jack

I'm not really concerned with food going down the drain per se, it's just that I'd rather keep it onsite and have it go into our (poor, sandy) soil than send it into the sewer.

According to the Le Creuset website, if you use the dishwasher you should treat their pans with oil every time you put them through the dishwasher: "When frying in an uncoated pan for the first time or whenever the pan has been cleaned in the dishwasher prepare the pan as follows: Add some vegetable or corn oil so that the base is covered. Heat the oil gently and turn the pan to coat the inner side walls. Remove the pan from the heat, let it cool and clean with kitchen paper." I can't be arsed with that, so I tried just not putting them through the dishwasher. Since doing that, I find that food doesn't stick as much, and the pans are more or less wipe clean rather than needing scrubbing. I do treat them with a bit of oil now and then.

Not a fan of putting food down the drains - seems a waste. I recently started using a bokashi bin for the first time in 10 years. Works well, although I'll admit it involves a little more work than a waste disposal unit!

I don't think anyone is suggesting that you don't need a kitchen sink! We don't put our pots and frying pans through the dishwasher, but they clean up very fast in the sink. Plastic gets a quick rinse before recycling. Everything else goes in the dishwasher.

It's a decent system apparently, but eye-wateringly expensive (all the Loxone branded stuff is, imo). One Loxone dealer in Belgium has a solution that integrates Doorbird intercoms with Loxone, if that's what you're after. You can set up a wired doorbell system using one digital input monitoring a button of your choice, and using one of the outputs to trigger any wired system. When you say "funky", do you mean in terms of tones it plays or how it looks (or both)? Edited to add: I'm on the Google Groups Loxone mailing list. Some very helpful people contribute to it.

Buy a decent dishwasher and you'll barely hear it. Our Siemens makes a very occasional groaning sound as it changes mode, but other than that it's virtually silent - certainly the noise isn't in any way annoying, and I say that as someone with distraction issues and bat-like hearing.

My friends don't give a stuff that they can see a few pots and pans poking out of the sink from the table, and neither do I. We're generally too busy enjoying ourselves to even notice! MVHR takes care of the smells - they're simply never a problem.

Mine came as part of our Pazen window package, so I'm not sure what brand they are. The ones we ended up with are 240V, with simple relay-based switching. Works well with Loxone, although you need two relays per blind, which adds up quickly if you have a lot of blinds. One thing to be aware of is that Venetian-type external blinds definitely don't block out all light. Our kids' rooms have them, and just the gaps around the side and the holes for the support wires let in enough sunlight in the morning to wake them up. Doing this again, I'd have gone for proper blockout versions on bedroom windows. That said, I do like the sleek appearance that the Venetian blinds give to the house from the front. We never raise them all the way up - they just get rotated to a semi-open state every morning.

Any particular reason for this requirement downstairs? For less-used rooms (eg, lounge if you generally use the snug), why does it matter if you need to go via another room? Saves wasted circulation space (not that all circulation space is wasted, of course) and can help link everything together. Picture the scene as you walk through the front door at the moment: a cavernous reception room dominated by a central staircase, and then... some doorways around the perimeter. The only one of these that gives you any glimpse of what's to come is the slight view you get through the lounge to the garden. The view from the front door through all the other doors is onto a wall adjacent each of those doors. Is your current separate dining room a several minute walk from the kitchen? Believe me, you'll get sick of that traipse after a while. "Oh, forgot the ketchup", "Bugger, I forgot to get a drink", "Can you refill my drink while you're there", "Sure, I'd love some more if there're leftovers", "Right, what's for pudding", etc. I think the distance of the dining room from the kitchen is the biggest problem with this design. If I fixed nothing else, I'd fix this. Have you ever lived in a house with a properly designed and scaled open plan area? You worry that you won't use the dining room, but that's surely a feature rather than a bug? If you make it pleasant to eat adjacent the kitchen, then a separate dining room, and all the extra cost it entails, becomes redundant. If you really must have it separate, you could put your dining room where the current snug is, and maybe pinch in the doorway a little. You'd be a lot closer to the kitchen, while still have the dining area feel separate. You also seem to be conflating open plan per se with "endless open plan living". There's a balance, surely? And as for house sizes leading this, we intentionally chose open plan kitchen and dining, despite our house being nearly 300m2, because I've lived with both and vastly prefer it this way. That said, it's your house, and it has to reflect the way you live. However, I found it telling that the way we live changed in ways I hadn't thought about once we moved into our new house. For example, we've always lived in our lounge, but once we got a snug, we found ourselves living in that instead, and hardly use the lounge at all unless we have people over.

This is a brave move, especially when you're probably already feeling uncomfortable with how things have gone with your designer, so well done mate. Hopefully the feedback will help crystallise your thoughts. As others have said, only you know what you want and how you live in a house. However, where lots of people are saying the same thing, that might be a clue that something's important. I'm assuming from the lighting on the Sketchup model that south is roughly towards the bottom of the floorplans. A few things that jumped out to me (some of which others have already mentioned): Too many stores. I don't know whether some of these are intended to be used for clothing storage, but personally I'd want to see generous built-in wardrobes in all bedrooms of a new build, especially of this size. The wardrobe in any spare/guest bedroom can double up as a general store (we keep Christmas and Halloween decorations in our spare bedroom wardrobe, for example). The bedrooms seem huge, but in at least a couple of them (eg, top left) you can't make much use of all the extra space. Personally, I think a longer, narrower room with the bed at one end gives you more options for furniture, musical instruments, and general playing area. The top right bedroom has an awfully long walk to the bathroom (especially in the middle of the night). I'm not sure about the laundry/boot room feedback. It's certainly nice to have a lot of space, but I'm less sure about having these functions combined. If you do combine them, you could consider a separate room for things like less-used shoes, coats and sports gear so that it's out of sight. Also, it's a minor thing, but having the laundry so far from the foot of the stairs could be an annoyance for whoever is schlepping up and down the stairs with clean and dirty laundry. A laundry chute might help at least for the bedrooms above. Some people will consider it wasteful, but I love the big entrance hall. That said, you'd retain most of the wow by moving the stairs to one side (or around two sides), keeping the centre open and making the space smaller. You could reduce the reception area by probably 20-30% without much impact on the feeling of space. The current stairs also seem a little narrow for the space, but that might just be because of how big the space looks on a floorplan. The kitchen island is massive - I don't know what work surfaces you have in mind, but I doubt you'll get a single piece of stone that size (fine if you're happy with a join through the middle). I also think it's potentially too big to look right - no-one can realistically reach the centre, so will it become a dumping ground for "stuff"? I know we have real trouble keeping our large island clear. I also think it feels like it's very close to the bifold doors. No-one's going to want to sit along that edge with a large window at their back. I like the snug position relative to the kitchen, at least in terms of having comfortable seating in that general location, although for me a proper snug works better away from the kitchen. In our case, we have a snug that's basically used as a TV room, and it's down the hall from the kitchen. The kids can go in there and watch a movie or read while we're cooking in the kitchen with the radio on. For the functions we wanted from a snug (eg, family movies after a long day out), it was important to be able to close everything up and make it dark and cosy - that's not really an option when it's beside the kitchen. If this is what you want from a snug, I'd consider having it elsewhere, but I think it's important to have comfortable seating (as you have in your snug) in the same open plan space as the kitchen. We don't have that in our place, and it's one of my biggest regrets. The dining room - does anyone still use a formal dining room? I have some friends who have a really nice one (1930s house). We had dinner in it once, but every other time we've eaten in the open plan dining area adjacent the kitchen. The location of the current snug would actually be an ideal dining area. Perhaps consider swapping dining room and snug positions (and adjust room sizes accordingly)? Master balcony: balconies are expensive and a challenge to build without thermal bridges. Get a costing for the one on your master bedroom - you may be surprised at how much it'll add to the cost. I love the idea of balconies (we have a couple ourselves), but realistically, when will you use it? My wife likes the idea of having a coffee up there, but frankly by the time you've got some clothes on, gone downstairs, made the coffee and come back up, you'd have done just as well having it on the patio downstairs. The fact that it's uncovered and (it appears) south facing means you can't use it when it's raining and you can't use it when it's hot and sunny. Basically, you can only use it when it's warm and cloudy or cool and sunny. How many days a year is that? And if you have kids, how often do you think they're going to let you laze around up there when it's nice? The different size of upstairs and downstairs will add disproportionately to the cost, while complicating detailing including airtightness and thermal bridging. Re: the basement, if you have the funds and want those functions, go for it. Make sure you consider how you're going to sound-insulate the cinema room from the house above. Someone mentioned ceiling heights, and I agree. 2.4m for a large house will feel mean (a friend of ours has a large open plan refurb with 2.4m ceilings and the space feels awkward due to the ceiling height). We have 2.85m downstairs and I wouldn't go much lower for a large house. Upstairs we were more confined, so we have 2.55m and that's fine. More generally, have you worked out your budget and what all of this is likely to cost? At this stage, a rough guide would be the floor area multiplied by the likely cost per m2. That cost is obviously quite variable and depends on your choice of build route (eg, main contractor or frame supply followed by individual contractors, whether you're project managing or having someone else doing it, and whether you'll be doing any of the building yourself). At this early stage I wouldn't budget for less than £2000 per m2. You can certainly bring it in at less than that, but it's a good rough starting point (unless you're in London or surrounds, in which case I'd add a few hundred per m2). Good luck, and let us know how you get on.

He may have a point, this is hard/expensive to do properly. We're stuck with a cold bridge for our balconies that I missed on the construction drawings. You can provide a thermal break, but the products needed to achieve this aren't cheap, and you may need specialists to install them. Again, he may have a point. Do some research about the capital and running cost differences between GSHPs and ASHPs. In most cases, ground source is much more expensive to install and maintain (make sure you include the cost of replacing and disposing of the fluid in the ground circuits for ground source every few years), especially for a well-insulated house.

I agree with most of what you say, but at least for some people, doing it this way won't give them the results they want, because they simply aren't capable of thinking like someone who does this for a living. I wasn't able to design something that was what we wanted while meeting the limitations of our awkwardly shaped block. I spent many hours trying, but it was so remote from my skills and experience that I just didn't have the mental tools to do it. The architect's first draft was quite different to any of the many high-level plans I'd tried, and it clicked with us first time. YMMV, of course.

Welcome to Buildhub! You'll find that some on here are anti-architect to one extent or another. I personally think a good one is more than worth engaging. We cut our losses with our first architect after three significant sets of revisions left us feeling no closer to an end result than the first draft. While there were some more objective factors, in the end we just weren't confident that what they were designing for us was what we wanted to live in. After months of working with the first architect, we politely (no bridges burned) disengaged, swallowed the not-inconsiderable costs to that stage, and then started again with someone who "got" us a lot better. The house we built, while not perfect (as you learn when you live in something), is very close to the original draft the new architect presented. I think you already know the answer to the questions in your final paragraph. Be brave - you should be excited at this point. Building a house is hugely expensive and stressful, and you want to get it absolutely right. £2-3k and an uncomfortable conversation are a small price to pay for getting the house you want in the end.

One way or the other, you'll still lose. 'Tis the way of things.

Sorry, I meant warranty in the loose sense of being responsible for the quality of the goods, not in the sense of a manufacturer's warranty. It isn't particularly clear from the sales listing quoted above whether the "7 year warranty" is from the seller or manufacturer.

Despite saying that it's now in the UK, the website is saying it doesn't operate here yet

No-win no-fee only works where there are significant damages to be claimed. In your case, you're just looking for replacement/repair/refund, so if you're successful there're no funds from which a no-win no-fee lawyer could take their cut. Not for warranty support, no. Responsibility for providing a warranty absolutely rests with the seller (even if they have to engage the manufacturer to do the warranty work). The wholesaler/rebadger and original manufacturer have no contract with you and are under no legal obligation to do anything about the situation. What you might do is call the technical department of the original manufacturer or the company that did the rebadging, and see whether they can help diagnose what's wrong. If they give you an answer along the lines of what you've had above, you have a much stronger case to go back to the seller with. I don't know how typical it is, but we have a Panasonic ASHP, and I've found their technical department absolutely superb at every turn (their replacement parts costs are less superb, for sure ) Because the seller will have to pay for it. Bear in mind that if they're offering a 7 year warranty, they aren't expecting problems to arise very often, so this will be an unusual situation and they'll be skeptical. At the moment, they probably feel it's more likely you've installed it wrongly or damaged it in storage than it being a defective unit, so why should they pay for a warranty call? I have to admit that my first step here would have been to pick to phone up and have chat with the seller about what's happened. It may be that they can take you through some diagnostics that will help get to the bottom of the issue. Since you've started with demands for a warranty claim, their initial response may be one of defensiveness. One other thing: take some photos of the logs showing that this isn't actually a new unit, and that the error codes existed on arrival. If those are accidentally wiped or overwritten, you'll want a record. Good luck. You'll get there in the end, but I'm sure you don't need this right now!

It's a 12W fitting - 28W is the CFL equivalent.

Right, got the suggested stuff. I now need to buy some tools. I understand that I need some flexible plastering knives. I have some TE to tape and fill as well as joints between fermacell. What combination of sizes do you think would do the trick? Anyone have thoughts on a particular brand or set worth buying or avoiding? I don't mind paying (a little bit more) for something decent, but only if it'll make life easier and/or give a better result. For the TA, I'm assuming scrim tape is easier to use for a first timer than paper, yes?

Me too, but I'm trying to make the guy feel good about being a quitter.

Smart missus. I've had this conversation with various trades. Most would have a go at most jobs, but all of them baulked at plastering (one admitted having had a go on his own house, and he got as far as one wall before conceding defeat). Just get it done right first time. It won't be expensive, and no-one will think less of you for handing over this one tricky job to a pro.

At least they fixed it I guess!

O2 is covalent bonding (as opposed ionic bonding such as for a salt), I seem to recall from the foggy depths of A-level chemistry.