MikeSharp01

Might be worth factoring in aspects of 'the grid' that you feel you will need as this might modify the available sites. IE do you want broadband, electricity, gas, water, sewage connection.

Basically leaving a gap would perhaps be daft but on the other hand the party wall stuff might cost a bit - you will also need to join the roof and looks like the chimney as well as the wall and if you do join to the existing one you are probably stuck with the same basic profile - IE same size.

Surface mount, simpler to Install and you don"t need to wreck the cabinets to fit them. I used metal surface boxes with the cables coming in the back via a grommet at millstone manor.

Not sure we will be allowed by the powers that be to re-write the laws of physics - besides which they would have to change everywhere and the effects would be interesting to say the least?.

Yes but speaks not of the full cost, iron is more plentiful than lithium, in 2019 we only harvested 97000T of lithium (BGS 2021) while in pig iron alone we managed 1.3 billion T.

Is this timber a rainscreen, IE there is a surface below that actually does the work of stopping water penetration?

Perhaps you could put the UFH in the liquid screed so avoid the voids and get the UFH in as well, unless building control where you are insists on it the insulation it will do very little thermally, might have an acoustic effect, so might usefully be dropped. If you try and fill back up to the same level with screed however the extra 50mm of concrete might be too great a load so that would be worth checking if going that route.

Early days - but promising results.

I guess you don't want those fingers in the way as 800Kg of slider comes towards the close either.

What is going on here, did they manage a close air tight fit without the expanding foam and / or compriband, or is this a tongue in cheek dig at FENSA?

Looks good - have you had a recent air test to see if the whole place is still as you built it 10 years back?

can you squeeze a photo of the neighbours gable with your current layout.

I guess its about working the numbers - the money spent on an extension can go into the move and paying the uprated mortgage for a period while your income and inflation nibble away at it. If you are thinking of putting the extension costs onto the mortgage than that may change things but again its about working the numbers. Don't forget to factor in the difficulty of finding a builder and materials to build with at the moment!

You will be throwing away two out of three lots of work and you might find yourself in the difficult position of wanting ideas from each in the final design and asking one of them to take ideas from others forward as part of the final package which may be a difficult fit. We tackled it slightly differently, we asked our chosen architect to work up three schemes for the project and when we combined aspects of them we had no problems - we loved the tower concept from one, the room layout from another. We chose our architect by giving each of the shortlisted ones a pack of our expectations including RED lines, a mood board, our budget, our expectations of self building - IE we wanted to be able to do as much of the work as we could, eco desires, our requirements on drawing formats / availability / usage rights and process outline based on the RIBA phases (where we mentioned the 3 schemes thinking) with go / no go points along the way. We then met each 'down the pub' and after receiving fee proposals we tidied up loose ends with each and made our choice. It worked out well I think as every time I stand in the structure, which is now up and going through cladding before we start work on the inside for real, I get a happy feeling about the way it works. PS in our case the Structural Engineer was also part of the package as our chosen architect wanted us to use someone they had worked with elsewhere.

You will need to think hard about separation distances and work the combinations especially the 3ph which will need a notification tape above it as should the gas.

What other 'services' are going into the trench? Will they be ducted? You may need to layer the other services to achieve any separations that may be needed. Heaping the top soil is a good idea you can use pea shingle in place of sand then I would put a layer of type 1 and compact it then the rubble rock then compacted type 1 again followed by top soil and final compact.

Glad it all worked out OK.

Once you have been over your design with a fine tooth comb your electrician can do the cabling at first fix and then return to it for second fix and anything they missed will be their need to fix, which at that point can be quite expensive - or you use radio switches to get around the problems which as @nod says are/is rare. You need to think about how the multiway switching will work with dimmers and if its complex you might like to consider radial wiring where for the lighting where everything comes back to a central point and the interconnections are made there that way, provided you have installed enough 'ways' to the boxes you can wire it how you like back at the box. Also radial allows you to have complex controls in the middle and simple switches at the boxes.

TBA I don't know, my friend who has a licence takes my stuff down there for me and he gives me a receipt - I do know they no longer deal in cash so I would be ready for both an account and some ID.

Yes we have one in Kent - odd isn't it!

Welcome to THE forum for people like us. Probably need some pictures to fully understand what you are saying but are you saying that the retaining walls have soil on your side and nothing on the other side?

+1 it works, don't worry about it.

In addition to one under the slab, in the ground to all intents, and a couple in the middle of the zones I placed one sensor, pocket pipes anyway, In the floor about 1m back from the windows. It struck me that I might like to know if the sun is doing its job before it gets ahead of us and to allow me to move heat from zones getting sun to zones not getting sun. I swither about this being a good idea or not, when I put them in I am sure I had a way of determining a control schema but I cannot for the life of me find my notes and right now, in response to this thread, I am struggling to work out what the plan was.

Good to hear, it was a long shot anyway.

Just while I remember, daft thought but worth eliminating - there is no chance that the low loss header has been put in upside down?