ProDave

I doubt the staircase company will care. It is your building control inspector that will care at completion. If not 2M headroom it will not pass, so make the ceiling stepped or whatever is needed to achieve 2M headroom.

At least you only have to keep renewing your insurance. I had to bung building control another £100 each year to extend the building warrant.

This is one of the disadvantages of applying for PIP. Because usually you are not specifying details of the house, it allows the council to impose a set of standard requirements. We had this, but the ones I objected to we succeeded in over ruling. You could always offer to buy the plot subject to getting the house style you want approved, and then submit a planning application quickly. There are several houses near here of various timber designs, just look around your area for something similar to what you want as examples.

You can have a stair type handrail supported from the stairs not attached to a wall. It could (cough) disappear after sign off.

It will be nice when it is finished. I thought it was part of a fire station.

Unless the water jacket of an oil boiler rusts through (I did have 1 replaced at less than 1 year old due to a manufacturing defect) they will go on forever. The burner is a completely separate unit, very serviceable and replaceable if it really can't be serviced. We had a rental house with a Grant outdoor combi boiler that was still working at 30 years old when we sold the house. It might have been on the verge of needing a new complete burner. If it really looks like spares are going to get hard to obtain, just buy a spare complete burner and put it into storage.

Which is why I keep saying a cold roof is a really poor design and something like this if far far better designed from the outset as a warm roof and very little difference in cost. I hope one day people designing such buildings just might start to take notice and use a warm roof design by default.

Sorry I would say airtight membrane on all the walls with all joints taped BEFORE the battens go on. then all your services are inside the sealed envelope. You need a lot of detailing at those joist ends going into the wall, and a set of basic rules to ALL trades along the lines of DO NOT drill or otherwise penetrate the airtight layer without first discussing it with you and agreeing it is necessary and there is a plan for how to seal up whatever is passing through the airtight layer.

Hi and welcome. You are in good company, lots of self builders not far from you (I am 20 miles north of Inverness) We moved up here from England 20 years ago, into a static caravan to start our first self build. Then did it all again completing our second self build just over a year ago.

And don't assume an existing agricultural access to a field will meet the requirements for access to a domestic dwelling. Have a good look at what actual visibility you get in both directions from the existing access.

Our main bathroom and en-suite are the only upstairs rooms with any heating, wet UFH, more so the tiles don't feel cold than because the rooms actually need much heat. But the main bathroom has an electrically heated towel rail. Mainly because daughter wants to be able to pick up nice warm towels off the rail at the end of the shower. Me personally I file that away as "gross waste of energy" but I am outvoted.

I did not know "sample inspection" was allowed in Scotland? I know in England typically only 1 in 10 of developer new builds are. The regs in Scotland do demand proper sound proofing levels things like sound insulation in the inter floor space, other measures like resilant bars for mounting ceiling plasterboard on etc. Is there anything downstairs like flush mounting downlights that you can pop one down from the ceiling and have a look up through the hole to see the construction and see if there is any soundproofing insulation. We know our self built house was built properly, to regs, with proper BC inspections and it does not suffer any of the noise problems you mention. Normally if inspected an air test would need to be done. Is that something they are also only sampling a few not every house? What does your EPC say about the house? Have you just got a basic EPC or the full SAP calculations. Again for a self build a full SAP assesment based on actual air test etc is required.

The field does not appear to have any restrictions, but likewise has no right of light etc. The access strip is subject to covenants that may have been imposed earlier but are not specified.

To be honest, I would just do it. If you do sell in X years, unless it's an obvious bodge of a job, any buyer will probably assume the door has always been there and not question it, it is after all what you expect a door from a utility to a garage. Assuming by the time you sell the time limit for BC enforcement has passed, then in the unlikely event of someone noticing the door was recent, a simple indemnity policy should satisfy any buyer. Just make sure you do get proper trades to make the opening and properly support it with the right lintel.

Here you go, have a read of this thread. It explains why a tradesman charging £200 per day is not a rich man, and other thoughts on the matter.

Get the UFH connected in your other bathroom then you can use that, while you go for a record post count gutting and re modelling this one.

Didn't we have a thread on this recently?

It might be the Windy city, but they would certainly have to work over a very much wider seasonal temperature range than UK housing.

Interesting read, I have not yet fully digested it. but a few initial thoughts. Most of the houses tested are >10 years old, hardly cutting edge, and only a few have MVHR. There is a clear conclusion that passive or trickle ventilation is not adequate, and the houses with mvhr perform better. There is the strange observation that most bedrooms are overheated and the notion of wanting a cool bedroom is unachievable in a well insulated air tight house, which is strange because we have been managing this since our house was built. There really is merit in not heating the upstairs at all if a cool bedroom is your requirement.

It really is simple. Work out how much your required fall falls in 1 metre. Make a spacer of that amount and tape it to one end of a 1 metre level. Then you set all the pipes level with the bubble. What can be so difficult?

I keep on saying it but the proper old fashioned mechanical thermostats when wired properly with a neutral connection for the accelerator heater work damned well. But it is harder now to find the proper ones. If they don't "click" as you turn them up and down when not connected they are electronic imitations.

I would try some tape. Something like Frog tape is sticky to try sealing it for a test but will peel off with no residue. If sealing inside makes no difference try sealing outside, though you don't really want to be up a ladder when it is blowing a hoolie.

Yes in normal use DHW would start re heating when it goes a few degrees below it's set temperature. So a normal reheat is easily done in it's half hour window. But Daughter likes to shower until the water goes cold. I just can't get through to her you are not going to come out any cleaner after a half hour shower than you would after a 15 minute shower. So when she is done, most of the 300L in the tank will have been displaced by 6 degree incoming mains. Allowing for mixing with the small residual tepid water that was left in the tank, I have seen the temperature sensor starting at 9 degrees when starting a re heat from that.

A bit slow. I can't accurately define how slow but I am sure someone will do the sums and tell us how long it should take to heat 300L of water from 6 degrees (yes that is the mains water temperature at this time of year here) up to 48 degrees at 5kW heat input. Most (if not all?) heat pumps set time limits on how long it will spend heating DHW before reverting to space heating (they never do both at the same time) I have mine set at the moment for 30 minutes heating DHW then 30 minutes heating the house. So whatever is the theoretical heat up time, double it with my present set up. I could set it to spend much longer heating the DHW, with a near passive house you don't have to worry about the house going cold if the heating input to the house stops while it is heating the DHW.

Pictures of the window from the outside both close up at the details and a zoomed out view to give overall context please. We had a similar noise at our last house, though lower frequency. I believe it to be nothing to do with the window but a seam in a Tyvec layer around the timber frame not taped properly, and able to blow like a reed and make that noise at the seam.