AliG

Planners can be a law unto themselves. When they are claiming overdevelopment a useful thing is to have a plot plan showing the house as a percentage of the total area. I would be hard to argue that this is overdevelopment if it is less than 20%. Some rough calculations for other houses nearby would also be useful. As far as I am are there is no rule that says houses in an area have to be a similar size, although I know others have had this issue. Other smaller houses may be on smaller plots. If the house is not covering a large percentage of the plot then I seriously doubt that this arbitrary size limit would hold up on appeal.

True. For example I’m sure that we’ve all seen traffic wardens parked on a yellow line to give out tickets.

Pipistrelle bats don't appear to be endangered and their protection is a waste of everyone's time and money (unless you are a bat inspector). GB index of common pipistrelle population from Field Surveys

I remember a few years ago I decided to fill some holes that were letting draughts through in my parents' house with foam. Next thing I know I was throwing out the work shirt I was wearing whilst doing it. Lesson of the story is don't wear anything you don't want to ruin whilst using foam, I don't think it cleans off.

I am thinking of installing a SONOS Beam, which is a new soundbar on the wall below our kitchen TV. The power cable and HDMI lead would have to be around 150mm above the top of our in the wall gas fire. Is there a recommended safe distance for a power cable from a fire? The fire won't be used much but you cannot rely on that.

The actual cost of wholesale gas is a relatively small part of the bill thus gas and indeed electricity costs do not vary anywhere near as much as you would think. The price of gas has varied over time especially with the large commodity price inflation we had a few years ago, but even then the price of electricity is pretty well correlated with the price of gas so the relative economics are unlikely to change much. OFGEM Dept for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy

There have been numerous discussion of this in the past. Generally if mains gas is available then it is the cheapest way to heat hot water. ASHP are more competitive versus oil heating or electric heating. This is due to he fact that gas costs around 3p per kWh and electricity costs around 13p. Thus an ASHP with a COP of 4 would provide no saving over gas and in winter when the COP might fall in cold weather gas would be cheaper again to run. If you have a very large amount of PV and use it to run an ASHP then the calculations could start to turn in its favour, I believe this is what @JSHarris has. But it would be tough to make such a system to work well in the winter.

I would just have the trees trimmed and offer them the branches. You don't need their permission and asking them only creates the chance that they say no and you have to try and work around their unreasonableness. I had to trim tress along the boundary that my neighbours used to try and object to my planning permission. They never said a word and I didn't bother asking them, I just put in a planning application then did it. If they hassle you call the police and if you think their is an element that you are English, say that you are worried it is racially motivated. A good thing to do in situations like this is keep a diary of anything that happens noting time and date. This goes down extremely well with the police/courts. We have had to do this is a situation where we were harassed by a crazy ex neighbour/friend. The police sorted it right out. Is it a conservation area? If so you will need permission to trim the trees, at least you would in Scotland. Frankly it is a real pain that people can plant trees along boundaries and interfere with your enjoyment of your property. Because of my neighbours complaining, I have a 4m waste of space strip between my house and the boundary to protect the roots of their tress and a smaller garden than ideal at the other side. Effectively they have hijacked part of my garden by having trees on the boundary.

I have Porotherm which is thin joint. Much as large areas of straight wall went up quickly, as soon as you had door openings etc it was no faster than normal blockwork. Indeed it was probably slower as the brickies weren't used to it. By far the biggest time over run on the build was the block work. The SE wanted us to prop the two leaf cavity wall ground floor before putting the first floor concrete slabs on it. Much as theoretically you can build a single leaf wall, I seriously doubt that they would recommend this for safety. It is quite easy to cut, but it is harder to fix things to. If you want to build a house then face it with brick, the fastest way is going to be SIPS or timber frame. They can be built to roof level and the roof put on before the outer skin. You also won't have the issue of matching the course heights as mentioned.

I wondered if a waste disposal is considered environmentally unfriendly. As far as I can find from the internet, they are actually considered one of the most efficient ways of getting rid of waste and it is easily dealt with in treatment plants. Composting is a good idea, but it is not practical particularly in apartments and the reality is a lot of food waste is still just thrown away. Consider what is gong down the average WC and ground up food waste mixed with water is negligible. Don't put fat down it though!

+1 for silicone utensils and baking pans. Much easier to clean. We have 2 sinks but they are just used to rinse things out. A waste disposal is a must, cheaper than the boiling water taps we all love and at least as much use. I actually did away with the draining grooves in the current house as I fund they get dirty compared to the rest of the worktop, they don't actually direct water into the sink and they cost a few hundred pounds. No issues at all so far.

To think their business seems to be property.

Just saw this in the Daily Mail. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5839037/Two-millionaire-couples-war-2m-self-build-dream-home.html TBF £2m and 1 year is way too ambitious for such a complicated house, but equally it shouldn't have cost £5m and taken 10 years.

As an aside, I recommend that everyone checks the specification of fridges, dishwashers etc. This will tell you how noisy they should be. Aim for quite ones in an open plan space. You can barely tell when our dishwashers are running. I even got a waste disposal that is so quiet I am scared that someone will leave it running. I think if you can afford it and have the space it is nice to have the option of open plan living and specific rooms, which this house has. A way to improve an open plan room though is to arrange it into areas via furniture, being l-shaped etc. Our kitchen is a cross, one side is the seating area, one side the table and one side the kitchen. I don't like when a kitchen is designed with the kitchen area just open to the seating area. I think there is room to do this in the space.

As said don't pay this, you won't be able to claim it back. I had to have quite robust discussions with some suppliers to get them to zero rate things when it was supply and fit. They all did in the end. I had to sometimes send them the VAT notice. The rules are mostly in Section 3 of this. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/vat-notice-708-buildings-and-construction/vat-notice-708-buildings-and-construction

Welcome to the forum. As you already mentioned that you are thinking getting rid of your architect, this reinforces that I probably would. I do like the look of the outside, but this is one of the strangest interior layouts I have seen on here and I would echo most of the comments above. I think the best advice is to make a list of rooms that you need and how you plan to use them and then decide how big you want them to be as a starting point before getting onto details. 1. Combine boot room/ laundry room and use the space freed up to make the snug bigger. 2. You walk through double doors into the kitchen and right into the island. As a general rule I think there should be a lot of space around the entrance to a room to make it feel spacious when you enter. The island is also in front of the bifolds. The whole kitchen layout needs rethought. You might want to move the kitchen area to where the snug is, if you made it bigger via point 1. A lot depends on whether you want a sofa in there or a table (which I prefer to an island). It really depends how you want to live in the space. Also square islands don't work well as you can't reach the middle. 3. I have a large double height entrance hall, and what you have there is very grand, but it uses a large percentage of the space. I see that the entrance to downstairs is under the stair and then you have patio doors that are unlikely to get used. Moving the stair to one side might actually make the hall feel bigger and allow a larger more open double height space if that is what you are going for. 4. I would hate having to walk through a cloak cupboard to get to the WC. I'd try and have a cupboard off the hall and a WC. I would also try to have a window in the WC if possible, 5. Not sure why the master bedroom has a store and a dressing room. I would probably make the store a wardrobe for the bedroom next door. I would not have an ensuite bedroom that did not have a fitted wardrobe. 6. I would make the master en suite larger and swap it around so the window is next to the sink/WC. 7. I also am not a big fan of balconies. Do you think you would actually use it? 8. Making upstairs just slightly smaller than downstairs at these side will be very awkward to build. It would probably cost more and give you less space than if the area where the master ensuite and dressing room are just went right to the side of the house. You could use this to make them larger also. Actually looking at it, it is a really bad piece of design. There is an upstairs corner with nothing to support it for the sake of bringing it in roughly 2 feet. I think the house e has enough shape and interest to it that this would not make it too boxy. 9. I would concur that I would make the master en suite larger than the main bathroom. That's the room you'll use every day. 10. As drawn, it appears that the downstairs ceiling height is 2.4m. A house of this size would normally be 2.6-2.7m on the ground floor nowadays. 11. The garage is almost connected to the house, but not quite. It looks like the garage is designed to have usable space above it. If so, I would connect the garage properly to the house so you don't have to go outside. 12. You could consider putting the cinema and gym in the roof space rather than a basement, or rejigging the rooms to put a playroom up there and the cinema downstairs. It will probably be cheaper. We have put a games room up in the roof and it is a lovely light space. I hope this doesn't sound too harsh. Some designs on here have been excellent and I wish I asked for advice on my own design. I also really like the outside look of the house. The layout though, seems to do some quite strange things and make some basic errors.

I have used an architect that I have known for a long time. He regularly makes the point that at the end of the day it is your house and he has to take on board what the client wants. I do not feel that this mindset has been taken on board by all architects. I think he added a lot design wise to our house versus the more functional aspects that we set ourselves such as room sizes. If I had to do it again I might have gone over a couple more revisions to the plans as some things are not quite how we envisioned them at the design stage. It is a lot easier to go over things again and again yourself than with someone else where you feel that you are wasting their time. One thing I wish I had done was taken my design and asked for comments on here. I think doing this then going back to the architect would help. If you do use an architect be very precise on what you want, for example we wanted a large en suite, but my wife's definition of large is a lot larger than the architects and this then required a lot of revision later. Funnily enough I had specified the sizes of pretty much every room, but didn't include bathrooms.

The economics do improve somewhat if you use batteries to store excess EV generation. The combination of that and some E7 moved from night to day could improve your returns towards an acceptable level. I was focusing on the question of EV vs batteries which I think EV easily wins currently. One thing to remember is that heating hot water with excess EV is a poor use of the power if you normally use gas. Electricity is roughly 4x the price of gas, so you'd be better to try and use the electricity for something electrical and heat the water with gas if you can. It somewhat depends on what people consider an acceptable ROI. I would think around 5-6% in the current interest rate environment, it seems that people tend to use higher numbers. I have no doubt that battery prices will fall and make this a good investment, it's just not quite there today.

I had just googled it, as you say checking Uswitch the cheapest E7 was 8.5p. Makes batteries look even worse value as the cheapest normal rate was still less than 13p. At these rates the maximum E7 saving would be 63p and any use at the daytime tariff would massively eat into this.

A Tesla Powerwall costs £6000 plus installation costs(cheaper alternatives may be available). An installed 5kW EV system costs £5-6000, cheaper if you DIY. As the EV system generates free power and costs less than a Powerwall it is extremely unlikely that a battery system would be better than an EV system as a starting point. It may depend on your use of electricity over the day, but in general electricity from a battery is still quite expensive. A much cheaper way to store EV electricity is to use it to heat hot water. E7 electricity costs 7p per kWh vs around 13p normally. A 14kWh Powerwall could save you at most 84p a day if you filled it up every night with electricity and used it during the day. However, you may not use all the electricity or you may still buy some electricity at the higher daytime price on an E7 tariff. Thus the savings might be only 50-60p a day or £200 a year versus a £7000 investment. A 5kW array should generate around 3500kWh, or £455 a year of electricty plus FIT payments of around £200. You may not use all of the electricity, however. But still you would probably get a £500 return on a smaller investment. As suggested the best way to increase the return is to get cheaper panels/installation, assuming that you have the space. Generation/returns will fall considerably if you don't have a south facing roof. The price of batteries needs to almsot halve before ROI becomes reasonable.

I have had some of this issue also. Luckily plumbers, electricians etc have been sourced by the builder or architect and have mostly done a good job (apart from plasterwork previously mentioned). However for some jobs I have really struggled. I don't know how many people I have spoken to or emailed about fitted wardrobes for our bedroom. My wife got fed up and got a quote from Sharp's (which was around £1200 per wardrobe/set of drawers and so too expensive). What I don't understand is why people don't just say they are too busy or not interested. Honesty would go down a lot better with customers than wasting everyone's time, promising quotes that never arrive or getting all the information then producing an absurdly high quote on the off chance that you are desperate (quoted over £6000 for three electric roller blinds).

Those brick slips are attached direct to the Protherm, so we have a very solid feeling fake brick wall. They went a bit overboard with the pointing so it needs to be cleaned off.

The archway is finished so we can use the front door again. They do need to finish the front face. We can now finish the render off. Our fitted bookcases are in, we have to choose one of those three door finishes.

It might have been that I wasn't using it often enough. I had to set it off to work manually, it didn't have a docking stationing come out itself so it still only got used weekly at best. Wasn't moss, but other than that I'm not enough of a lawn expert to know what the reason was. After a couple of years the ground was clearly covered in small clippings between the blades of grass. In fairness though the garden looked very tidy, my main issue was the cost of spares after three years.

I had a Robomow one for a few years and was quite pleased with it. It was cutting around 350 square metres of grass. I was very lucky with the price I paid and a few years later they were a lot more expensive. Prices have come down a lot recently. My next door neighbour who wasn't great with DIY then bought one and couldn't get it set up right so gave up on it. There are a few issues to bear in mind. It doesn't strim the edges and obviously doesn't weed which seemed to be a bigger job in our garden. They say that the small cuttings will mulch into the lawn over time. However, I found that after a couple of years use my lawn was choked with cuttings and it needed regular scarifying. As noted you have to put a perimeter wire around the edge of the grass to define the area that you want cut. If you have multiple areas then this is a pain. We just had front and back. You get really stung on spare parts. We left the box that sent a current through the perimeter wire permanently outside. After a couple of years it broke and they wanted £100 for a replacement. The perimeter wire would also sometimes come up and then get cut by the mower so had to be fixed. Finally the battery eventually needed replacing and was maybe £200. I just checked and spare parts are available which is good, but are very expensive. https://www.magic-parts.co.uk/acatalog/DATABASE_ROBOMOW.html We then built an extension and the shape of the garden changed which would have meant reinstalling all the perimeter cables. At this point for this, a new battery, new cabling, new blades, and a perimeter switch I was looking at about £400 after three years of use. The power supply and controller were also getting erratic. Basically with these lawnmowers costing £500-1000 you need them to have a long life to pay for themselves. I think I paid around £500 over 10 years ago which was quite a deal at the time. I decided to buy a Bosch battery lawnmower which was a great product. After a few years I got a fantastic deal on having someone cut the grass, £160 a year for doing it every two weeks. They also strim the edges. My reckoning is that I over the years I have spent around £100 a year on tools to do it myself anyway so this was a no brainer. I have never looked back.