newhome

Are you just paying for the sign and having it fitted separately? If so then I'd certainly give it a go and note that it was a planning condition. If you are having the sign supplied and fitted then the work should be zero rated as long as you can persuade the builder that it's eligible.

Don’t your tenants mind you spying on them everywhere? One might conclude that you are a voyeur! ?

Just don’t drink it from one of the bottles in the photo by accident ...

Response times are long if you have UFH regardless of whether it’s a passive house or not. Goes with the territory. The speed at which the temperature drops will vary but even then in a non passive house mine only drops 1.5 - 2 degrees in 24 hours at current temperatures. It then takes an hour or maybe just over to recover those 2 degrees when the heating comes on in the evening. It’s not yet dropping down low enough overnight to require it to come on in the morning. The main thing with UFH I have found is understanding how your own behaves and to work with that to suit your lifestyle. There is no one size fits all.

IT professional? ? You do have to wonder about some people! ?? You’d think it might be easier to use a bucket and empty occasionally ?

If that was a woman then respect! If it was a bloke then there was no chance of the aim being that good. Most blokes can’t even aim into a decent sized toilet bowl! Bet there were wet patches everywhere that have since dried ? ?

I have every room on a different stat / zone, the advantage being that I can have the heating off in the 2 thirds of the house I never use, and for the rooms I do use I prefer to have warm downstairs (20), and cooler upstairs (16). Even then I can choose to let the temperature drop down overnight or when I am out of the house as I know how long it takes to bring the rooms back up to desired temperature and can set accordingly. Having individual stats is important to me as being on an electric system in a large non passive house the heating costs would no doubt be significant (and wasteful) if I was heating every room. I do have MVHR but don’t find that it works efficiently enough to balance the heat across every room. It probably helps to some degree but the non heated rooms are certainly a lot colder than the ones where the heating is switched on.

As @Ferdinand says the kerb already looks to be dropped to the left of the path so just aim to enter the new driveway from there. It might not be exactly where your parents want it but it will still be a lot closer. Or you could extend the existing driveway along the tree line to provide a nearer parking space.

But what about the wallpaper!! ?

The female loos aren’t as bad as that so go for female IT professional ?

Ha ha! Given that (apparently) only around 50% of the guys wash their hands after going to the loo and the gents is always simply disgusting to the extent that you wonder if they actually know how to use a loo (according to some of the blokes I work with) I’m not sure IT professionals are necessarily decent tenant material. They do probably have money to pay for a cleaner however ...

Not something I would be in a hurry to do again for sure!

Years ago we rented a maisonette out. We used a letting agency to supposedly make life straightforward and for that service they took a decent chunk of the rental money but they dealt with the tenant, and made regular inspections (supposedly). Until that is the tenant stopped paying. They contacted us and told us and asked what we expected them to do about it when we asked them to deal with it. We turned up at the maisonette to find that the tenants had done a bunk. The maisonette was a new build with new carpets, magnolia walls etc. I emphasise the word ‘was’. The tenants had wrecked the place. They’d had cats in there that had shit / squits literally anywhere you can imagine; kitchen worktop, carpets, hob, everywhere! They had left bags of decomposing stuff in there (god knows what, we didn’t look), that had turned to maggots and swarms of flies. There was vomit all over the bedroom carpets that had been left to dry and the stomach acid had bleached the pale grey carpets in vomit spatter patterns. There were used condoms and syringes everywhere. I don’t need to explain what the bathroom looked like other than it was brown rather than white, and they had ‘redecorated’. They must have been to the pound shop and bought endless single rolls of wallpaper and borders, and literally put them up one by one. Endless different patterns and colours. Rather than trim the wallpaper they had pasted it up over the ceiling and over the skirting to avoid cutting it. The border was put up with drawing pins. There were letters from debt collectors, the police, benefit fraud investigators. Stuff of nightmares. My one and only foot in the rental camp, we sold up and got out as soon as we had spent money (more than they ever paid in rent) tidying the place up. Makes me laugh when people talk about landlords in such disparaging tones ...

Welcome, from the ‘other side’ ie SE Scotland.

Yep, earned value calculations. I suspect that most people don’t do enough of that in a self build which is one of the reasons contractors bugger off once the remaining payments are worth less to them than the work still left to do. As Nick says it’s still really important to stay very close to the budget even if you are using a main contractor. There are many tales of horror on here where using a main contractor hasn’t worked out as people envisaged.

I don’t have a passive house but I have UFH both upstairs and downstairs. I wouldn’t have it upstairs again out of choice. @PeterStarck is an exception I think as most people with houses built to passive standards seem to fit UFH downstairs although towel rads for upstairs seem quite popular. Living where you do I think it’s a no brainer to fit UFH pipes in the slab at least.

Nothing was measured during our inspection, not the accessible WC / shower with inward opening door, the height of the light switches, or width of doors etc. The route from the parking area to either the front or back door (it’s at the side quite a few metres from either door) is a bit of a nightmare in truth and I can’t imagine anyone in a wheelchair would want to live here. The only thing they were interested in was the level threshold. The fact that you could fall off the edge of the ramp on the way to the front door didn’t seem to concern them. All of the things that were picked up were visual observations or paper exercises. One of the things they wanted was proof that the ST panels on the roof weren’t a fire risk ?

Go back and negotiate a discount to fix yourself if you don’t want them to do it. TBH if you’re not going to be signed off before you move in it’s probably a non issue as you will have time to address it.

It's not in this one though surely?

Where's the bath?! Or is that from way back? It looks like your faux grout may be shiny rather than matt? That may be harder to blend in unless you pick a grout that has a shine to it if such a thing exists

Not me personally lol although I did tile the bathroom myself in the house I owned in Kemsing back in the day. We had someone in to do the tiling in this house as the hubby wasn't keen on trying to tile especially as there were 6 bath / shower rooms and a large part of the downstairs floor is tiled (other than the main lounge and dining room). This was the room where I had a meltdown as they used Mapei beige instead of the jasmine after I had matched the faux grout lines really carefully to the jasmine. As it happens you can't even tell the difference but a woman having a hissy fit ain't to be reasoned with!

Not mosaics but faux and real grout lines

Given the 165 pages on this thread (you will need a translator!) I imagine it’s a relatively common problem. https://forum.softpedia.com/topic/528151-pompe-caldura-aer-aer-aer-apa/page__setlanguage__1__langurlbits__topic/528151-pompe-caldura-aer-aer-aer-apa/__langid__1

You will need to call them and explain the circumstances. You can never rely on internet quotes for such circumstances. Internet quotes are appropriate for the 90% of the population who conform to the ‘norm’, anything else needs specialist underwriting. They may decide that you are far enough through to get a standard policy (I wasn’t) or they may not but you’ll only know if you phone them. Many many people embark on building projects to their home without informing their insurance company and thus risk invalidating their insurance.

If you admit that you don’t have a completion certificate and construction work is still in progress they won’t insure you. If you don’t admit to it then the chances are you will not be covered if you come to claim. Like all insurance policies it pays to be completely open about the circumstances otherwise you may find your cover is invalidated. I rang round loads and couldn’t find one that would cover me when I explained the circumstances, not even companies that provided cover for alteration works, extensions etc. In the end I used Challenge Quoterack and explained the circumstances in detail. I was contacted by 3 brokers, one of whom arranged me the policy I took out. I could sleep at night knowing that it was all above board. My insurance was arranged with Halifax but I was not able to source this insurance through them myself. One of the occasions where using a broker was much needed. https://www.quoterack.co.uk/ChallengeQuoteRack.aspx