ProDave

I thought they hadn't started yet.

Hi and welcome. What do you mean "mid century modern"? I hope you don't mean this, that was featured on C4's Ugly to Lovely https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/132031949#/?channel=RES_BUY

If you are out in the sticks your supply impedance might be a bit high if you are not close to the nearest transformer.

I have exactly this with my LG ASHP but only on start up, not at full running. It will be the variable speed drive in the inverter putting a varying load on the supply and hence dipping the voltage rapidly. It is precicely this that worries DNO's as they don't want your ASHP flickering next doors lights. It would be interresting to hear from the electrician the loop Ze of the supply and Zs of the ASHP circuit. In our case it is only the lights in the utility room affected so we ignore it. A different make of LED lamp elsewhere is not affected, so first instance I would buy a few of different makes of LED lamp, and when you find one not affected, buy a job lot of them.

It is worth corresponding with your planners. In my case condition 1 of the planning permission said the access onto the highway must be formed prior to any other building work on site. When I started on that I wrote to them to notifiy that I had started and they replied confirming that the development had started. If I had wanted to I could have left the site indefinitely before continuing as they had confirmed the development had started by forming the access onto the road.

Yes we had to make a compromise having a run or counter top across the whole room with a back to wall WC and cistern and that was the lowest we could get. you get used to a slightly higher than usual basin.

If the prevailing wind is NW the smoke from your neighbour will seldom trouble you unless they are very close. How close are they?

I just went and measured ours. The counter top is 790mm above the floor. That was the lowest we could get it, constrained by the concealed WC cistern further along the same counter set as low as it possibly could be. This puts the rim of the basin at 950mm about the same height as any other ordinary e.g pedestal basin. Your 850mm for the counter top may be a little high unless your counter top basin is not as tall as ours?

It was over 20 years ago when i was in the last year or 2 of a "proper office job" where we had a pretty normal setup, with individual desktop computers with the software needed installed on them, and an office network for data storage, backups and handling the email servers and wed service. Then one day it was announced "we are going to outsource all out IT to a cloud based service" so all programs, and all data would be served from and stored on an outsourced data centre somewhere. I remember at the time thinking "what a bloody stupid idea, what idiot decided that was good?" Thankfully I left shortly afterwards and have been self employed since in charge of my own destiny and free to make my own good or stupid decisions.

To balance in favour of the low tech UVC, with direct heating you can have multiple immersion heaters at different levels and heat the top part of the cylinder first then switch to the next heating element down the tank.

So do you actually want a painted steel I beam as a "lintel"?

Drying rack with mvhr works well. Upstairs laundry, you trade taking baskets of clothes up and down, for having to get a washing machine up the stairs. Not I job I would wish to do or regard myself as strong enough to do without doing some serious harm to the stairs. It's good to get some exercise taking the washing up and down from time to time. A laundry chute would deal with the "down"

Do not mix UFH and radiators, it just complicates things with different warm up times so you really need different controls so radiators and UFH turn on and off at different times, which seems to fry the brains of most "heating engineers" used to all on and off at the same time. If you are really building to close to passive house insulation and air tightness you probably won't need upstairs heating. I followed the well trodden path on here of not really trusting that, so I put electric points for a panel heater in each bedroom. Like most that have done this, those heater points have never been used and we have no heating in the bedrooms, and this is in the east Highlands, probably the coldest place in the UK in winter. I can never understand why some people get quoted high prices for UFH. I did all mine myself and the materials are not expensive, and it is not even difficult, just time consuming. If you want to fit it yourself there will be plenty of help here, and there is no reason wy UFH upstairs should be much different than downstairs, though you might need to make some decisions very early on in the design of the building.

So get your architect to make an offer to you to buy the plot "subject to planning permission" Architect then applies for full planning and once granted the sale completes. No more cost to him as he has to do the plans anyway, and if he is quick he gets the reserved matters application in before the PIP runs out. Then he can do the dig a trench to "start" if he wants to lock in the planning for some future build date. Almost exactly what we did with our plot.

What makes you think in X years planning would be refused? Planning was granted for 2 houses when it was a bare field. Now one house is built why do you think it less likely the second would be approved again? So wait until you are ready. If it was refused then you have good grounds for appeal. Digging a trench and pouring concrete does not constitute "starting" as you have no approved plans to build from (reserved matters) and I bet there is a "development not to start until approved matters are agreed" clause.

And I thought working out the pattern to tile our floor with 2 different size rectangle tiles and 2 different size square tiles was complicated.

Bottom left 2 white triangles, bottom right, 2 blue triangles. Should be the same.

Yes that's it.

You have a row of posts down the middle of the house. I presume this is to support some form of beam running down the middle of the house to support joists running front to back of the house a distance of about 10 metres so they would need intermediate support. My suggestion (which is just what we did) is make the internal wall either side of the hall, a supporting wall going all the way up to the roof. then the joists can span the other way. We have 11 metre long posi joists spanning the entire length of the house on one go, taking support from the 2 load bearing walls, so the longest unsupported span is 5 metres. This removes the need for the row of posts down the middle of the house. Okay only 2 would be a nuisance in the middle of a room, as the other 3 are hidden in walls.

When I go looking for something, I just stop looking when I have found the first one, I don't waste further time looking for their friends.

That's what I thought. Not necessary. Make the wall either side of the stairwell a supporting wall, and the walls above it either side of the landing. Then floor and ceiling joists span lengthways the entire length of the building taking intermediate support from these 2 supporting walls. Exactly what we have done. Look to be only a 5 metre span that way, exactly what we have.

What are the row of 5 small squares evenly spaced along the centreline of the downstairs?

Stairs are wrong. To get to the right hand study, you have to ascend the stairs then walk all the way round the gallery to get to it. Put the stairs the other side of the hall so they ascend and finish just before the door to the master bedroom, then it's an easier route to the other 2 bedrooms / study rooms. You will probably need to start the stairs closer to the entrance door so they finish before the master bedroom door and don't cut across the entrance to the living / dining, and will need to re jig the entrance to the downstairs bedroom and hall storage cupboards.

UNLESS it's a basin with internal overflow, in which case the waste has a couple of holes as it passes through the basin and the sealing washer IS at the bottom. A picture would help.

If the roof timbers (and any insulation) has been soaked, then even fixing the leak will not stop the smell. The whole lot needs to be stripped off and replaced. Only then will it be fresh once more.