AliG

This is exactly what I did, I thought with 2.7m ceilings I needed taller doors so I went metric. I would have liked 2.2m doors, but was too tight to pay to have them made. I think our openings were around your size to take a 2040mmx826mm door. It is, however, surprising how few doors are available in metric sizes and even fewer fire or glass doors in metric sizes if you need them. I have the walnut version of this Deanta door and they are very nice with the added benefit that they make them as fire and glass fire doors. They are around £100 ex VAT. https://www.leaderdoors.co.uk/doors-c14/internal-doors-c111/internal-oak-doors-c119/internal-oak-fully-finished-seville-solid-door-p38437#

Pictures as promised - The WC is not quite finished, but almost. The grout needs tidying up, and there are lights to go in the alcoves. We have 4 identical sinks like this, plus a double one on our bedroom. Part f the reason for ending up with 4 was that when we priced them up initially the sinks were only maybe £200 more than wall mounted ceramic sinks, much to my surprise. Months later they discovered that they had forgotten to include the cost of the quite substantial brackets.

I know, but it's nice to dream. There is a great fake news story doing the rounds about a guy who won the lottery and then dumped thousands of tonnes of manure on his boss's garden. I don't care that it's fake as it made me smile.

Builder fired brickie doing garden walls last week. I think it's the only time someone has been fired during the build. Was fed up with him apparently spending all day talking and not working. Also he apparently was taking a very strong interest in the house, the window frames, when I was away working etc. The next night the chains were cut holding the site security gates closed. We have had no issues in two years of building. Bizarrely nothing was taken. I got a much sturdier replacement chain. Weird thing is the pedestrian gate isn't even locked as we have moved in. The builder did call the brickie just to make sure that he knew he was under suspicion.

Would it be petty to think that many of your deliveries could accidentally block his driveway.

I'm on my way home on the train, I might have time in the next few days that I have off. What's a lot more exciting though is Peter Davison is sitting facing me one table away!

Porcelanosa supply a wide range of marble basins by L'Antic Colonial. http://www.anticcolonial.com/en/tipology/banos/lavabo/ This product is closest in look to what you are showing here. http://www.anticcolonial.com/en/serie/?parent_tipology=16435&tipology=7,8,10,18,47,49&serie=MINIM I can't remember the exact price of it, but I would guess that list is around £4-5000 but they frequently have 40% off sales which might bring the price into the £2500 range. We have a number of the L'Antic Soul marble basins which I think add a lot of luxury to a room for about £900 on sale. I'll take a picture when I get home. You can also get a similar look in white Corian type material for somewhat less, but it is a plain white stone. https://www.ebay.co.uk/usr/uniquedesignideas?_trksid=p2047675.l2559

Once in Edinburgh my dish stopped working in high winds. A quick investigation revealed that the dish remained attached to the house and instead the winds had bent the dish!

If that has Freesat then there is no harm trying it with a FireTV or other cheap streaming stick. If it doesn't work out you will have only spent the cost of a cheap stick. People will really only likely want Netflix. Just type up some laminated instructions for them.

I like watching TV and for me recently with being very busy at work and building a house one of the pleasures of being on holiday is that I can do things during the day and then kick back in the evening and watch a box set or a movie. I don't think you can underestimate the need for a simple system for guests. When we recently stayed in 3 AirBNBs I actually had to fix the TV in one place where the reception was so poor it kept losing Freeview and another place had a flat screen TV from the dark ages. For simplicity I would go for a SmartTV with built in Freesat (Unless you can get Freeview reception sorted out). Nowadays people are going to want to have access to Netflix. Having to swap inputs etc causes a lot of confusion. I would also want built in WiFi. I do agree that in my own house a SmartTV is likely to become obsolete, but this is a slightly different situation. Luckily the price of SmartTVs has been collapsing recently. Costco has some cracking deals for example. However, often the best deals don't have Freesat. I feel it is best sticking with LG or Samsung as it with their volumes SmartTV support is less likely to disappear. Something like this would probably work. http://www.argos.co.uk/product/6998563

It isn't a crazy quote or a cheap quote. Does it include VAT? Hard to say on the decoration and plastering without knowing the areas involved. Labour on the bathrooms seems about right. Carpentry work for kitchen seems high. Unlikely to be much more than 2 guys for a week.

I must admit that I don't know about WER and SAP, but a couple of comments. The windows with laminated glass will be more secure as they will be harder to break. 3G is better for sound transmission, but sound transmission is also reduced by having different thicknesses of glass that reverberate at different frequencies, so options 5 and 6 should be quite than option 4 and 3 will be quieter than 2 which is quieter than 1. 3 might even be quieter than 4. I personally would go for option 5 as over 4 due to the better sound transmission and higher security of the laminated glass. 6 would offer very little over 5. Depends how much you value security and sound transmission. I would note that 3G is quite a bit heavy and the thicker glass will be heavier again which might affect the cost to install the windows if the quotes are supply only. TBH 9.3% uplift from 2g to 3G laminated seems like a very good deal.

They did exactly the same thing with me, SGN was the meter installer. They wouldn't budge. Luckily this allowed us to put the meter on the same wall as expected but with a surface mounted pipe through the garage to the boiler. The regs are quite restrictive on running a pipe through the house. If you cannot persuade them to put it somewhere else I think you could run a pipe underground in front of the house to where it needs to be. In the end we had to do this to get gas to gas fires at the opposite end of the house from the boiler.

Nope, just space heating and hot water. There were no thermostats or timers connected for 2 months so the boiler would have pretty much run constantly.

I noticed @lizzie had this problem today also. I just checked the gas meter for the second time today, first time was just after it was connected in late January. When the boiler was installed the heating controls were not in place, so the builders switched it on and left it running 24 hours a day. This was necessary to some extent to dry out the house. We moved in in mid March and the builders would often be working with multiple doors/windows open. They would think nothing of having the heating running and the house open whilst it was freezing outside. The heating controls were eventually connected at the end of March and eventually I had to tell them to just use the garage door to get in and out as my wife was freezing. This was probably early April. There were also two large holes in the plant room wall awaiting ventilation to be installed. They were blocked off but at some point someone opened them up. For most of April, basically 1000 square foot of the house was open to the outside. They also drilled a hold in the kitchen wall which is our main living area to bring a gas pipe into the fireplace. I couldn't understand why it was so cold one day and there was a draught as I wasn't there when they did this. Eventually it will be under ground level and sealed off. Finally much as the house is very well insulated and has triple glazing, the seals have still not been completed around the outside of the windows which is probably adding to heat loss. Anyway, I checked and we have used £1700 of gas since the meter was installed in January. This seems absurd until you realise that a 42kw boiler running 24 hours a day would use over £30 a day of gas. The boiler was probably running almost constantly for two+ months. So if you install your boiler in the middle of a very cold winter, don't let it just be left running if you don't want a large bill. Also don't let builders run the heating and then open every door and window in the house when they get too warm which seems to be how they like to work. And finally watch for the builders making holes in the outside of your house and then just leaving them open whilst they work at normal builder pace.

I actually think that this is the most important comment before doing anything else and I'm sorry we didn't ask this before you started. It seems that you have plenty of land. Is there any particular reasons that the house is oriented the way it is? The lounge, dining room and kitchen face east and north, only the family room benefits from a south facing window and even this will be shaded by the house. The cinema room where you wouldn't want light is on the south side. Indeed from a light perspective it would be much better to turn the house 180 degrees. As the kitchen has a dining area, I would have a single door from there to the dining room and a door into the dining room from the hall. If it is a formal dining room it shouldn't be open to the kitchen. Do you want a through the wall fire between the dining room and the lounge? If not move the fire to the other end of the lounge and have a double door to the lounge closer to the front door. I wouldn't put a window in a plant room, it will make it difficult to place equipment inside and you will be able to see into the worst looking room in the house. Why does the cinema room have three windows? We have one and it is a pain in the neck. If you want a window in case you change the use of the room, the reason we have one, put it to the side. You have bathrooms upstairs above the middle of rooms downstairs. This is doable, but you will need to lose the waste in the ceiling which might encroach on the ceiling height. Plus you then have to route the waste somewhere downstairs. Instead try to keep rooms with plumbing above each other or have toilets close to corners (although I personally hate boxed out wastes in downstairs corners) How high is the interior wall height at the eaves? You have drawn the upstairs rooms out to the outside wall, but it is not clear how high the ceiling will be at this point, maybe only 1.2m? I applaud the effort you have made, it seems like you have put in a lot of work.

Before I start trying to move things around, why is there another door at the side of the kitchen? I would really alter this area especially with your comments re spending most time there. Why is the kitchen not open to this area which you say is the most attractive aspect of the plot? If the front door is really very rarely used, plan B would be better. The layout is quite American. I would not rearrange house for heating issues, they will be negligible and any changes made for this reason would annoy you forever.

The import and manufacture of mains halogen spotlights has been passed out now in the EU. They can still sell existing stock. You can still make 12v MR16s, but these cannot directly replace LED GU10s. I would not worry about someone replacing all your LEDs in future with high powered bulbs, eventually LEDs will be the only kind of build that exists apart from for specialist applications such as oven lights.

Funnily enough I prefer to calculate the areas for work myself as whenever a contractor does it they always err on the high side. The alternative is that they calculate it and round the area up which costs you more. Also when ordering materials you often have to order 10-15% more than the area actually being worked on. Tilers etc will then try to quote on that as the area not the area of actual work. It isn't clear to me what the standard for quoting is in this situation. Certainly I gave the tilers the areas of all the bathrooms ex doors, mirrors and baths for their fitting quote and then ordered a larger amount of tiles.

Sorry, I missed that. Shouldn't respond to things whilst at work.

Are you sure you should be submitting the non-resident's capital gain form as you were a resident at the time of the sale? I don't know anything about it but I thought this was worth checking.

In America lots of ovens are 750mm side which I think is a better size than our 600mm standard. I don’t know why you can’t get them here, you can buy a Wolf one at £4000. I can’t see it offers anything extra for the money. They’re not even that reliable from what I read

I have a very similar Liebherr freezer as it was the only built in freezer I could find with an ice maker. I stuck with cheaper Siemens for the fridge. I really wanted to get these models from Siemens. They are integrated, but they replace an entire 600mm cabinet and are 212cm high so the same height as a full height unit. But for some inexplicable reason they cost almost £4000 each versus less than £1000 for a standard 177cm high integrated Siemens fridge and freezer. I really cannot see why they were so expensive. The kitchen designer tried to spec Gaggenau ones which are exactly the same models but with stainless steel interior and cost around 50% more again. I was gobsmacked. She also tells me a lot of people buy SubZeros at around £12k. It's still just a fridge! Basically you can spend as much as you want, someone will be willing to take your money.

@epsilonGreedy you make a good point. One reason I downgraded the fridge freezer is simply that the fridge was never full and it was unnecessarily large. A lot depends on how you shop and how big your family is but I didn't see the point giving up so much space to it and it just seems to be for show often.

When looking at the spec of a fridge freezer the two things I normally check are the noise level and that the freezer is frost free. That one shows 43dB which is a bit noisy for my liking, I would look for 40dB or less. I think all American fridge freezers are frost free. I had a Siemens American fridge freezer in my last house which was replaced with a Samsung one when we redid the kitchen. That felt like a good saving moving from a product costing almost £2000(came with the house) to just over £1000. Prices seem to be falling again now. I preferred the Samsun to the Siemens, it had far better LED lighting and an indoor ice maker which took up less room. I couldn't figure out any reason at all for the high price of the Siemens replacement which if anything was an inferior machine. My parents have just replaced the Smeg that came with their house and was quite poor on reliability with a Haier narrow American style. After about 18 months they have had no issues. Fridges and freezers are pretty reliable relative to other appliances and so I would have less worry buying a cheap one than a cheap washing machine(ice dispensers are the reliability exception and this doesn't have one) Both our American fridge freezers had no issues with the ice/water. The Siemens freezer did become noisy after 7 or 8 years and found that it was getting iced up inside. I managed to take it apart iand fix this myself. The drain was blocked. Come our self build we originally planned another one, but I eventually changed to a built in 600mm wide tall fridge and tall freezer for a few reasons. 1. People were always mucking about with the ice dispenser. Everyone suddenly needed crushed ice in their drinks when they came to visit. I was worried this would eventually break it. 2. The narrow freezer in a 1/3 2/3 American F/F is annoying. I did consider a french door style one with the freezer at the bottom. 3. I felt going back to integrated appliances was neater, but more expensive as the appliances cost more (there is less competition in built in appliances) and then you have to buy extra cabinets. 4. As @ProDave mentioned the water dispenser was pointless. Water often is colder from the tap. I got a freezer with an ice dispenser inside so no one cold play with it and no water dispenser. We have noticed in the new place that you have to run the cold water for ages to get actually cold water as it sits in a loop inside the house around 80m long and the kitchen is at the opposite end of the house from where the water comes in, so that could be an issue for some people.