Fallingditch

Great job, Tom - well done!

From the research I did a year ago, Nolte are an independently owned, mid-market German kitchen company. I would position them as competing with Rotpunkt, Siematic, Brigitte. Not as expensive as Poggenpohl, Leicht, Bulthaup. More expensive than Hacker, Schuler. (Seeing as you are in Preston ... after a lot of research, in the end we decided to go the DIY route so to speak. We bought our kitchen using cabinets, doors, and drawer fronts from TK Components - trade only company in Manchester. Specified Blum runners and hinges throughout. Locally sourced granite worktops. Components from ebay etc. Really happy with the outcome - but you do need to have a very good working relationship with your builders/people who will be putting the kitchen together.)

58kg

Er, heavier than that but don't have details to hand. http://www.doordeals.co.uk/products/internal-doors/internal-fire-doors/internal-oak-suffolk-firedoor.aspx If its important, give them a quick ring their Sales Support is very good.

This deserves a picture, Mike?

I've got a problem with acoustics. We've built a large 10m x 8m open plan kitchen, and we've got a lot of echoes. One of the ways we plan to mitigate this is to fit bookcases in the corners. (Wall mounted acoustic panels and carpets are also on the To Do list). Then again, we've got quite a lot of books, so we will need to install a few bookcases in other rooms in the house too. All the doors in the house are oak veneer (very happy with what Doordeals Sheffield supplied), which means that ideally we want the bookcases to be oak veneered too. Here's an example of an oak door next to an alcove: Question: does anyone have experience of buying and using bookcase/shelving systems? ideally with an oak veneer option? (I have noticed that Regalraum, a company based in Germany but targeting the UK market is offering a lot of options in this space).

7.4 kg each at full length. Next time its a bungalow LOL

After you've bought one, and before you fit it, check that the water runs down the drain (and doesn't form little pools). You know it makes sense.

We moved in in April. Second fix takes a long time (plus the well-documented tiling, shower tray and splashback cockups). Finally onto the Hardieplank fibre cement cladding. Screwed up the project planning, by letting the scaffolding go before we were ready to clad, so its a cherry picker. Slower than using scaffolding but it is getting the job done. Not too long now ...

Hi Jim - welcome. We're in a rural location NE Essex between Colchester & Clacton. Just finishing the build now - but we built in blocks not ICF. Our building is meant to look like a three storey tide mill (in keeping with another down the road. Fortunately we got the right planning officer who recommended it, and it went through Committee with a few minor conditions. Also lucky !

For example, YTong (which we built a 3 storey house out of), or Celcon, or Thermalite. (We went with YTong because the others couldn't quite meet our inner skin specification.)

When a hot tap/mixer/shower is turned on, the combi boiler detects it. The combi boiler fires up and heats the water flowing through the combi boiler on its way to the hot tap/mixer/shower. If you buy a good quality combi, then they are effective at proving just the right amount of heat energy to raise the temp of the hot water to 60 (or whatever you set it to). If you have two concurrent showers, the combi boiler will run full pelt heating this 'DHW circuit'. (There;s a valve inside called a diverter valve which diverts heated water either round the DHW Circuit or the Heating circuit). The rest of the time when you do not want hot water at the taps, the combi boiler is supplying hot water to that Heating circuit. Now in your scenario, the Heating circuit is not heating up radiators at (say) 75C, it is heating up a bunch of pipes in the floor at (say) 25C - 30C. Boilers are not designed to work at 25C -30C - so you will have actually two different circuits - the Heating circuit and the UFH circuit. They are joined together by something called a mixing valve which allows some of the water from the Heating circuit (at say 75C) to dribble into the UFH circuit (at say 25C - 30C). What this means is that in heating mode, the combi boiler will fire up just long enough to get the UFH circuit up to (at say 25C - 30C) - say 5 minutes. Then it shuts down for a while (say 5 minutes). Then it fires up again etc etc and that's what it spends its days doing - heating up the Heating circuit in order to maintain the UFH at (say 25 - 30). Until of course somebody opens up a hot tap at which point the combi boiler switches into heating up the DHW circuit because thats their priority. Then the tap gets turned off etc etc. Hope that was the answer you were after ;-)

Links to previous discussions on the forum in the text below - still valid Having been through a similar process, I can say that the key factor when sizing DHW and Heating systems is peak domestic hot water demand. If you are willing to say that the maximum amount of hot water you will ever need is two concurrent showers, or one concurrent shower and a (slow) bath fill, then you can meet this hot water demand with a single combi LPG fired boiler and no additional storage tanks. Several people on this site have recommended Vaillant boilers because they are as the ones which seem to need fixing least. A maximum capacity combination Vaillant LPG boiler can be bought for about £1,500. Even allowing for pipe install costs, boiler conversions etc, that compares favourably with the cost of air source heat pumps and storage tanks. (Important thing is to find a plumber experienced/competent in installing combi-driven underfloor heating systems - but when it comes to the design questions, you will get all the information you need on this website) Because it's a combination boiler you will be going for, then it will do the underfloor heating and any radiators also. (For comparison: when you are running two concurrent showers you will need about 30 kilowatts output. When you are heating up your underfloor heating system you will need only a small proportion of that. Even if you need to run some additional radiators you are never going to be out putting the full 30 kilowatts). Couple more points: depending upon your situation you might want to consider simply making use of 47kg propane bottles instead of a tank. That's what we use against the shed wall (although its not for everyone, I agree). Every few months a bloke drives up in a lorry and replaces two empties with two fools. Here in Essex current price is about £55 per cylinder. I cant give you accurate figures, but without heating, one bottle lasts four of us about two months. finally you didn't mention cooking. If you prefer cooking with gas, say no more. Long thread about that here also :-)

+1. Big fan. Three more things: you can configure Google Drive to 'replicate' locally. Any changes you make to a local file will then 'replicate' across all devices (and if they are configured for local storage, it will be saved there too. (Google Drive isn't the only Application which does this - its just as PeterW says, its reliable across platforms. Windows 10's search capability on a local drive is much improved. Its very fast indeed. So all my build Word docs, PDFs, Excel spreadsheets are held in my local Google Drive, and I can search across the whole lot in Excel 2013 and 2016 they introduced 'Tables'. Tables allow you to sort and filter quickly and easily. Where other people might keep 'lists' - I keep tables. They help me all the time to arrange things: into high/low (example: dates); filter by category (example: 'sanitaryware'); calculate totals for a partcualr category (example 'VAT on sanitaryware') Negatives: I still haven't come up with method I am happy with to manage URLs/Bookmarks/Favourites/Hyperlinks. Like @JSHarris, I found it 'found it too tedious to maintain' ...

Under test in the front room. I think the expression is "there's a lot of £5 notes here" LOL

Had to remove two and re-tile. It was at my risk The 900 x 1500 tray has been replaced. The water now flows down the trap reasonably well. But it does now leave lots of little puddles behind. Is lots of little puddles normal? Am I getting obsessive here? Do most shower trays 'not drain fully' and rely on air drying to cause all the water to finally disappear? (Thing is, I have a 2nd replacement tray and under test on a bench it is also leaving lots of lottle pools so have to decide whether to bite the bullet! ) Be interested if previous posters have an opinion @Oz07 @jack @ryder72 @jsharris @ragg987 @alphonsox @bitpipe ...

I have actually installed around 45 18w warm white LED panels bought from eBay. Bought them in three tranches. After each tranche, the seller I bought from disappeared so I had to switch supplier - not a good sign generally. Having said all that, there hasn't been a single failure in three months. Quality is acceptable throughout. (Note I can't speak for the RF interference - I don't know how I would experience that). It was also recommended to me that for the bathrooms, 'natural' is more appropriate than warm white. To get 18w natural - had to buy from China (and wait two - three weeks). They worked fine also (and I would agree that natural is a good idea in the bathroom). I can only speak from experience. But buying them in this way turned out to be less risky than I would have expected. (Names I bought from include 11supperman; Boaofactory; UIK_Very_Good_Seller btw. There's also Hartington Heath based in N.London as opposed to China. You will pay a premium with HH but if goods are faulty, they will replace, and they were still in business last time I looked)

Well, supplier was chased. They have supplied two replacement trays. The first one still has pooling issues but not as bad as before, so (somewhat reluctantly) I have gone with it. The second replacement tray was again defective so they are replacing that again! Getting to the point where I have little confidence in their ability to provide a shower tray which drains. Wish I'd known of this risk six months ago ...

Spent quite a lot of money on triple glazed IdealCombi. Multiple opening types including French. Been using them three months - happy to recommend, although cannot really comment on price paid.

We bought about 15 doors from http://www.doordeals.co.uk/ in sheffield. Very happy with price and quality (but didn't buy any double doors mind you). They got it right first time. They have a bloke driving all over the country with them. Good customer service also.

Mrs B don't know if this helps but there are different approaches here. I made the following post on the old site: "I have just been through a painful learning experience with Environment Agency policies. I am also lowlying (zone 3a) at risk of coastal flooding. For my first design, the architect was informed by the EA that the ground floor would have to be built 1.2m above ground level. After some negotiation we agreed to have a split level house, with lower level at 600mm and ground floor at 1.2m. (I knew no better at the time so accepted it).That build didn't happen (a future blog post will explain).We are now on a brand new design (same site). But this time, I carefully read the published guides published by DCLG. They are:The National Planning Policy Framework document from 2012, which sets out the principles for conducting the sequential and exception tests, and states, paragraph 102,“For the Exception Test to be passed:” … “a site-specific flood risk assessment must demonstrate that the development will be safe for its lifetime taking account of the vulnerability of its users, without increasing flood risk elsewhere, and, where possible, will reduce flood risk overall.”“National Planning Policy Framework – DCLG – March 2012”And“Improving the Flood Performance of New Buildings – DCLG – 2007” which says that if you are going to build a replacement dwelling, then you build to a strategy, and if water levels (including climate change) might be above 600mm , then it is entirely acceptable to adopt a water entry strategy (see page 9-10).I submitted a Planning Application for the new build in early December with ground floor this time at 300mm. The Environment Agency objected. I used the above sources to justify my decision to adopt a water entry strategy. The Planning Dept accepted my arguments and awarded Planning Approval."The point here Mrs B is that there is the option to say "by all means lets try and prevent the number of times floodwater gets it, but for those occasions when it does, lets try to make the building flood resilient". Flood resilient means avoid carpets, soft furnishings, no electrics at low level, consider stainless steel kitchen units etc. I repeat this may be useful or it may not, but it does illustrate how there are different possible solutions out there.

Generally, I specced the functional, but the aesthetic sat with my partner. For example, I did not select a single colour, nor had little input on materials (fine be me). On the other hand, 100% of the services were with me. Gets interesting with things like kitchens. Went round the houses several times there, but we ended up with a solution we were both really happy with. So its back to @recoveringacademic : Listen. hard. PS What I would also say is that we respected each other's vetoes: "You're not having that! " "OK "

What happens to the crumbs?

Thanks for all suggestions. Have followed up suggestions & sent out many emails, but looks to me like I might have to go with a customised solution from @Barney12

I have a granite kitchen worksurface and a granite topped island. An 11mm groove has been routed underneath the granite where it protrudes over cupboard doors and drawers. 10mm, 12V DC RGBWW strip has been fitted in the groove. It is controlled by a wall mounted controller which causes the strip to illuminate either in a single adjustable colour, or to continually change colour (disco mode, as they call it). All works really well: However, seeing the individually glowing chips rather detracts from the experience IMHO! Anyone know where I can source plastic diffusing strip? to stick over the groove and create a single band of coloured light?