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I would like to design and build an L shaped shed that also has an outdoor covered area for log storage/seasoning. The roof will be flat, measuring 2.5m in height on one side and about 2.2m on the other side. I have a basic idea in mind, and have found lots of online shed design templates where one can tweak existing designs and convert into cutting plans, but none appear to offer the kind of L shaped shed I want. Anyone have any recommendations for online tools that might be flexible enough for this, or shall I not bother with that and just design it from scratch. If from scratch, are there any rules/basic principles/resources people can recommend? I want either a painted finish or natural wood, depending on cost.

indeed, that is a key issue which dissuades me from meddling too much with this. I guess one could seal the bricks first (which I believe was actually done prior to pointing - but will check) so that if it does stain the brickwork, there's a greater chance of cleaning it off. The instructions for this product state "Use painter’s tape to seal off areas you do not intend to stain, such as window sills, door frames etc" and "As long as you’re careful during application, you do not need to protect the brick or stone. Keep a bucket of clean water nearby so you can quickly rinse spills." This is all a bit ambiguous. On the one hand it is saying no need to protect brickwork, on the other hand one has to be careful and rinse spills quickly. Maybe I should get the specialists in: https://www.remedialrepair.co.uk/mortar-tinting.html

I did consider coffee or tea and I'm fairly sure I could get a more or less desirable colour. I just wonder whether it would last/change over time. Wall is external, so will be exposed to the elements etc.

The pointing on an external wall hasn't come out quite the colour we wanted. We'd like to darken it from an off white to a light grey. I came across this product online and wondered if anybody had any experience of it or something similar: https://steadfastspl.com/product/colour-matching-mortar-tint/?gclid=Cj0KCQjwlK-WBhDjARIsAO2sErRzwkELd09_Q0o_WWS8B_atPc111qwr7fg3eCymj38ZqnChkSyWOlIaAs0FEALw_wcB We haven't sealed our brickwork yet, so I think we're still in time to tint the mortar but not sure. Could be risky. Will obviously need to do a trial on a patch first, but no idea what the long term performance of such tints would be.

We don’t have a Harvey’s unit, but our softener was supplied with 4 blocks (ie 16kg) of Harvey’s block salt. I’m about to run out and have a prime account so ordered from Amazon prime 6 blocks (24kg) at £27 inc “free” delivery. Works out at £1.125 per kilo. Is that a good price? Or can I get it cheaper elsewhere? Is all salt the same, it is it worth sticking with Harvey’s.

This is pretty insane, storing heat at 500C in sand for months at a time: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-61996520

I’m comfortable with the risk. The reality is that with all the anti fire measures in the house, the risk of it burning down are very small. The risk of it burning down and the doors on top floor not being compliant contributing to that fire are even smaller. And the risk of that’s happening and there being evidence left to prove the non-compliance are even smaller than that. Ultimately, when taking out home insurance I don’t recall there ever being a question asking about compliance with building regs. They ask what year the property was built and then make their risk assessment based on that. It’s not as if they give a discount after the fire safety of the property is improved.

Yes.

Not sure I follow this. Can you draw a sketch please?

Well the house was built a 100 years ago, and the insurance was in place well before the building works. I’m not sure how making a minor modification to a house would invalidate the insurance.

I agree with the principle, but in practice, our master bedroom is above our kitchen, and in fact the position of my head when I’m lying down on the bed is about 80cm from the location of the kitchen fire alarm. So the fire alarm in our bedroom is completely unnecessary.

It is a standard domestic situation, but with an open plan area in the ground floor that has no doorway between the kitchen and the stairwell, so they have made us jump through all sort of hoops. Architect pissed me off really, because originally the plan was to separate the stairwell/hallway from the kitchen with a fire curtain, he then said this would be very ugly and problematic for various other reasons and persuaded me to opt for a sprinkler system and a fire engineer report to verify that would be enough. Engineer required interlinked alarms in every room of the house plus FD30 for all “habitable” rooms. It’s all complete overkill given there is a sprinkler system throughout the ground floor as well. Has cost an absolute fortune.

Just bumping this up with an update. BCO was having none of it so I’m temporarily fitting some actual FD30s to get around this and get my certificate. Anybody know what requirements are for FD30 double doors where they meet? Do I need a pair maker? What about intumescent seals; are they needed where the two doors meet or is it sufficient to just have them on the doorframe?

Why are you worrying about this? If there is an accidental fire, the alarms will go off before smoke leaking through any gaps becomes a concern. I wouldn’t be messing around with intumescent seals.

MVHR supplies the office. Not extract. But MVHR can’t be relied upon for cooling, even with a summer bypass activated.

It doesn’t. At these prices, it’s little more than a gimmick. The government should nationalise a team of 10,000 fitters and then offer free fitting as well as subsidise the cost equipment.

I was hoping it would be cheaper. Just don’t understand why it’s so expensive.

Thanks @joth. If I keep the virgin media hub as the firewall router, but switch its wifi function off and then install one of these two managed switches, how much management would I actually need to just keep the three APs running nicely and monitor usage? I see that the smaller (and cheaper) of the two describes itself as "auto-sensing". Does that mean it does some of the management for you? https://eu.store.ui.com/collections/unifi-network-routing-switching/products/unifi-switch-lite-8-poe https://revolvingav.co.uk/product/ubiquiti-unifi-flex-5-port-1gbe-switch/

We bought a 1930s semi not far from you, but survey identified lots of damp and other problems before we bought so we knew we would have to gut the whole place before we bought it. By the time we were ready to apply for planning permission we knew we'd be: gutting the whole house of all its wiring and plumbing removing all indoor walls with the exception of one quarter of the house (consisting of one bedroom and one living room under it) that was staying the same knocking most of the rear wall of the house down to make way for a ground and first floor extension doing a loft conversion removing the external pebbledash covering of the whole house At the time, we thought it was a major job, but that the house had "good bones" and so we were just removing what was necessary and keeping certain crucial bits like the roof and the joists. Planning more or less forced us to lower the height of the ground floor floor by about 40cm. This was not planned, as we assumed the corbels were the same level throughout the house, but ultimately that proved a bad assumption and we ended up needing underpinning. Quite a lot of underpinning. Then during contracting, the builder persuaded me to retile the roof at the same time as doing the loft conversion. And when i started reading about the benefits of MVHR on this forum I realised we would need to replace most of our joists with posi joists. So the joists went as well. Oh, and did I mention we were replacing every window in the house and the front and side doors? One day I got "home" from work (we weren't actually living there through this rather severe bit of house surgery) to discover that the two rooms I thought weren't losing their walls, ended up losing one wall. This was actually necessary, so i retrospectively okayed it and then the builder asked me whether there was any point in keeping the other wall and so I gave the okay for him to get rid of that too. In the end, in no way overstating the extent of the gutting, we ended up just keeping the side wall, the front wall, a quarter of the rear wall and about 10% of the roof rafters and two fireplaces (one of which had to be lowered by 40cm when the floor was lowered by 40cm). The whole ordeal took 18 months and cost me an absolute fortune. I had always thought you couldn't knock down a semi detached house, but shortly after we started our building works I saw that this is exactly what they did around the corner. I'm still not sure whether there would have been much saving in £ given the additional structural engineering and insurance required for the adjoining house, although I'm sure it would have been quicker and we would have ended up with a better insulated house. Having said that, our neighbours were impossible to deal with and if we had knocked down our property I think they would have killed us judging how angry they got with us when we were doing a bit of gutting. I imagine that with a terrace house, in theory you could knock it down but in practice the structural bracing and insurance costs would be double the cost of that required with a semi detached demolition and so would be prohibitively expensive. Our house is also very well insulated, having put about 50mm of EWI on the original walls, made the house very airtight and not cut corners on the insulation for the new bits. Good luck.

I would suggest investing in more zone valves and more thermostats. Unless you live in a very small property that is. I know i went overkill with 12 zones and thermostats for a 5 bed house, but I honestly don't think i could have done it with less than 9. It's good to only heat what you use when you use it, and the more zones and thermostats you have the more precise you can be with that endeavour.

Thanks @MikeSharp01. Unfortunately despite being quite geeky some 26 years ago, I'm about 25 years out of date on this stuff and it is all rather beyond me. This does sound like it could solve some problems I didn't know I had until I read people's responses to my various posts on this thread, but it also sounds like it could create some other problems: e.g. if it has two fans and the ability to produce up to 1052.94 BTU/h in heat, I'm guessing it's a little noisy! As this will be sited in a cabinet in the corner of our playroom-by-day-tv-room-by-night I don't want something too noisy. @pocster fan-less setup sounds much more appealing. I think I need to decide to what extent I want/need all the security features and customisations available with a managed switch before taking my research any further forward. I do need to decide in the next two weeks though as Prime day is just around the corner and I'm hoping some of this stuff will go on sale.

Really grateful for everyone's continued help with this, though I'm still confused and I'm not sure if that's because of earlier contradictory responses from others or just my general cluelessness. Agreed, sorry. The cloud key is for access by 3rd party and my IT guy did indeed set everything up on his laptop. So are you @joth saying something different to what @Nickfromwales and @Dreadnaught were saying? After seeing the cost of the dream machine, I figured I would set my virgin "superhub" router to have no wifi at all and just act as a wired router and then link that to a switch and then link those switches to the APs and everything else. I haven't bought the Ring PoE camera yet, but have already bought into their doorbell and so thought it made sense to get their camera instead of a Hikvision one, for example, as that way the ring cameras (the doorbell one and the PoE one) would be on the same software. I knew that meant paying Ring a hefty sub each year, but i figured that would be cheaper and more future proof than going down the NVR route. With no requirement for an NVR the dream machine becomes really an unnecessary luxury. But maybe I'm missing something here.

That is a very expensive setup and not one I can afford unfortunately, particularly when an unmanaged solution would probably solve all my problems much much more cheaply, eg.: https://www.broadbandbuyer.com/products/41041-tp-link-tl-sf1009p/ I say probably because I haven't really given much thought to the PoE budget yet. At present, i plan on using PoE to power the following: Tado hub (using the this Active PoE Splitter I mentioned previously: https://amzn.eu/d/hpNsulI) Philips Hue hub (not sure if they do or will do a PoE version, but if not I will use a splitter) Ring PoE camera Velux Netatmo hub (not sure if they do or will do a PoE version, but if not I will use a splitter) First AP Second AP Third AP (if necessary - i'm hoping two will suffice, but who knows until it's actually installed) connection to further switch for non PoE devices So 8 PoE sockets should suffice but there is little room for future proofing if I think of something else. Having said that, I'm not planning on laying any more cable so there isn't much more I could install without making the house really ugly with trunking. How did you choose the number of PoE ports? Is it possible to add additional ports by adding switches later down the line (as i'm provisioning with item 8 on my list above? This would be for everything that needs ethernet but no power, so two PCs, two TVs and a printer.

I thought that if i'm forking out £350 for two market leading APs it makes sense to get a decent switch from the same manufacturer. Won't that assist with managing it all from the ubiquiti app, or is that not required for compatibility with the app? I have no real idea about any of this. Way over my head.

Surely if you have multiple zones running off the same thermostat, it effectively just becomes one zone, right? In that case, what is the point of zoning?