jack

Methinks the lady doth protest too much.

It could well have been a brick. Nothing would surprise me with @Ferdinand

We had one two mins walk from the house we were renting when building, so it would have been really convenient for them to be competitive. Unfortunately, they were often twice the price we were getting at TP and Jewsons, even for cash. I just assumed self builders weren't a market they were interested in.

We're going for this option in our bedroom, now that the ceilings are being re-done anyway following our leak. I HATE pelmets with a passion.

Yes! Especially if you intend, as we did, to have a sleek modern look to your rooms. We made the mistake of believing that our external venetian blinds would avoid the need for other window coverings. We were wrong. They let light through the holes in the slats (for the control/support tapes) and side gaps, which means the rooms aren't properly dark in the evenings or mornings during the summer months. Had we known about this, we'd have left more space in the recess above each window to allow for recessed window coverings. At the moment, we're trying to choose whether to attach window coverings to the windows themselves or go for coverings that cover the entire window and reveal. The former approach brings all sorts of complications with added weight and clutter. With the latter approach, we can either mount something like roman blinds to the wall above the reveal, or run ceiling mounted tracks for curtains. We aren't big fans of curtains, so roman blinds are currently the lead choice.

Old school!

Aw, come back Nick, we were only messing. Nick? Niiiiiiiiccccck!

Welcome Ed!

Based on where it is, it's pretty unlikely you'd trip on it. You'd usually place your foot close to the top of the stairs (when going down). By the time your toe getsto the raised bit, your foot is decelerating, with the toe higher than the heel. It'd be just about impossible to catch it, but even if you did, there's no momentum to cause you to trip (you don't trip over things in front of you unless there's a lot of momentum). On the way up, your foot is raised over the last step and above the raised bit, then lowered onto it with little to no forward motion. Again, no way of tripping. I had the same concerns with the slight lip where our carpet joins our top step, but it just hasn't ever been an issue.

Why don't you do it in his garden? No-one would ever find the body!

I missed the hollow-core. Sounds an expensive build-up. If you're adamant about screed upstairs, I'm pretty sure you can liquid-screed even on top of 22mm chipboard + easi-joists if you engineer it right.

We have a very similar spec house to Bitpipe, but no heating at all upstairs. Bedrooms are fine without, but we should have gone for heating in the bathrooms, as they get a little more nipply than ideal in winter. I'm currently planning to install a small IR panel on the ceiling of each upstairs bathroom, which should at least take the chill off the tiles each morning in winter.

Just act like whoever you're talking to at BT. I don't think I've ever spoken to a single person there who understood anything they were reading from the flowchart. Me: "Hi, our broadband isn't working. I've tried resetting the router but I'm standing beside it and the red light is still on." BT: "Thank you for calling BT. First, could you please check that the router is plugged in." Me: "AAAaaaaarrrghh!!"

Were these recently installed connections he was re-making? The difficulty with Openreach is that they are focused on business to business transactions. While they should in theory be able to work with self-builders, they're fundamentally focused on phone/internet providers, and large scale development. Self-builders are such a small group relative to their normal activity that they just don't seem to be able to make it work for them. Also, it was explained to me that if you already have a phone line (as we did, since we knocked down and rebuilt), you shouldn't be directly in contact with Openreach anyway. Reconnection of an existing line should be arranged via your phone/internet provider, who will get Openreach involved themselves. The problem with this is that if you can't speak to Openreach, you can't ask questions about how they want you to set things up for them, and lord knows most phone company people wouldn't have a clue. We had the ridiculous situation of having the get an Openreach guy onsite to do the installation when we knew very well it wasn't ready, because we just couldn't get BT to relay a simple question to Openreach. Got there in the end, but it was a stretch. I found Sky Broadband worse during this period. It turned out that my wife accidentally didn't disconnect our broadband, so we were paying for a year despite not having a phone line. When I rang them to discuss this, they agreed that they could see we hadn't had a connection for over a year, but refused to refund a penny of what we'd paid. Apparently we were paying for the "right" to use the broadband, and if we chose not to use it that was our fault. I get their point legally, but this seemed hugely short-sighted from a customer retention point of view (especially given that acquisition is the hardest part of the process for broadband providers). I will never under any circumstances consider using them again.

I was always one for keeping things packed unless staying for a week, but if we're staying more than one night my wife immediately unpacks everything into whatever drawers or shelves are available. I actually prefer that approach now. The main things I'd like to see in the bedroom of a holiday let (well, furniture-wise! ) would be: a decent set of drawers a small hanging area for a couple of shirts and dresses somewhere to put a suitcase or two out of sight From your post, it sounds like you have most of that covered. Outside the bedroom, as Ian says, somewhere to hang wet coats and riding gear would be good. Ironing board + iron is useful if you're in the sort of area where a pressed shirt is going to be useful.

We had a similar experience when we turned up to our local planning office for an informal chat about the bungalow we were about to buy. Apparently they give brief consultations for free, but the moment we said we were considering knocking down and rebuilding, they refused to say another word and demanded payment of whatever the fee was for a development meeting (because you're always a developer once you knock the house down apparently). We eventually convinced them to give us 5 mins of their time since we were standing right there, but it was clear that this was grudging. I must remember the trick above next time I want to talk to the planning department!

Yes, a decent amount cheaper (£132 v £195) at Costco than Amazon, assuming they have it in stock.

Thanks, that's interesting. Even with the name they use in the ad, I still can't find it on their website (and it definitely used to be listed).

I think 4m is a standard width.

The castors may be an issue, I agree. What about something harder/tougher than rubber, like those plastic interlocking tiles you can get? Or heavy duty vinyl roll? Costco used to do the latter specifically for garage floors, but I can't see it on their website right now.

We did that. Bought in 2012, knocked down and rebuilt during the course of 2015. My wife and I were discussing this just yesterday, and concluded that there's no way we'd be able to afford to do that in our area now. The same bungalow now would likely go for at least 30% more than we paid, and the cost of building has, if anything, gone up over the same time period. I suspect the numbers will be very variable depending on where you are in the country (or even within the same town).

There are also a couple of manufacturers that offer ducts with a flattened oval cross section. Useful if you want to run within a stud wall (as we did in places) or have limited space. Examples at the bottom of this page and here.

Great news that this is possible. Re: putting it in the attic, one thing to consider is access to change/clean filters. This needs to be easy to do at least a couple of times a year (we do ours quarterly or so). The (potential) worry with attic installations is that they're out of sight and out of mind. Maybe set a reminder in your diary? We went with a Brink Excellent 400. I'm not sure whether I'd do this again, as it was quite expensive relative to, eg, the Vent Axia Sentinal that I know a lot of people use. Our house is reasonably big (290m2) so that immediately knocked out a lot of smaller units. We were also considering Passivhaus certification, so needed a Passivhaus certified model, which further limited us. I second the vote for BPC. We didn't go with them in the end, but I had a long a very helpful chat with Gary at one point. Given we decided against PH certification in the end, I think we'd have saved ourselves a fair amount of money if we'd gone with them.

I've had friends of mine lose their heating and/or hot water in the depths of winter before. In some cases they couldn't get a heating engineer out for a couple of days. In at least two cases, they were then told that the parts would need to be ordered in, so they waited further days before they heat came back. I can't see that it's any worse for someone with a HA system. 95% of the system components - valves, pipework, thermostats, cylinders, manifolds - are completely standard and will be familiar to any heating engineer. All we're talking about here are a couple of relays being controlled by the HA system rather than a timer. It's a trivial matter for any heating engineer to look at a schematic and figure out where the likely failure is. If it isn't the HA relays (trivial to test), then it's somewhere in the rest of the system, which is completely standard. Of course, the HA system itself could fail, but that would manifest itself in many other ways as well. It's not that expensive to have a standby unit in the cupboard and a backed-up version of the HA software with current settings. Also, to repeat myself, I'm not suggesting this is general advice for anyone thinking about how to control their heating system. Alex already has the kit bought and installed. He's technically knowledgeable and knows how everything's set up. It just seems crazy to go and buy a whole bunch of other hardware to avoid using an existing system that's optimised for the task at hand. It's just more things to maintain and more things to fail in my view. Now if he didn't already have a HA system installed and ready to go, I agree completely with what you've said. There's no point introducing complexity and unfamiliarity for the sake of having it controlled by an HA system, unless it brings other advantages. Interestingly, I think that low energy houses are less likely to get a benefit from the flexibility offered by HA heating control, because often the system control is very simple (eg, only 1 or 2 zones to control, no need to have several heating periods per day with different turn-on times and temps).

These are real concerns Jeremy, I agree. But Alex has already installed a home automation system. In such a situation, it seems reasonable to me to use it, especially where the system involved is very well adapted to the type of application being discussed. We use our HA system for lights, blinds and UFH control, as well as monitoring some temperatures. I haven't bothered integrating it with the MVHR or ASHP, because the proprietary interfaces for those are ludicrously expensive (although I'll eventually end up controlling the MVHR speed setting by way of relays that close dry contacts). I've found myself very rarely having to access the app for Loxone, as most of the things I actually want to control day to day can be controlled by way of wall switches. The blinds are mostly automatic (all come down at dusk, some come up at 07:30, others - bedrooms, mainly - are closed automatically but opened manually by way of a wall switch). The lights are all controlled by pushbuttons in a fairly similar way to ordinary lightswitches, although I've set it so that turning on certain lights in the daytime will result in a higher light output than turning them on at night. I can check slab, air and DHW tank temps via the HA app, but this is mostly just because I'm interested, as none of those things are currently controllable via the app. Also, even if the the HA system itself becomes obsolete or the company goes out of business, the way the house is wired means that any other system could be transplanted in with relative ease. It's mostly just relays and simple programming, so not difficult to replicate in another system if ultimately required. I hope to get 10 years out of the current system. I have no idea what will be available then - with luck, HA will have become cheaper, easier and more secure by then. I don't know whether I'd bother with HA if I were doing all this again, but it is definitely very convenient for things like automatic external blind control.