ProDave

ANY build method, done properly with attention to detail will give similar results. We are timber frame and achieve those sort of results. Heat loss calculations, and proven by actual experience, says our house will need a maximum of a little over 2kW heat input when it is -10 outside and +20 inside. You should seriously be aiming for something similar. We originally planned 2 stoves, but only fitted one as you will find out in a well insulated house, it is near impossible to keep one part of the house cooler than others so the one stove does a good job of heating the whole house. In such a well insulated house, a stove needs to be somewhere it can circulate heat all around the house. Your open plan area would be good for that. But put one in the living room with the door shut and you will cook in no time. I would not fit conventional chimney's. A stove just needs a twin wall flue system up through the house and out through the roof. Then you can choose withing reason where to put the stove later on.

You need a screw extractor set, something like this https://www.machinemart.co.uk/p/6-piece-screw-extraction-set-3---25mm/ You drill a pilot hole into the broken off stuck but then the screw extractor will bit into that pilot hole and unscrew it.

Wood burning stoves is a marmite topic on here. There is nothing wrong with one in a well insulated modern house as long as you fit a room sealed one, that takes it's combustion air in via a duct direct from outside, rather than from the room. Beware not all stoves with an air in vent take both primary and secondary air from outside. Check carefully. Our main reason for having one is a good supply of free firewood. If we did not live somewhere with plenty of free wood we might not bother if we had to buy all the fuel. Appreciate you wanting a house specific to your needs, nothing wrong with that. It might be worth planning a way to floor over the vaulted area should you want to make way for another bedroom, i.e. design the structure to allow that should you want to. A hot water tank really needs to be as close to the kitchen and bathrooms as you can. Probably a little airing cupboard incorporated in your en-suite complex could achieve that.

That will no doubt go to appeal and drag on somewhat.

If the 330mm brick wall is not built yet, build in an opening, bridged at the top with a lintel, to create a space for the pipe to rise between rooms.

Hi and welcome to the forum. That is obviously a house to suit your particular needs and certainly not optimised for best resale price should you ever do that. Agreed master suite needs a re think, apart from anything else it is a tortuous trek from the bed to the loo in the middle of the night. Double garage while it may fit 2 cars at a push, the door is not wide enough for 2 cars. Store room would be better as the family bathroom leaving 2 larger bedrooms above the garage (one used as craft room) and it might as well go to the back wall.

Are the boards on battens (e.g service void) If so boards can go back further than the recess of the trim and the trim goes down onto the top of the floor board not behind it.

You don't need to understand the inner workings in detail. UFH manifolds work by taking the incoming water from the boiler (or other heat source) and blending it with colder return water to give a controlled flow temperature into the UFH heating loops. If you just wanted to pipe raw hot flow water from the boiler into the heating pipes you would not want the blending system incorporated in this manifold. Most of them have the boiler flow and return on the pump / blending valve end so intuitively make more sense. I had not see your type before to I searched and found that diagram that seems to indicate it is connected correctly. Whether you or I understand what is going on inside does not matter. Yes the annotation on that drawing is poor, but it seems to be doing what it is supposed to.

"" and of course as we all know, part 2 of that, is you go to a timber merchant, select the nice straight lengths from the various banana shaped pieces on their racks, buy it, take it home, leave it a few days and when you pick it up to use it, it has twisted or warped.

I repeat the diagram from the other post. Everything is working fine. Boiler flow 48c into bottom left boiler return 36c out from top left. UFH loop flows out from the floe meters on the top manifold 36c UFH loop returns back into the bottom manifold 26c What is the actual fault you are trying to correct?

Okay so you have windows on both floors facing the development. So your objection should be that the development should not have windows on an elevation facing your house withing 21 metres of your windows. The original development layout with the bungalows in a square had no windows facing you. I wonder why they changed it. Agreed it does look like over development. That is a separate matter for the planners to consider.

Still waiting for clarification which elevation of yours faces the development plot please?

Can you explain a little better? Which elevation of yours faces the development site? Plot 4 is the one closest to your garden but I don't see any windows proposed on the side that faces your garden?

It is a shame you did not ask here in the first place. Most of us would have told you £960 is way too much for such a simple job. Care to post pictures of the poor job done? Before and after if possible. As others say, these check your trade type sites are where the poor tradesmen advertise. The rest of us never advertise anywhere as we get plenty of work through personal recommendations. There is usually some form of local facebook group you could ask for a recommended local tradesman. Although I don't do facebook myself, I know such groups exist as several customers chose me because I was recommended on fb when they asked.

I think it is piped correctly, though intuitively it does not seem right at first glance. There are several types of UFH manifold and in particular the way the blending valve works. I had not see one like yours before, so I did a little searching and I found this: http://www.gasapplianceguide.co.uk/UNIPIPE Manifold.htm That appears to show it piped as yours is.

I will call by the stone merchant in Inverness and see what they can offer, hoping to get a good deal to use up offcuts? I think it has always been a desire for a "pantry with stone shelves" rather than a technical reason.

The set square must be 50 years old. Well battered, you would not want to try using it to do a detailed drawing. I think the pantry being "cool" is a forlorn hope in a well insulated house. We did omit UFH in that corner of the room, but there is no stopping it getting to the room temperature. It is more of a big cupboard to keep all the food stuff out of the way. SWMBO wants stone shelves in there. the jury is still out on that one.....

Slowly ticking off the bits to "finish" the house and the pantry has come to the top of the list. This is basically a small rectangle in the corner of the kitchen partitioned off to make a walk in cupboard with shelving. The corner of the rectangle will be cut off at 45 degrees and into that cut off corner will be a bi fold Oak door. I am knocking up ideas how to do this bit. Conventionally you would form the corner and then make the door opening in a short straight bit of wall. But that would widen the width of that 45 degree wall thus reducing the space inside the pantry. So i have come up with this mockup. to try and make the 45 degree cut off just the width of the door and it's liner. The bit of wood on the floor with the pencil on it represents the door. The last stud in the corner will be at 45 degrees. That will probably be made in practice with 4 * 2 with a corner planed or ripped off at 45 degrees. The door liner is made from 12mm thick planed oak, as most of my other door liners have been. And a bit of Oak corner bead in lieu of architrave. All the proper joiners will now be shaking their heads. Tell me why not, or how better to do it while taking up the minimum space?

Or is there? A smart meter is basically a 2G phone used for data. Does nobody else remember placing a phone on the dashboard shelf next to the car radio and getting "galloping horses" interference on the car radio?

If you have a calculated heat loss of 4.5kW and install a 5kW heat pump, it won't have any time to heat DHW. +1 for UFH throughout. Once you have had a house with UFH you won't want one with radiators again.

If that indicates the height you are going to raise the ground level to, check you are not too close or even above the Damp Proof Course first.

+1 to the above. My personal favourite appeal was 3 houses ago wanting to build a garage described as "concrete block and render" Refused by the council. Trying to discuss with the planning officer all I got was "even if you render it, it will still look like a prefabricated garage" and no amount of explaining would persuade them this was not a prefab garage. I won on appeal. In that case I thought that planning officer was not best suited for the job.

the trouble with a roof leak, is where the water appears through the ceiling is usually a long way from where the actual leak in the roof is, and even with water appearing from multiple places it could all be a single leak in the roof. The only way to find it is a good look around inside the loft space with a torch when it is raining heavily and persistently. Only when you locate the leak can you move forwards and deal with it. It may or may not be related to the recent work.

Build a decent garden building for useful additional play space etc.

Need a more general view of the roof zoomed out and some idea of the bowed bit you refer to and where you think it is leaking.