AliG

It is a curtain rail glider, can't see the exact same one, but a similar one may work https://www.google.com/search?q=curtain+rail+gliders&client=safari&rls=en&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjH8cDCqZ3fAhXkUBUIHX-OAvkQ_AUIDygC&biw=1280&bih=714

If you think about it, MVHR is always cooling down your house (assuming outside is colder than inside). The more it runs, the more cold air it brings in, it just isn't as cold as it might be due to the heat exchange capturing energy from the extracts. If you switch off the MVHR upstairs might get warmer, but it would be stuffy.

That is similar to what we see with out MVHR, the incoming temperature is increased from a low outside temperate, but not to the same temperature as extract air. I don't think 90% efficiency means that you get 90% of the temperature of the extract air, you would have to calculate the energy capacity of air which would probably be based on its temperature in Kelvin. Also I assume that some of the extract air is coming from colder upstairs rooms such as bathrooms. Basically when there is a 15C+ temperature difference between inside and outside air MVHR will help but you will probably still need some heating. @Oz07 that's freezing!

Can I ask something controversial here- Do people actually use their extractor fans. I think that I turn it on around three times a year. Admittedly we use the oven a lot more than the hob. Should I be using it more?

Thanks I will suggest that

Often with appliances they seem to do well with different products. We are on our fifth Siemens dishwasher and have never had a single issue even with 10 years daily use. I would always recommend them. Oven TBH I just don't see how you differentiate. Pyrolytic is good for ease of cleaning. You can get a Zanussi Pyrolytic oven for less than £300 apparently. We have Siemens, they do the job, they start at around £6-700. Miele ovens used to be well over £1000 for no obvious reason, now they are a similar price to Siemens. I don't think they could sell them at the previous premium. A Gaggenau 200 seems to be around £1400 in Europe, hard to find UK prices. TBF I might be tempted to pay that for the flash factor, but I wouldn't expect it to make any difference to my cooking. My parents have Miele ovens, the microwave is laughably small. Fridges are the same. £100 fridges can last twenty years. I have Siemens, and I feel they are a bit overpriced. A tall integrated Siemens fridge is £8-900. A Miele is £1300. There is no benefit whatsoever that I can see. My kitchen designer suggested built in Gaggenau fridge and freezer at £7000 each. They are exactly the same as the Siemens A-Cool ones at £4000, I think the Gaggenau has a stainless steel interior, but it is obviously exactly the same item. I almost got these but I decided I didn't need a £4000 fridge. Miele also sell similar ones at £7000. Then people can spend 5 figures on Sub Zeros. Crazy I do have a Miele washer and dryer. They do get very good reviews and are a superior product, but TBH I don't think the premium is justified, my parent's Bosch washer dryer at half the price is also very nice. However, they get punishing use in our house so hopefully will last. I got a 10 year guarantee on them. As for hobs, again I don't see what benefit a more expensive Gaggenau or Miele induction hob has. They all look basically the same. But if you want a vented induction hob people swear by Bora. TBH that was all that was available and you now have a Siemens one available also. I suspect it is quite similar You could wait a long time for a Gaggenau display model, don't you want to finish your kitchen. I can vouch for the hob part we have never had any issues.. https://www.siemens-home.bsh-group.com/uk/productlist/cooking-and-baking/hobs/venting-hobs Looks like AEG do one now too https://www.pauldavieskitchensandappliances.co.uk/aeg-ide84242ib-combo-hob-hood.html?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI65r7qNaJ3wIVjr3tCh3xGgMIEAYYASABEgIzQ_D_BwE

Jack and Jill is def a possibility if we have to reduce the floorplan. People in general seemed to think it is a hassle because of two doors, but it is very space efficient. If we moved the WC and sink to the other side of the WC, would we be able to put a drain in the utility room and claim it is a possible future shower space?

The 2 en suites was my idea, as my parents occasionally have people stay I just think it is nice that they don't have to come out into the hall to use the bathroom in they don't have to. It is extravagant, but the idea is to have a small house with the feel of a large house, I kind of thought of taking what they build as luxury flats for downsizes and making that a house. I think the architect has allowed for the activity space in the WC, but we have discussed would we just put a shower or a bath in there. I think the regs are stupid in that a shower or bath off a bedroom on the ground floor doesn't count as accessible, it has to be open to the public as it were. We could make some of the WC a cupboard and have a drain in there with a partition that could be taken down.

Do you have a price on the Gaggenau extractor? The designer drew up our kitchen and suggested Gaggenau appliances but they are just laughably expensive. Often they are very similar to Siemens function wise but have a slightly nicer design for which you pay roughly 2x the price. Bosch Siemens owns Gaggenau, also it is now 100% owned by Bosch but they still use the Siemens name. The equivalent Siemens extractors are around £1600. Functionality should be the same, indeed I wouldn't be surprised if it is the same unit with a different case. I would expect the Gaggenau to be £4000 which is silly when most of the time you cannot even see it. https://www.siemens-home.bsh-group.com/uk/productlist/cooking-and-baking/ventilation/worktop-ventilation-solutions/downdraftair-system Managed to find an EU price for the Gaggenau which was 3600 Euros.

Got preliminary floor plans from the architect if anyone wants to comment. The changes I have already suggested are - 1. Door into garage 2. Window in lounge opposite the entrance door. 3. The WC is larger than many bathrooms, our reading of the Scottish building regs is that there needs to be provision for a public bath/shower room, so we have left space for one. But it is 2.6m across excluding the bulkhead which seems too much. I would shave off 2-300mm from the and the kitchen due to the limitations of the amount of site coverage we can have. Maybe we start with this and have that in our back pocket. 4. Some kind of covering outside the front door. The bottom of this is South.

I have often wondered this also. However, I was staying in a hotel last week in North Dakota and at -13 outside the aircon unit was running constantly to keep the room warm and it was very annoying. My granny's old council house had ducted air heating and it wasn't noisy, but if I remember correctly, the outlets were around 400mm square and connected almost directly to the heater. Heating requires a lot more airflow than MVHR. It might be OK with a very well insulated house with low heating requirement, but I think it would be annoyingly noisy in the winter. The nice thing about UFH is that once the slab has warmed up it should keep a pleasantly consistent temperature.

I'd expect over double that in Edinburgh. New places regularly over £400 per square foot in nice areas. Central London £1500-2000 per sq foot for new stuff which has a crazy premium often approaching double the price of similar sized places in the area.

When you say chilly, what temperature do you mean? 21C is probably the coldest temperature that people are comfortable with, I try to set thermostats at 21C, but sometimes get complaints from the family when set at this level and have moved the kitchen up to 22C in the evenings when people aren't moving about so much. One issue is that digital thermostats usually come with a 1 degree differential set so the heating won't kick in until the temperature falls to 20C which would probably be noticeable to people. I changed mine to 0.5 degrees. I don't know how this affects the efficiency of the heating short cycling, but especially with slow to react UFH I don't want to wait too long for it to kick in as the temperature falls. If the starting point of the heated downstairs rooms is 21C then upstairs in the winter may well sit at 18.5-19.5C, I just compared my heated rooms with spare rooms where the heating is off and there is roughly a 2 degree difference in temperature, my house is well insulated but not as well as some on here. It depends a little on the outside temperature, solar gain etc. This is a comfortable temperature to be under a duvet, but not to to be out of bed. I often have discussions with the family who want the upstairs temperature turned up or the heating left on later, the trouble is 21C is too hot for me if I am in bed. I think the ability to have no heating upstairs is somewhat dependent on whether you just go upstairs and get straight into bed or hang around upstairs. It may be that 22C downstairs is needed to maintain a more comfortable temperature upstairs or you do need a little bit of extra heat. As mentioned with doors closed there is only so much that heat can circulate even with MVHR. If you do need a panel heater, £100-150 a time fitted would seem reasonable, you can get panel heaters down to £50 a time. I suspect that you'd be better buying them yourself as the electrician will just go to his normal supplier who may be expensive. I'd try turning the heating up to 22C first.That will probably be cheaper and easier. I am waiting for you turning on the WBS and asking how to cool the place down!

I think from memory that Safari doesn’t give you the option to ignore that message but if you use Chrome and go into advanced mode you can then ignore it

Can’t believe that we still aren’t quite finished. Have to report on a recent comedy of errors. The builder decided he would use a cherry picker to put the tops on the chimneys so he could get all the scaffolding down. The chimneys are pretty high up at 13m and have large aluminium tops that match the windows and soffits/fascias. So in comes an enormous cherry picker. They manage to have it sink into the garden. So then they bring in artic to tow it out. The artic can’t turn around in the driveway and backing it out they hit the gate pillars that they had built less than a week earlier. Eventually they got up and put the tops on. Yesterday doing the second one they got stuck 13m in the air when the weight alarm went off on the cherry picker. I only knew because I looked out of the window and saw the joiner who had gone home earlier outside fiddling with the machine. Eventually we got them down once we figured out how to use the emergency battery power.

Have the quote on for rendering the wall. Thats fine. Unfortunately some idiot (me) decided to only use real stone for the house. For the garden walls to match we have to use the same sandstone for the copes. This includes a circular seating area. I was hoping to get away with sandstone slabs cut to size but it wouldn’t have looked right. Not for the first time I have been told that I can’t spoil the look of the house by using something cheap. So over £10k for around 100 linear metres of coping stones fitted. I didn’t realise when we started that having a small slope to the site would cause such an enormous extra landscaping cost.

Off white with a sandstone cope, same as the house. I am worried about the cost of the copes. Luckily they do sample bottles!

As requested

Liquid Weather turned it purple! Decision has been made to render the wall. Thankfully, this should be the last unexpected bill.

It is the sandstone wall we want to change. It is easier and cheaper! The wall is a block wall and they are sandstone slips that the builders have been putting on it. We did not expect them to be so yellow when they arrived. In hindsight, probably should have stacked some up to see what they looked like rather than letting them just get on with putting them on. It hasn't been pointed yet so that might probably help.But ultimately they are too bright. The Liquid Weather would make them a lot darker I think, so we have ordered a sample of it. @Ferdinand is right about the planting, there is one area where we had planned to have plants hanging over the wall and that area we might not change.

Ordered some liquid weather as there’s nothing to lose giving it a try

Reading about yoghurt and the Liquidweather they seem to be designed to darken things up to look like dirty old sandstone. Here I need to make it lighter probably, which I don't think is possible. I don't know what applying acid would do.

Funny the architect said that this might be a solution

Hmmm that might be at least worth a try. I might buy a sample. My wife is quite undecided and now says she might prefer something more rustic tan render like this. She also wants it fixed as quickly as possible. It is very difficult to know how it will look finished. I am worried about having too many materials and colours.

We have a long retaining wall in the garden which we wanted to clad in stone. The architect recommended a drystane effect but neither my wife nor I liked that idea and we wanted something less rustic. We ordered coursed sandstone and the builders have started to put it up, but the stone that came is just very very yellow. My wife has decided that she doesn't like it and I can see her point. She thinks the issue is that the sandstone pavers are not uniformly yellow. We thought they were going to be yellow when they were ordered but they ended up being mixed sandstone. For some reason getting proper samples out of people seems to be an ongoing issue. Last week we refused to let the driveway get done in resin bound stone until we had an actual sample that we liked and a full bag of it, not a 2 inch square sample in a box that bears no relation to the actual colour. Anyway, having looked at it I don't think the pavers are the problem, I think the problem is that the colour is too yellow and that it is too many different finishes. I suggested changing it to ashlar stone to match the house, however, having spoken to the architect he suggested rendering it with a sandstone cope to match the house. This I think would look the best but has issues with staining which is why we didn't do it to begin with. I have a picture of the part complete wall and a picture of a rendered wall with staining issues which we want to avoid. Thoughts would be appreciated.