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I’m with @jack on this. I hate downlights. We managed to get away with only 13 in the whole 5 bedroom/3 storey house: one in the porch two in the ground hallway one in first floor hallway two at the top of the stairwell above second floor hallway two in the kids bathroom 5 concealed in the kitchen -these are to illuminate the L worktop, I say concealed because you can only see them directly under them, there is a decorative ceiling that drops 20cm below the ceiling where they are installed. I will try and upload some pictures. i find that lighting works much better with lots of layers, and only using downlights where you absolutely have to because there is no alternative. So we have a lot of wall lights, a pendant in the middle of most rooms, including in our master en-suite, which looks great, and a few floor standing lamps and table lamps. We wired many of the lamps into 5A lighting circuits so that you can still control at the wall.

FYI You could always get a horizontal cylinder if you wanted bigger and height was restricted.

Because they forgot and are not covering their tracks with bullshit! When my builder forgot a step, at least he had the decency to admit it. It only happened once in a 20 month build, but it was pretty important. We forget to put a cavity closer in either side of the opening for the sliding door. Had to cut the bricks and put one in. Not terrible, as sliding door was deep enough that it covered the mistake.

The other issue I have is I would like to trial the light fitting, before I commit to keeping it.

I have an Amazon prime account, so normally get my stuff from there. But was slightly horrified to see that a Euro to UK adaptor costs £10 including so called “free” delivery. Given screwfix do a UK to Euro one for 2.99, it shouldn’t cost any more than this. Unfortunately screwfix does not do a Euro to UK, just the inverse. Any ideas?

Thanks for the tips so far. What would be the difference in outcome/experience/skill required between a spear point drill it and something like this: https://www.screwfix.com/p/erbauer-diamond-tile-drill-bit-6-x-67mm/51908

But reading your posts, they don’t seem very rational. You have said it is nothing to do with the heating, and maybe you are right. But you have not explored other factors in any meaningful way. i do think you need to experiment with a few humidity readings in the building (both the extension and the original house), record some data over a week, then if humidity is higher than about 49% hire some dehumifiers and get it right down to 35% and keep it at that humidity level for at least a week. Meanwhile, remove all mould, airtight and insulate the house and install MVHR. Once that’s all done, switch the MVHR on and return the dehumidifiers to the hire shop. That’s what we did with a 95 year old very damp house and it worked. If you can’t do that, then either do what you can and accept there will be some mould, or sell up and buy somewhere less mouldy.

Very cool and lovely looking house you have there. My only concern would be that the living room where the stove is will always be warmer than other places, but I guess that doesn't matter too much given cooking appliances in the kitchens will help bring the temp up in there when you're cooking and you want the bedrooms cooler anyway. But what about the bathrooms? Do you have any towel rails? Doesn't the tiled floor get very cold?

As long as you make a start, then you’ve banked your PP for life. Not sure what is legally required to make a start, but given you do need to serve your building control application notice either shortly before or shortly after you start, you would have to do that as well, not to bank the planning permission per se, but to make sure two different departments within your local authority didn’t have conflicting data. That way if the planners ever raise an eyebrow later, you can much more credible say “I started this 43 years ago, here is my BC application notice to prove it.”

Just curious about this. Do you effectively have a giant stack of concrete blocks in the middle of your home acting as radiators built into the wall? Sounds really cool but just trying to imagine it.

That’s brilliant, wish I had a time machine. I guess I paid for the labour of cutting and putting all of it together because it was delivered with everything all in its place, which made installation very easy, I think they call it “pre-hung and painted”. Looking at the paperwork now I see it is only FD30 but rated at a 40dB reduction, and they fitted the locks and handles which I supplied, after satisfying themselves that the locks were fire rated, whatever that means. Total price was £815 plus vat and delivery. Seeing what you’ve found, clearly this was very expensive. I will tell myself that the customer service was decent: there was an issue with some of the painting having bubbled up. The day after I raised the issue they came to pick up the door and two days later it was back on site and paint issue resolved. That was about 6 months ago and we’ve not had a problem with it since.

Good luck getting those parts for that money. Yes, the seals on the two uprights and the top are just bits of rubber, but the drop down seal is more complex. I could only find the drop down seal as a standalone item for about £90 quid, and it was rather unsightly, as not integrated within the door. The price I mention was for an FD30 door (might have even been FD60) sold as a Doorset with frame, stops etc, and all seals fitted/rebated, ironmongery fitted (but I had to supply locks and handles, they supplied four hinges) and spray painted. I will see if I can find the rating, but it’s good enough that it eliminates noise of a washing machine, tunble dryer and 35kw system boiler.

Which is your local authority for planning purposes?

That sounds far too absolutist. Who published the “guide”? In any case such guides are not legally binding. Only the planning policy documents, planning law and case law interpreting them matter, as far as I know. Can you post a link to the guide please?

I ordered a system that I think was lorient tech or similar from a company based in Enfield. Came to about £1100 without handles or locks. Not cheap, but worth it in my opinion as it really works well at isolating our utility room from the rest of the house.

Of course the starting position is that you have to build any extension out of the same materials. But that can be rather boring, costly, inefficient and complicated. Ultimately, it is very difficult to match like for like exactly, and so in the last 25 years or so creative architects have found ways to persuade the local planners to deviate from the starting position. Particularly given your extension is a rear one, that won’t be seen from the front of the house (is that right?), you could argue that it won’t impact the “street scene” though different councils interpret that concept slightly differently. My Council were real sticklers for the rules and applied a stupidly expansive interpretation of Street scene, but still allowed our rear extension to be built with completely different materials to the rest of the house. They made us match the materials for the first floor extension, but not for the full width ground floor extension. So unless you want to build your extension out of stone, don’t.

@Grian go for it! The first thing I ever built was a small wood store with a sloped felt roof. If I managed it, you will be fine. My tip is to go to your local diy store (a big B and Q or Selco for example) and see what outdoor treated timber they supply. Take a note of the lengths available, then plan your wood store accordingly, so that you can minimise the amount of cuts required. And buy self driving wood screws and a decent drill. I think I managed to build mine with only 6 cuts, and is still standing 8 years later. If it is at least a quarter full of wood at all times, it won’t blow away, but if you are worried, make the uprights 20cm longer than they need to be so that they can be buried in the ground and then anchored with diagonal somethings (maybe very long nails?) that are then covered with the ground.

If this is your belief, then you desperately need an architect!!!

If you get it installed by a decent installer, they will use a composite which closely matched the predominant colour of the stone, and give you a 0.6mm join which is hardly noticeable.

That pole is wooden right? There is a great song by the Prodigy that comes to mind…

Yes. Yes, all decent cylinders, whether direct or indirect should have the ability to install one or two a back up immersion heaters. Normally these are back up, because most people hear hot water with a gas boiler, and that used to be considerably cheaper than electric. But if the boiler breaks down you hear with the electric immersion heater. Now with all the changes in energy prices, it may be cheaper on certain tariffs to heat with electric at night, I’m not sure. Yes.

I'm pretty sure I will be able to find the studs with a magnet. Maybe I should just use regular exposed brackets. Would that be easier or do I have to fix timber to the wall and hang shelves off that?

I have the same question, but my wall is very much boarded (and plastered and painted)!

Have you worked out what the surface area of glazing is relative to the surface area of wall? For us, with the exception of the wall that contains our siding doors, there is much more wall than glazing, as we are semi detached, so hardly no glazing on the side, and the 1930s style was not to have a tonne of glass. But obviously the more glazing you have the more important it is to have lower u values. If money is tight, a compromise option is that you could have cheaper (higher u values) in the bedrooms, where it is actually a bit more beneficial for the temperature to be lower, and lower/dearer u values in your living spaces. For example, in our sliding door, because it’s quite big and an area of vulnerability for the space we spend a lot of time is, we have slightly lower u value, I think 1.3, but I don’t have the spec to hand.

I think you can assume that any half decent window installed now should last 20 years or so. Most windows come with a 10 year warranty (at least mine did) and if they last 10 years, you should easily be able to get 20 with a bit of love and care. If you went for steel windows, 50 years plus is the norm, but then the u values aren’t great on steel. We also wanted crittall style and unfortunately i wasn’t aware of the smart alitherm heritage that @Nick Laslett, has mentioned above. We went with MetTherm which only have a u value of 1.6 as a standard 2G, although I think with most of ours we specified their higher spec units that have a 1.5 u value. I know this isn’t great, but we are doing okay with them so far. We have not had to turn on the heating yet, and the indoor temp is currently 21 in most of the house with 20.3 by the front door and 21.7 on the top floor. Overnight temp has so far only dropped to 7C, so I’m sure by November we will need at least 2 hours of UFH a night, but we don’t mind that, we like walking shoeless on warm floors, and we like the indoor temp to be in the low temperatures. Ultimately windows are just part of the fabric of the building. An important part, but not the be all and end all, so if spending extra money on windows means you can’t have something equally important like an airtight house and MVHR, or good EWI, or a more premium heating system, then I think targeting stupidly low u values on your windows isn’t worth it. But then I always knew we wouldn’t get a passive house, however hard we tried as we were starting with a 1930s semi. Obviously if passive or near passive, is important to you, then you probably need to be targeting 3G sub 1.0 windows.