the_r_sole

Sounds exciting, I'd like to hear about the budget!

this is pretty unusual - we always produce our reg drawings and give them to the engineer, then coordinate back in their information - on domestic projects I can make a reasonable stab at what an engineer would require (although occasionally need to change some of our details to suit) but you have to start somewhere!

Can't remember the English ones off the top of my head but yeah, non negotiable in Scotland

You need escape windows - I'm not sure what the confusion is? If your top storey is more than 4.5m you need the protected enclosure but still escape windows

"Two highly successful architects" Sounds like they're very well suited to retirement as they clearly didn't operate in the current market or do any work for informed clients!

Ok, I get it, your mind is made up - the commercial reality is going to hit hard with this, engage with not just the owner who likes thing, but the people in control of the purse strings who will actually be funding it. I've worked on lots of commercial projects where the owner and end users have great ideas then the board approval for the funding is required and it reverts back to standard construction. good luck with it

It looks a fairly well advanced scheme to change the construction method? Should surely be designed with the method considered... I'd say as soon as you step away from standard construction methods you're opening a can of worms, you'd want to check first off that it could all be insured/sold etc without hassle, poured concrete also reduces the potential for alterations later which may or may not be a consideration. Commercial building are usually built in the most cost effective way possible, look at other office buildings or even blocks of flats, they're not built with inefficient or expensive methods - at the moment with high prices all round it will be even more of a battle to get funders to build in a more experimental way, especially if they ever get a qs involved (which I'd guess will be happening looking at the scale of it) Anything commercial I've seen that's aiming for passivhaus standard is timber kit (or mass timber) - be interesting to hear how you get on with this, you'll want to get a fire engineer on board to look at the proposed wall build ups asap!

Why are you ditching your architect? The detailed technical design portion is critical in translating the design into a building!

very cheap for that size of house

Unfortunately, there's no obligation on the authority to tell you about any of the comments received on an application, so if the objection is incorrect then an appeal might be worthwhile They must have had enough information to base a decision on, but maybe this could add weight to an appeal if there's been no site visit. Not sure that a conservation officers comments are necessary on a small scale development so might have worked in your favour to not have their comments if you do appeal "out of character" is the planners get out clause for issuing a refusal, it's such a wide concept that it's impossible to disprove If the previous works were bad, the planners can prevent similar extensions because of that, but a good planning consultant can usually argue that one out! However, the existing house being to small is not an argument I'd be surprised if there's no alternative design - I can do hundreds of iterations of an elevation from the same floor plan, there's always alternatives If they've raised valid planning policy objections, it doesn't matter where they live or who they are, it's the magic of the "democratic" planning system! If you have no alterative design, just go straight for appeal it's the only route you have

I honestly don't think it's an "aesthetic" choice that you should be making - windows in this country have cills for a reason, there's countless example of "minamilist" houses which still have some practical construction details, you'll likely find that you void any warranties for Windows or doors if you install them on the outer edge of the outer leaf. The image in the op looks more like an unfinished central European building than a minamilist house, moving them to the outer edge is only going to make the weak points for water ingress weaker. Maybe the velfac could achieve the look as the outer glazing for them covers the frame but I don't think anyone would notice a practical window detail and a small cill...

Well, your reasoning for wanting the base CAD files over the consultants PDF's doesn't stack up at all if you don't want to change it...

LT does it out of the box too

The last bit of your post is very strange to me - you don't appoint a design team and then not get them to coordinate their packages, what every client I've ever had wants, is a set of fully coordinated information which they can hand over to a builder (or build from). I've never had someone ask me for the early design drawings and then dissppear off to get an engineer to design the structure, then hand it over to someone else, then to someone else, imagine the errors built into that information if no one is going back coordinating between the different bits. And if you as the client are doing that work, why would you need any of the other professionals because you'd need to have the knowledge of each of them to be able to change the drawings after they've "been paid for their service" If you engage a professional design team, don't remove all their design liability by changing their information

that's very different to handing over the files to be altered by a replacement designer... you should find that dwg/cad issues for coordination are done by everyone involved in the project, but you should also see that no one is amending anyone elses information, only commenting on areas where there are conflicts, for example - I could just move some structure on the engineers dwg to "correct" it, but that would have unintended consequences on the structural design - but coordination is not the purpose for the release of the CAD in this instance

drawings are what we get paid for, not the tools we use to produce the outcome, we can control (and limit) our liability on formally issued drawings - issuing our base information specifically to be altered by a third party is a completely different thing so you wouldn't get our layering system, cad blocks, sheets etc on a cad file

do both work with your SAP calc?

if we release cad drawings for a job where they are giving it to another architect/technician we will remove all of our ip from the drawing - the new designer should want to work from their own base drawings too in case there are any errors built into to third party drawings. I've said this before on here, but you wouldn't have asked an architect for his pens, drawing board, head and arms before, you'd just take the output from those things. Pdfs are the same as paper drawings and the deliverables from the process

most officers are very, very resistant to letting a step go in now, I've had it a few times where the joiner for some reason hasn't managed to figure out the height of the opening (even one where we had to trim out the vertical ties on the roof to get the opening low enough!!) The last time this happened, the solution offered by the officer was to raise the internal floor level of the whole story! needless to say the joiner just moved the window in the end! Always worth asking, and explaining the build error rather than design error, you might get a charitable officer signing it off!

loft conversion and extension is basically two different jobs so there's a fair bit of engineering - if you don't like it then ask the architect to get another quote, we generally try to get three quotes for every project, although at the moment we're struggling to get anyone with capacity for months!

First thing I'd want to do it draw it myself, never trust someone else's cad!

first question - why?

prefab is fine, but the time is just taken in a factory rather than on site - you can potentially overlap the site works with the factory work, but then you have to make sure that slabs/sole plates are mm perfect, prefab in this country isn't really competitive so far, any time we've looked at it in the last few years the economics haven't stacked with it for individual homes or small scale private development

in my experience, there isn't really a construction method which significantly shortens the overall construction programme, there are ones which allow you to get to wind and water tight or certain milestones quicker but there's not really a method for reducing the start to finish time without introducing a fair bit of risk.

yeah, appealing against a refusal is more straight forward and you can usually get in to the next meeting where they look at the officers reports etc - when it's against a non determination they have to get an assessment done by an officer, get the planning departments recommendations, model conditions if they are minded to grant permission etc etc, so they can drag out for ages