allergies or asthma until I started to live and work in central London and now I do. I stopped using spray deodorant a few years ago as I realised that every time I used it I was breathing in a cloud of particles. I am quite enjoying the fresh air from MVHR in the new place.

I just meant don't compromise your house for the sake of two similar houses, decide yours first which you seem to have done. If you want 1200sq feet, and you have permission for 3000 in 1 house, I would be looking to build a second house at 1800sq feet to maximise your retirement pot. Start there and see what the planners say. If you cannot get permission for two houses, build one sell it and buy yourself something the size you want with the profits is probably your second choice. There is probably a point where planning for two becomes so difficult, time consuming and costly that this might be the better option. As for planning - We bought one house to knock down and spoke to the planning department about replacing it with two. They were quite against this as it "changed the spacial aspect of the area" If you ask me you can only see this from Google Maps, but they were pretty firm on this. We ended up building one house the same size as the two houses mooted previously and they had no issue at all. Is there some kind of character appraisal for the area that deals with this kind of matter? Or is there some kind of greenbelt development guidance that he council uses? Often you can refer to this if it helps your case. I think the argument that two houses will make a greenbelt site seem more built up than one is not unreasonable and you need a way around this. Building a big extension or a big rebuild is still not two houses. My suggestion/question is could the site be split leaving the current building in place. If it can I would apply to split the plot and build a second house. If you get permission for that you can then apply to demolish and rebuild the original building. If this is possible it might be an easier route.

I totally see where you are coming from @Big Jimbo. Money can't buy you time with your family. That's why once I thought about it, I came down on simply decide what house you want for yourself. It seems like you can build whatever you want for your self and you may or may not be able to build another house too. Don't start from the position of wanting to build two similar houses as that may not be best for you. Best for you is living in a house that suits you, near to your family. So I would design that and if that allows for another house to be built then that's good, but I would make a decision for you and your family first and then see what possibilities you have after that.