Spinny

is there any case for extending the underground drain over to the carport ? Might you be washing the car under the carport ? Would you have use for a ground level drain gully to take ground water running away on any adjacent hardscaping ? (just wondering about taking the water away from the main building rather than towards it) PS Just looked at your 3d image - seems you do have a hard surface between carport and main building - this would normally run off away from the house - potentially to a ground drain ? Do you plan to have a tap (and electric light & power) to the car port ? Lighting under the walkway ? You could bury the services or take them across inside the walkway structure ? Garden/external lighting planned ?

What is the roofing material and how will the underside be finished ?

Looking good. Do you cover the cavities to keep the rain out ?

An Architect designs buildings, a builder builds them. A Landscape Architect or Garden designer designs gardens and landscapes, a landscaper builds them. They are different skill sets and IMO it is rare for a builder to be much good at design, or a landscaper much good at design. Rare to see a designer actually building things themselves too. It is easy for those with unlimited funds. One deisgner I spoke to was asking £8k for a 300sqm design. One landscaper £250+sqm. It adds up to a lot pretty quickly. Stealing ideas and a bit of direct labour becomes attractive. Lots of ways to go with steps...

Our place faces west as well. We are fortunate to get some evening sun flooding down the north side of the house into the back garden. perhaps you get a similar effect with some evening sun coming down into the back where you have your 2.7m wide area to the north of the house ? If so you might want to consider a seating area where the planters are ? When the sun sets the shadow of the house creeps over the back garden and a patio near the house becomes shaded. And then it becomes nice to (a) stll look out onto areas that remain sunlit as long as possible and (b) have a second sitting area to catch some evening sun elsewhere in the garden. Our back garden is longer but thinner and so we plan to have a patio near the house, and a second one at the bottom of our garden. Photo is 7pm on 7th July.

Things can often get installed to suit the convenience of the tradesman and minimise effort. Routing cables and pipework in an ideal way can be a surprisingly tricky planning problem rather like completing a puzzle. Some do a good job of planning 'in their head' based on years of experience or possibly just do it the same way every time. But without recognising the issue up front and having a sketched layout done - which may need redrawing a couple of times to resolve conflicts - it is difficult to control. When do you ever see a tradesman spending half a man day sketching layouts or routing plans ? Most would consider that money down the drain on a fixed quote. And always seems to be a race between plumber and sparky to use any readily available apertures. Builders get construction drawings (most of the time) but domestically it seems no-one ever has a wiring or plumbing plan beyond where they want the end points. You can't get domestic architects interested in planning service voids either.

Is that a wall around the edge of the patio ? If so it would seem to cut off the lawn from the patio. Wouldn't you want to look out and see the lawned area when sat on the patio or in the house ? A lot probably depends on use cases etc i.e. exactly how you plan to use the garden and who will use it etc e.g. adults, kids, elderly, wheelchairs etc. Maybe consider a second outside tap on the other side or near the house for watering and cleaning. (or is that one marked there already ?) Which way is south and have you considered where you want shading ? Sight lines from windows and seating positions would normally be something to consider and relate to seasonality of planting - magnolia flowers early, spring blossom tree, autumn colour etc. It is difficult to comment too much without knowing what is there already, and how much things are constrained by that and by budget.

Fairly clearly if you bought the property without the presence of this large sewer being clearly communicated at the time of purchase - and indeed covered by the solicitor/conveyencer through the questionnaire process with the previous owner - then you may have a good legal claim against the previous owner, your solictor, their solicitor etc etc. Drain search should also be a standard thing - sewer maps readily available from the utility - often free. Also a need to check your house insurance, as if the sewer collapsed damaging your property would you actually be covered ? Also are you upstream of your neighbour that has presumably illegally built over this sewer ? Should his building collpase the sewer your property could be inundated with er... Did you and your neighbour buy your properties new from a builder/developer ? Could be a legal case against them. The street of properties I am on has a shared sewer running under everyone's front garden - a couple of the gardens have access manholes. Nobody could sensibly build in the front garden forward of the existing building line, and no-one has. The sewer is pretty deep. Has absolutely zero effect on the house prices and everyone drives their cars over it on front drives all the time. Ask a lawyer but I might imagine any attempt by ST to claim a simple garden shed or similar had damaged a sewer which should be well deep and well constructed wouldn't stand a cat in hell's chance in court. If ST are claiming any significant inhibition to the use of the land then I would have thought that should perhaps have been entered against the deeds of the house as a covenant/restriction ?

Have you guys finished taking the piss yet ? (and good luck getting your turbine tip speed close enough to the speed of light for relativistic length contraction to be in any way relevant to it)

Haha, as with odd socks, there is somebody somewhere that must have a few million tape measures by now.

Anyone using something like this ? https://youtu.be/w7lcKytNIS4?si=3O13yhXyxCN8vYHi

OK Yes I am fully aware of measurement errors, and manufacturing or building tolerances etc. etc. But IMO that isn't really a reason to just wave your hands too much, go whatever, and ignore things. Otherwise things can escalate. Be as precise as you reasonably can and they won't escalate. Specify 1.5mm wrong on position, and 1.5mm wrong on incorrectly understanding tolerance, cut 2mm wrong, shift the worktop along 2mm when fitting - get unlucky and you are 7mm wrong now. Maybe it still won't matter, or maybe something will foul and someone is £7k down and 2 months late.

Yes, thanks Rick, good words. It is just the small stuff that makes you doubt - if someone is getting one cut off centre for no reason - why can't they see that themselves, especially when presenting me ridiculous pseudo accurate measurements to 100th of a millimetre. It is slightly wrong, but very precisely so, sir. I know it won't be mm perfect, but like a photon through a pair of slits, if you stop looking it will smudge out in unexpected ways 🤣 You know my concrete floor was only 12mm too high, but necessitated changing the heating system, my bifold was 10mm wrong (but actually wasn't) and had a carpenter chiseling down a 3.5m timber for no good reason. It's Britain sir, and it's wonky - move to Germany sir.

There is a support batten against the back wall, and the fitters have asked for another batten to be fitted to support the worktop in front of the hob. Particularly because we have a metal finger pull strip for handleless drawers at the front which is somewhat thin and bendy, and no MDF or chipboard cross piece above the top drawer. Maybe I should get them to add another piece of batten onto the front of the rear batten to thicken it up to give more support. Another small thing that cropped up concerns the cut out size. In the product install instructions it had 500mm with +3 superscript. I asked the fitters what this meant exactly as I assumed it was a tolerance but wondered why it didn't say +/- 3. They said it indicated a maximum size 3mm larger and have now specified 503mm on the template drawing. Googling a bit more about this I think they have this slightly wrong. My understanding is the cut out need to be min 500 and max 503, therefor anyone cutting should be aiming for say 501.5mm to allow the maximum possible cutting error of +/- 1.5mm. Small stuff but if they turned up with the worktop and it had an actual cut out of 504mm and it caused a hob fitting problem it could be consequential - there is presumably a reason the manufacturer has specified +3, and not +4 or +5. Also for some bizarre reason they have the hob 1.5mm off centre ? My actual length measurements are 2203mm at front and 2204mm at rear, so they are planning to cut the quartz 4mm short - 2mm at each end. Having no prior experience of kitchen fits means I am wondering EXACTLY what they will fill the gap with. Ideally I guess it would be something flexible and perfectly colour matched to the quartz, or possibly to the kitchen panel. But worse case you get someone wielding a sealant gun that sticks an 8mm bead down in 'grey' or 'white' without using any masking tape. I know I am sweating on detail again but I have had too many bad experiences to just trust pro's I have never used before. They do have a policy of those that template return to do the fit. In theory good, although it might make the fitters overly conservative when templating. They started out wanting 10mm overhangs everywhere - which isn't their design decision to make.

OK, I only used a new thread because the question was a different one i.e. hob position rather than undermounted sinks. Yes they are related in being about kitchen layout etc, but I am only trying to think of future users that might be searching about similar questions. And also that someone with an input to offer on hobs may not bother looking at a topic on sinks. I am thinking long meandering topics where the question keeps changing from one particular thing to another over many pages are potentially frustrating to read through ? There are lots of specific questions around worktops so maybe I should have started a topic called 'My various questions about kitchen worktops etc' but had a view it was more focussed to have one topic for one particular question. So only done out of trying to ring fence particular questions a bit. Sorry if I have the wrong idea, any guidance on when to let one topic meander away from the title, or when to open another is welcome ?