Bitpipe

We have 4.5m lift and slide (Gaulhofer) to living room from patio area and it's in constant use so no problem there - despite size and weight you can move with one finger. We worked hard to have a near level threshold between inside and out so there is only a few mm high rail to navigate, not a big step. In the utility, which is adjacent but a separate room, we have a 3G door, which gets used less but is useful if you have muddy feet etc. I'd question the logic of two entrances to the same space though - have one and then choose the type (hinge door, slider) that works for you. We have a second slider in the dining area, so right next to the living slider, that opens over a Juliette balcony to a mezzanine to the basement. Bit of a waste and would have been better as a higher level window, but aesthetically it looks nice and balanced from inside and out, just a bit impractical.

I have a similar bath (two in fact) and while they are lovely, the supplied trap was garbage - just the flexi hose thing. We'd already tiled the bathroom floor at this point of second fix, with a 40mm pipe coming through to take the waste. Didn't know about those flush traps so plumber had to chop a hole in the floor under the bath, (through tile, latex and OSB) and then pop a traditional trap below, flexi hose between that and the bath and finished with a bead of sealant around the perimeter of the hole to keep any water from falling into the hole. Was messy as hell to do but worked out ok. Also, while I was sure the electric UFH mat did not run under bath, I was still very nervous until it was done. To be fair, the real issue in the OP is the location of the double poizi which perhaps could have been mitigated if this requirement was known, however I had loads of similar near misses so it's very hard to anticipate. I was almost similarly snookered with the waste for my Impey wet room shower tray but that's designed to rotate to avoid similar issues which was a life saver for me.

I take it you need horizontal / lantern style units and not the more usual Velux style for a pitched roof?

From memory most of the new cabling back in 80's and 90's was CATV, most of which is now Virgin Media. Quality of that street work was quite shoddy, especially in areas that had traditional paving slabs vs the more common tarmac paths today. Killed a lot of trees also by digging through their root systems. The guys on the street today are surgical by comparison - dual disc cutter to make the 6" wide slot, narrow excavator to get depth, grab loader to remove spoil duct laid and a finishing crew behind - all moving in convoy.

We currently have a City Fibre rollout ongoing - they have been in town for over a year, every side of every residential street has (or is in the process of) being dug, ducted and covered and then fibre pulled through. The crews work super fast, they can be here and gone off to the next street in a matter of hours. They seem to be using the same distribution as OR, poles where overhead wire is used and up to the house boundary where OR is ducted. I'll need to catch them in the act as we have a one off duct from the pole opposite, every other house has overhead. Nice to see a bit of competition to OR and VM though, no idea what the service pricing is like but my BT contract will be up in 18 months so I'll be checking it out for sure.

Exactly the same issue we had - broken wire in the pair at the pole where it joined the run to the house. However was not a clean break so the connection on that wire would come and go so the fault was intermittent. You just need to keep pestering BT who will keep pestering OR and eventually it will get sorted. Maybe ask them for an EE router (if your EE signal is any good). On a related note... we have two circuits in the house, so two master sockets. One was voice only and the other voice and business broadband. Neither were on BT but both had started out as BT contracts. Anyway, we decided to consolidate them so in Jan this year we ported the voice only line back to BT and added broadband plus the WiFi discs, EE back up router etc. On activation day, could not get it to work so logged a fault. Engineer came out and realised that the voice only master socket had the wrong face plate so he swapped it over and job done. This month my BT bill has a £245 engineer charge! I get into a chat support call and, after checking engineer notes and the voice recording of my original call, they say it was because the problem was at the master socket it counts as my responsibility and I'd agreed to the fee if the fault was found on my part of the network. I pushed backed hard and they were not budging until after two more go arounds, they acknowledged that the line had never carried data since install so it was an install fault. Got the fee removed but how many people would have had the technical knowledge to put up the fight?

Have you done ground investigation and do you have a SE signed off foundation design? Anything tricky about your site - access, slope, ground composition? Have you looked into an insulated raft foundation and compared labour / materials etc? Insulated raft is similar to ICF so you may be able to do some of the work yourself to save on labour costs, or not require as much labour as you're not excavating down. Also, some TF companies like MBC will do an insulated slab as part of their package but will not do preparatory groundworks.

New build, refurb? If you're building to a low energy standard then UFH upstairs may not be needed, we only have UFH on our ground floor plus electric UFH in bathrooms (to remove tile chill) and wet towel rads. As our GF is timber suspended over a basement, we used spreader plates and they worked well. Only issue with spreader plates is dealing with the pozi-joists at the end of every other loop. You do not want to be threading UFH pipe through the web so we brought ours over the joist top and just cut a slot in the 18mm floor deck to accommodate (pipe was 16mm diameter). This slot was then covered with the final floor finish, in our case cross laid ply and resin.

Yes, but... We have one (have tried to claim for a legit latent defect issue, declined) and when we transitioned from Ecology to a high st lender the surveyor, who was here for all of 20 mins, said 'do you have one'. I replied 'Yes' and that was that, never asked to ever see it. We changed lender this year and had a new surveyor come out and same routine. This time I actually showed it to him but he was not that interested. He spent most of his time taking laser measurements of the exterior and counting rooms inside, even though I offered to give him a copy of the plans to save the bother. Feels like these re-mortgage 'surveys' are very glorified box ticking by busy people who just want to get onto the next job. So given new builds are such a small fraction of their lending business I'd say you'll probably get away without one, worth a shot anyway.

Just checked Beadle & Chrome and they have SM33 for £1781 so maybe it's not such a good deal now, probably due to the ex rate shift.

Yup, it was https://ilva.dk/spisestuen/spiseborde/skovby-sm33/top-i-olieret-valnoed-finer/p-1071267-5642736856/ SM33 is 17,999 kr which is £2045 at today's rates. I used CurrencyFair (or the equivalent) to make payment and booked transport with Chandlers but for a single piece it may be cheaper to drive over yourself and get it - we had 8 chairs, extending table, side board, tv table and a display cabinet The guys at the store spoke excellent English and were only too happy to sort it all out for me. As it turned out, around the time it was due to ship, my BA silver card was about to expire and I needed just 20pts to renew so I was fishing about for a cheap day return to get the pts. Copenhagen turned out to be the cheapest option (about £100) so I took my laptop, flew over, got train to their store and sat and worked there for the day until Chandlers turned up to collect at 2pm. Was not necessary but gave me peace of mind that it had all been loaded correctly. Showroom staff kept me supplied with coffee and even bought me a sandwich for lunch

Ok, I'll go back to MBC and see if they can review the original calcs.

Hello, we have two small GRPd flat roofs, both of which have aesthetic issues but are otherwise sound. The front one (3m x 2m) was not built with sufficient side to side falls so water tends to puddle in the middle, eventually evaporates but leaves an unsightly red stain due to algae. Rear one, more or less same size, had patches of the topcoat curl up and flake off after a year or two. Roofer came back to remedy but it just happened again so no idea why. I'm inspired by @Thorfun's beautiful green roofs so wondering if there is a possibility I could just lay some seedum rolls and let that cover up the issues. Probably being naive here wrt weight etc but worth a thought!

Wasn't planning on decommissioning it just yet

At present they're only laying bare duct to boundary of premises or to base of OR pole (depending how house is currently served). We have a duct at bottom of the pole but it's a bit clogged with mud, I'm just concerned that they may not be able to loop a fibre back down it. If I can catch them when they're digging then maybe I can get them to figure something out - however they're ripping through town at a fair pace at present !

We got an OR quote to pull cable from pole, duct across road and pull through the ducting we had laid to the plant room - was expensive so we got another contractor to trench across road to pole and pulled through our own 5 pair gel filled cable from TLC which meets the OR spec, left 10+m of cable coiled at foot of pole. Paid for a new BT connection and when the OR guys came along they were more than happy to terminate the cable either end. Only issue was we did not leave a spare draw cord in the duct and there is now fibre to home being laid in area (they are using whatever means OR currently use to each prem, duct or overhead) so not sure what we'll do when they roll past ours in a few weeks time.

I have a friend who is a quite talented interior designer - her hourly rate is not that expensive but the recommendations can be depending on the client's budget and taste. She has trades & suppliers that she can recommend but no obligation to ever use them. As you would expect it's mostly higher end clients, rarely new builds and often just a single room or 'problem area'. The interior design masters show on BBC 2 gives a flavour of how they usually work.

We also needed external balustrade to protect stairs to basement and some other outside areas so a but beyond the norm.

I got standard 'high st' insurance when we moved in, however took another two years to get completion cert as we had external landscaping to complete. While a broker or insurer can (and will) sell you an insurance policy it does not mean any claim would be successful if they felt you omitted something material when buying the policy and insurers are notoriously good at finding reasons not to pay out.

We use PIR sensors in the bathrooms to activate both MVHR boost and the DHW recirculation pump.

Welcome! Are you building to a particular energy standard or just trying to do your best against building regs? Getting planning and finalising your structure is a big step forward and will make life much easier. We were first timers also, this community made it happen so please stick around and fire away with questions. First off, we all need to see plot, pics and plans, we love a good nosey!

I would genie lift it to roof 3 (onto a temp ply base) and then have a small ply ramp to get from roof 3 to roof 2. Using a wheeled dolly for that last bit, as suggested above) could work well. I had to get two 180kg stone baths to the first floor of our build, did not trust the temp MSF stairs to hold (given they were secured with a few screws). Luckily we had an atrium through which the genie could lift them and I roped in a few mates, just to be safe. Was a quick job in the end.

Would work but you risk damaging it as it gets pulled up and snagging on something. I'd wrap the roll in a protective cover and haul it up the ramp you've made. Two people should easily be able to lug 50kg each.

I'd be very wary of unrolling on ground incase it got damaged. While 100kg is heavy, it's liftable with the right equipment and help. An effective way of moving a load horizontally is to use two layers of material that can slip over each other. Ply might work but would be limited to 2.4m length - would probably be suitable for the base layer. Maybe use an unrolled length of strong PVC membrane or geo-textile fabric for the top layer? I can envision a ply ramp with a lip (to stop the EPDM rolling off) and then drape the top drag layer over it. Tele handle the EPDM onto it, secure the top layer around it and heave it up into position. Does that make sense?

Welcome, be wary of the 'eco' label, ask yourself what does it even mean? Lots of 'green wash' technology out there that has questionable payback (or physics) - fundamentals are to be well insulated, airtight and minimise heating and cooling requirements. Any new building of any design (from contemporary white box to stone clad cottage) can be designed and built to be energy efficient and comfortable to live in. Whether you build it from sustainable materials is a separate matter - you could argue that importing highly efficient triple glazed windows from Austria is less 'eco friendly' than less efficient units that are made locally. Straw bales vs ICF? Planners care lots about what it looks like, how big it is, where it is and crucially how it complies with local plans etc. They care little if it's made of chewed newspaper or concrete, can be heated with a 50W lightbulb or a blast furnace. Building regs will want to you meet the modest requirements around efficiency (plus a host of other factors). Keep asking questions though when you have specific ideas to explore. We build a basement and it worked well for us.