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Nice house @Ralph. I can’t believe you got that built for £300k. Was that including everything? Absolute bargain. The article mentions your fantastic joiner. What did he do for you apart from the treads, and how did you find him?

The question is do you want the hassle and bother of a complete replacement, either from this company or (more likely) another company. Changing a stove is not a 5 min job, not to mention the lead times. You'll lose use of your stove for this winter, i imagine. An alternative might be to ask HETAS to investigate and get to the bottom of why it has leaked smoke again. Might be worth @Trw144 weighing in here, given I think he used to work in the industry so will probably have seen these types of issues and understand how they tend to be resolved.

My understanding is that because I have a pretty sophisticated boiler that modulates well, I’m not losing money in terms of any inefficiency. However I have lost money (and storage space in my utility room) by buying a bigger boiler than I needed to. Instead of a 32kw boiler, I could have gone 46% smaller, ie 17.3kw (or 18kw or so). So my initial heat loss calculation was actually very close to accurate. On the plus side, presumably if my boiler rarely works at even half its total capacity, it should hopefully have longer durability (or maybe I’m dreaming!).

@richo106 one of the more stressful elements of my build was when i thought I had discovered my builder had used the wrong glue. He swore he had used D4, but it didn't look like all the photos I'd seen of installation where the glue drips out of the seams between boards. Turns out he had used D4, but not the expanding type. So make sure you get D4 expanding glue. The expansion fills any tiny gaps/cracks and gives a more solid result. Also worth screwing down with these: https://www.screwfix.com/p/floor-tite-pz-double-countersunk-floorboard-screws-4-2-x-55mm-200-pack/49231

Your plumber's recommendation sounds way overkill. By way of comparison our house is a 1930s semi, originally a three bed, but as part of our complete gutting, extension and refurb we added a loft floor which has two bedrooms. It is fairly well insulated now, with around 45mm of EWI on all old walls, and cavity walls for the extensions on ground and first floor. We also have UFH, but on the ground floor were only able to put 100mm of PIR under it. We upgraded all the windows to fairly decent 2G ones. We have MVHR and very good airtightness, having spent a lot of money on tape and supervised its install closely. Do you have MVHR and an airtight house, as that is a big factor. i did a heat loss calculation based on the spreadsheet linked above got to about 21kw added a bit to give me a margin of safety. Told my plumber I was buying a 24kw boiler for him to install. He thought I was mad. He literally said that I shouldn’t be taking the risk with a five bed house and that anything less than 32kw was madness and that really I should get at least 35kw. I started to doubt my calculations and got a 32kw boiler. I've posted about this elsewhere, but about a month ago, we had a situation which caused us to run all the heating in the house plus heat the hot water tank. I checked the display of my Viessmann Vitodens 200W 32kW boiler. The gas burner was modulating at 54%. My boiler is massively oversized. I think even 24kW was an excessive heat loss calculation and then I remembered that in my calcs I erred on the side of caution and rounded up most uncertainties. I should have stuck with 21kw. So do the calcs, add a small amount for safety, and ignore your plumber. I also recommend Viessman (at least for gas if you are considering gas) as their modulation ratios are market leading. We have a low loss header but no buffer tank and have no short cycling issues, even when we draw less than 10% output.

Yes, I was thinking about that. I have an ikea wardrobe which is 580mm deep internally and it's just big enough for even the biggest outdoor coat i have. So I'm thinking that an alternative is to arrange the wardrobe as being wider but shallower and turning the orientation of the hanging rails. Not as practical though, as you can't see very far behind the first couple of coats at the front.

Mine is smaller: 4.4m by 3.5m. So sounds like Beam will be adequate. I used to have a fairly basic 5.1 setup made by Tannoy. In fact, I still have it packed away in the attic. This was in my bachelor days. I had it set up in my flat in not a very good way, because the rear L and R were only about 80cm away from where the optimal seating position was. For one viewer, it was passable and I enjoyed watching movies alone. But then I met my now wife, and based on her experience of watching movies with me on that sofa (she would have been about 35cm from a rear R speaker calibrated for the 80cm position!) she banned surround sound in our first home together. My clever plan is to conceal a rear L and R Sonos Symphonisk or Sonos wall art speaker (or one of each) at the back of the room (which in each case will be at least 2.5m from the listening position) in combination with the Beam. Maybe I will delay purchasing the sub for the time being.

Ours has been designed at an internal depth of 550mm. It will just be for coats and outdoor stuff. It is almost 2m wide and full height (with drawers for shoes and boots underneath and too hung cupboards on top. It would be much more convenient for the layout of our hallway if we could reduce the 550mm dimension slightly. How much can we reduce it by before this gets to feel cramped?

Me too

I was thinking of getting the arc because the reviews were so good, and even the Dolby Atmos feature reviewed well, but it is so expensive and so big, I’m thinking the beam gen 2 will be more than adequate for our needs. I also have two young children. What do you think the compromise is? Is your logic that not being able to play loudly whilst they are asleep, and therefore little point in the higher fidelity of a proper surround sound system, as at lower volumes the Sonos beam is fine?

Which gen Beam do you have? Did you think about getting a subwoofer as well, or do you find this is not necessary with your setup?

The window point is not set in stone, but the point I make is as follows: Trickle vents are required on all windows by building regs. There are a couple of exceptions, one of which is if you have MVHR you don't need trickle vents. Condensation on windows can occur if there is insufficient ventilation. If you install the vent as far away as possible from the door (say in a diagonal) there will be some room designs/layouts where the window might be quite far from the main corridor of airflow. It's unlikely, but possible. So i'm just saying to take that into account. And as for the gap under the door, this is a function of the width of the door: height of gap = 7600/width of door So you will only need 10mm or more if you door is 760mm wide or less. If you can go for big doors (anything above 825mm) then you can reduce the gap 9mm or less. The lower the gap the more elegant the door, so we have fitted the largest doors we could accommodate. Most are 838mm, but one is 926 and we have a double door where the gap is only 6mm.

You are meant to supply air fairly close to windows, otherwise risk of condensation, within 40cm to 50cm of a windows should be fine. And in bathrooms you want to extract close to the centre of the room, but taking into account window position as well. Does your design allow for that?

Many companies will give you a basic design for a nominal sum. May be worth doing, unless you are happy to post 3D drawings of your wall and ceiling layout here for others to comment on (with details of joists, steels and other potential obstructions). You obviously don’t have to do that, but if it was me I would want the peace of mind that somebody had gone over the design and given it a thumbs up. My top recommendation is to use posi joists (if you are using joists at all) and to consider the Lindab Airy vents for the bedrooms as they are super quiet. You should also over spec your unit, so that it is running well below max.

I don’t have the exact brand and model we used, but effectively we had something like this: https://wetroomsdesign.co.uk/wet-room-kit-800-x-1200-line-pure?gclid=Cj0KCQiAtvSdBhD0ARIsAPf8oNkIg0AQKJ39OYtVtXISqaUcX5tqGO8FK__CoY8VeGDgm3woamVrkwgaAvt7EALw_wcB it was installed so that the opposite end of the linear drain was level with the adjacent UFH boards. Then everything is covered in tiles. They come in lots of sizes. I think ours is 800mm wide, but they come in 900mm wide and 1000mm wide as well.

Obvuously Matt black May not be to everyone ‘s tastes, but we have matt black windows, so it made sense in our bathroom. We have a water softener so the glass dries clear with virtually no marks, even though we don’t do any thing to it. This brings me onto the “spacious” point. Our shower room is small, if the screen was replaced by something opaque it would really make the area feel cramped. Instead, when you are showering, you feel like you have quite a bit of space.

It's an option, but i think a panel will be much thinner and more elegant. Also easier as no need to build the wall and decorate it. Check out this website: https://www.wetrooms-online.com/collections/black-shower-screens-black-shower-enclosures Some of the panels are only 8mm thick. The one I have is 400mm wide (with an adjustment range of something like 380mm to 420mm) and I got a floor to ceiling post with it, which looks really good. I'll post a pic later.

Why don’t you make a wet room instead. Then instead of an enclosure, you would have a small pannel on the left, say 400mm deep, to protect your entrance door and door way from splash and spray. will feel much more spacious this way than a shower enclosure.

I agree with @Temp. You can get a moisture probe/meter from Amazon for about £15. That’s pre-inflation, so maybe £20 now. Mine has two fairly pointy probes sticking out of it, you pin these into the wood (a tiny amount, less than 0.5mm in and it gives you a moisture reading. Also worth turning the UFH heating temp down to minimum, and checking the UFH has no pressure loss.

PS: @wozza the post by jevensen1 on this forum suggests my ubiquiti APs will get along fine with Sonos: https://en.community.sonos.com/speakers-228992/sonos-across-multiple-access-points-6767222

The 2.4ghz is fine. But why do you think there is an issue with Sonos and a wireless access point (if that’s what you mean by a wifi repeater)? I have wireless access points, not a mesh network.

So I’m after a Sonos Arc and two Sonos Ones. Maybe a Sonos Play as well, but the Arc is the one I want most, so can wait for the others. Question now then is where to get the best price.

Wall is tiled, I have the drill bit to drill through into it. That’s not the issue, it’s just access, although I’ve just seen online that there are right angled drill bit adaptors that might help convert my drill into a right angled drill. The pelmet is plasterboard that has been plastered in a special clay based plaster from Clayworks. In theory could be patched up, but I rather not as it was a special finish that I’m unlikely to be able to recreate. I raised this issue with the guys on site before the installed the pelmet, and was told “don’t worry, you can hang stuff from the ceiling part”.

Thanks everyone for your responses. I agree it would be better to attach to a vertical wall, rather than a horizontal ceiling, but unfortunately, unless anyone knows of a tiny drill that can be used for awkward angles, that’s not a possibility. Here is a cross section of the recessed LED light: in the top left of the cross section is an LED tube. In the top right is where we want the hook. Functionally, the hook would still do the same job if fixed to the wall, rather than the ceiling, but I very much doubt there is a drill that can get into that awkward angle? I would like the hook hidden, so I can’t go down any lower down on the wall, without it becoming visible in the room. 12kg is me over estimating. These hooks will mostly be used to hang hanging pot plants and paintings, so more likely in the 6kg to 9kg range, but always worth over engineering these things.