bgmill

Do you have any pics of the inside of the windows?

@Kelvin Overall, how would you rate the Lindab gear? Besides the ease of scratches, would you recommend it? We currently have this specced for our build, also in anthracite to match windows

That's really good going for such a modern house with that much glass. We're going to be at about £1200/m2 to weathertight (including roof but not insulation), and that's with no muck away, easy groundworks and a much simpler design than yours.

We have a main contractor quote to weathertight (including groundworks but not windows/doors) that's around £1000/m2. I'm considering asking for a breakdown of materials/costs prior to each phase so I can shop around and try to get better prices but I wonder how this might be received. I'm guessing he's factored in whatever discount he gets from the local BM as extra profit on the job.

I had a guy with a proper cultivator/stone burier come and do our plot. It got rid of 99% of the stones and was definitely worth the cost.

Yep, this one uses GPS so there's no perimeter wire to run or any of that faff. Setup is literally a case of mapping out your cut zones by driving it around the edge with the android/ios app like an RC car via bluetooth. It uses something called RTK (real-time kinematic positioning) to get down to cm level positioning so it just needs a good view of the sky. You can access it on wifi but that only works for me when it's docked as my wifi coverage outside is fairly poor. I'm running manually triggered mows at the moment as I've only had it a few days but I'll setup some schedules this week.

I ended up buying the Mammotion Luba and, although not 'stripes' as such, the parallel lines do look pretty good (plus they're actually straight, unlike when I manually mow!). Edit: this was two cuts, one at 0 degrees and then another at 40 degrees.

It's hard to tell in the images but it looks like there's open gaps/missing mesh too - you'll end up with birds/rodents/bats in there if it's not resolved. Agree with JohnMo though, the stuff you can't see will be 10x worse than this (which looks bodged to me). That brickwork also looks a bit shoddy/rushed to my untrained eye. Lots of irregular mortar joints, some of which are huge.

I would be inclined to cut a seating area into the hill, like a half-sunken fire pit enclosed on 3 sides.

* Mammotion

I'm currently looking at robot mowers as I'm already getting bored of cutting the grass and it's not even June yet! We doubled our lawn since last year and it now takes me around 3 hours start to finish on my Stiga Park ride-on, plus some extra time strimming before and tidying up after As the area is fairly large and I don't want to have to install boundary wire there are only really three that I'm looking at: Husqvarna 450X NERA, Kress Mission RTK 5000 and the Ammotion Luba AWD 5000. I'm swaying towards the Luba right now as the reviews all seem great and it's half the price of the Husqvarna. All three do 'systematic' cuts so leave parallel lines rather than the random cuts you get from non-GPS units.

I feel thoroughly ripped off in that case. We paid our architect £5k up to PP and then a further £10k for building regs. It took them 11 months to get sign off from BC due to lots of errors and omissions, so we not-so-amicably parted ways before any detailed construction drawings. SE, soil survey, topo survey, M&E, SAP report, etc was all on top (another £5-6k). I'm concerned about going to the build phase without any detailed drawings or an architect to oversee things but that's the reality of where we are now.

We've upped our beams to 225mm deep to mitigate bounce but now I'm wondering if our 440mm centres will be sufficient. We have lots of 5m+ spans with our longest being almost 7m.

Looks great, would be interested to know what your total cost so far was considering you did the majority of the labour yourself.

If we started over I would definitely choose an architect that has proven experience/accreditation in PH design. Ours spoke a good game and convinced us that they had the skillset but it quickly became clear that they had little ability or desire to go beyond basic building regs requirements in terms of thermal performance. Not a single mention of PHPP modelling and they wanted to draft in a specialist when I queried some quite obvious cold bridges in their designs (at my expense). All told, I've had to take a far more active role than I had wanted to - constantly reviewing their work, challenging poor decisions and researching alternatives - which has eaten up huge amounts of my time.