AliG

I think some people are not comparing like with like. When cars were first introduced I am sure people said they were slower and less reliable than horses, comparing a new technology to something that has matured over 100 years is bound to lead to some issues. @Bitpipe electric cars are already a product that works well, I am picking up my Tesla in 2 weeks. There may well be software and reliability issues, but this has little do do with them being electric, the drivetrain is very reliable. Instead these are often due to Tesla simply lacking experience in building cars or adding unnecessary gadgets. The core driving functionality is very sound. Often I read articles on electric cars where everyone pounces on the lack of range, I certainly have not driven more than 200 miles in a day at any point in the last 10 years. There is considerable evidence that the number of long journeys people make is very small and there are charging solutions for that. @temp I had missed your post, this is the kind of scare story I am talking about. The hackers seem to have spent months working on this. If you want to kill someone there are lots of easier ways. It is not something likely to really happen. According to the Wired article the maybe had physical access to the car. I never thought anyone needed a £500 phone when the iPhone came out, look where we are now. Basically I am a big fan of progress. Not every invention is progress of course, some are pointless gizmos, but progress does require some mistakes and some trial and error.

Things are very insecure in general. Hence I am going for physical security in the new place. Steel security door to garage and lockable sectional door. Someone could of course cut through the door but that is a lot of hassle when other people's cars are just sitting outside waiting to be stolen. However usually as @JSHarris you have to think whether it is worth it to hack things. The media is trying to stir up that "millions could be killed" if self driving cars were hacked. Who would do this and why. If someone wanted to kill you they have a myriad of options already. Most people are not at risk of being murdered so I don't think it is something to worry about at all. Indeed I am increasingly depressed re the reporting on new technologies in the media recently. It is encouraging a luddite mentality.

I'll post a pic in the next couple of weeks, they are being powder coated to match the window frames at the moment. I'm not sure that they will be on when we move in!

Our aluminium soffits and eaves are about to be fitted, when I specified it I was just thinking about maintenance and how it looks, but looking at the house the other day I realised that the highest point is 9m above ground so if we had something that needed painting they'd probably be asking for the added expense of scaffolding to do it. Sadly we have 3 MVHR units and 2 are in the loft. I wish I had asked them to move them into cupboards. When designing the house everything I knew about I tried to place in a plant room, but the heating engineers didn't really think about this and just placed manifolds and MVHRs about the house for ease of access. Similarly we ended up with two consumer units, one of which is in a spare room wardrobe. These things tend to be specified by outside contractors who might not think about it the way we do so it bears watching. The CU was never finally placed until the electrician arrived and looked at the cable runs.

I just saw an ad for this. Looks expensive for what it does, but I guess if you really can't get your car into the garage. https://www.myparker.co.uk

You don't get anything for nothing, if they are making a profit then you have to be losing out. The assumption that everyone can profit because they are all sharing in house price appreciation is not a good one. House prices have fallen around 10% in central London in the last year, there are no guarantees. In general it is cheaper to own than rent property. Rental yields are higher than mortgage costs. If they buy 75% of the property and you pay 100% of the rent then you would likely end up paying a 6-7% rental yield. You could achieve exactly the same thing by getting a mortgage for 75% of the value of your house which would likely be cheaper and you'd continue to own it. Obviously this could help cashflow if you don't have the income to borrow 75% of the value of your house, but if you don't then you probably shouldn't be selling it and renting it back either. One of the reasons that people struggle to buy a house today is the difficulty in raising a large deposit, if they only buy 75% of the house then you are going to need 25% equity in it. It is unlikely you;d be able to easily or cheaply borrow this money and again this would be no different to getting an even higher loan to value mortgage.

Thanks for the picture, I think a bit darker than I am looking for but I wouldn't even have thought about sapele.

I did consider composite cladding, but then decided as it would never get wet I probably didn't need the extra durability. So I thought I would stick to wood as it would be cheaper. But now that I am looking at it, I like cedar as it looks more modern, but it seems to be at least as expensive as the composite cladding, if not more expensive. It's one of the first things visitors see though, so worth spending a bit on.

Thanks, might be a bit too grey for the wife but I sent her a picture. I hadn't seen your pics, very nice. I almost bought a table from Daniel Polished Concrete also.

Hi, We need to pick a wood to clad the underside of our porch area and the underside of a balcony. As it is undercover it should never get wet. My wife asked for something with more of a brown colour, I am leaning to brown/grey, we don't want anything too yellow. I am leaning to cedar, one thing I am not sure of is how will it weather if it never gets wet and is not exposed to direct sunlight, will it still weather but just more slowly? Thanks

Welcome Jude, On this link you can download the declaration of performance for various Rationel windows. This includes the sound reducing properties. Basic triple glazing will have 3 panes of 4mm glass. This achieves around 34dB of sound reduction which is not much more than double glazing at 32-33. However, more expensive triple glazing where one pane is 6mm toughened or 6.4mm laminated achieves a much better 39dB reduction. When all the panes are the same thickness sounds can resonate through them when one pane is a different thickness, sound reduction is much improved. Even thicker laminated panes can be used for better noise reduction. The price increase for laminated glass was less than 5% on my windows, but they probably started off quite expensive. It also is much better protected against break in as you can't easily smash the windows. Most of the big triple glazing suppliers can supply this kind of glass if you want better sound reduction. They will cost around £300 per square metre of window.

Round the other side where they are working at the moment they have blue plastic stuck over the windows (you can see it in the hall picture) and they even had the handles covered on the balcony, I don't know why they didn't do this one. The windows were sitting around on site for ages before being put in and need a good scrub anyway.

The people who installed the conservatory kept saying it was done and getting the inspector out then it failed. I asked the same question, why didn't they check first and they said that they had. I thought the inspector would get fed up, but he was very good about it. They took five tests on one drain before it passed. By that point he didn't trust them and wanted to test the other drain that they had installed which failed and then passed after they dug the whole thing up and replaced it.

Ok, now that I have the completion certificates needed to sell my own house, we can get back to finishing the new one. We are due to move in on the 8th, clearly we won't be 100% finished then, but it should be fine. We will have a temporary stair and the decorators will still be working, but water electricity and gas will be connected up. We have gone niche crazy in the master ensuite, bathroom TV is going in the end there. Scaffolding is finally down letting you see the full height of the hall. Gamesroom and study all ready for painting. Second floor staircase should go in next week or the week after. Hall from upstairs. First finished window frame, I love the real stone, it just needs to be cleaned off. The renderers were applying the base coat today and the top coat will go on next week. More niches, I was surprised that the builder didn't mind putting them all in. Solar panels on, this is the final area waiting to be tiled. Detail around Rationel windows.

Yay, all signed off. Took 7 drain tests! My wife was a star, she was on the back of the conservatory company to make sure everything was done in time.

I am sure that is a very nice underlay but- The 8mm underlay has a Tog of 2.29 which is too high for use with UFH. Historically they said to keep the combined Tog of the carpet and underlay below 1.5, but I think 2.5 is now considered OK. Really you are probably looking at using much thinner underlay than this.

Here is one of our windows, it looks like they have used a stop bead around 5mm from the aluminium.

@Moira Niedzwiecka that really puts all our issues into perspective. I hope that things go as well as possible with you and your husband. You're right not to care for the opinions of your neighbours, some people really should think about how they affect others.

I believe they are all booked in now, it was a bit of a shock when I found out no-one had done anything about phone/broadband. I wonder if I gave the family the choice of no heating or no broadband which they would choose. I would probably get by with a ladder, not sure what the family would have to say. But as you say the furniture is the problem. I have just made my roughly 75th phone call of the day. I doubt I have ever made half that previously.

Lawn will wait for next year. They are dropping the scaffold in a couple of weeks and putting in all the service connection so I can put in duct for BT and Virgin when I do that. The slightly awkward thing is not knowing if they will connect to a pole I put up in the garden. The old connection went all the way to the corner of the house which looks awful. It was also around 40m of cable and bizarrely stretched around a tree which didn't exactly fill me with confidence. If I can just put in a pole and duct to it then I am sorted. If Virgin is connected then having to wait is not such an issue. Of course if we were not trying to do the last two months work in a month it might be a little easier.

Thanks, that's the backup plan.

I would rather it was underground as it is neater, but having read your saga I decided to put a pole in my garden and then a duct from there to the house. In that case I don't think I should be charged. I was more concerned that they will come out, and then extra work needs done etc which will take lots of time. A nice woman from Virgin has sorted me out though, they are coming December the 4th, I made it then as the electricity will be connected up. We can lay a duct to where their cable enters the garden and just pull it through. When Virginmedia are easier to deal with you know you have problems. Now I am going to try Sky to see if they can order a new line with them too. It's going to cost me a couple of hundred extra over a year if I end up with both, but then it will make it a lot easier to play them off against each other to get a discount in the future.

Awesome idea, I have just texted the builder, I am sure he loves getting texts at 630 on Friday afternoon. It is a Remeha, the literature says it can run-on LPG also.

I am going to apply to get both installed. TBH I was thinking of having Virgin broadband and Sky Q anyway. Virgin offer a rolling 1 month contract so I can sign up to that just to get it installed and see how it goes. I will try Sky also then although everything tells me that Openreach are pretty hopeless to deal with.

I am sure that everyone has had days like this. As well as the ongoing saga of getting the completion certificates on my current house I got a call today that basically the stairs won't be ready for us moving in. These were ordered last year. The issue seems to be that the stair maker doesn't trust the measurement he has been given will be accurate and wants to measure the finished floor levels. But by that point it will be too late to make and install the stairs. He suggested installing a temporary stair, but then left a message saying that he will drop everything to finish the stairs by 22 December. Unfortunately our move in date is the 8th. He also had a meeting on site on Wednesday but didn't tell me of this problem until I called him today as the builder was worried. So we can move into a hotel for two weeks or move in with temporary stairs and balustrades. None of us really want to move into a hotel. We also found out today that our wood flooring cannot be fitted until the heating is on, but the gas will not be connected until the 6th of December, so we will have to move in with concrete floors in half the house. I am just about to make my 65th phone call of the day to see if I can get Virgin media installed as I have no faith that BT will install a line by the 8th. Phone reception in the house is poor due to the insulation and not having broadband over the Christmas holidays would make me the most unpopular husband/dad in the country. For some reason the builder organised gas, electricity and water but thought I would do the phone.