ProDave

Under mount sink implies stone or imitation stone worktop. There are 2 ways to mount an undermount sink and some stone suppliers will only use their preferred method. One is support the sink independantly in the base unit e.g. with a wooden frame and supports and the stone worktop just sits down onto this. This method might just work in your narrow base unit. The other method is the sink hangs from brackets bonded to the underside of the worktop. This requires space all around the sink on all 4 sides and needs the bigger cabinet. So first talk to your stone supplier.

A shade over £5K for a new one, from a random chosen site so no doubt you could get cheaper https://www.thenaturalenergycompany.co.uk/shop/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=297 Buy a new one and keep the old one for spares?

After the test I realised I had not taped up the Tundish that vents the UFH cylinder so there was straight away a 22mm copper pipe leading out of the building. I wish I had remembered that and taped it up.

What has gone that costs £1500. Add that to the £2500 already spent on a new compressor and that's £4000 for which you should have been able to just buy a new heat pump (unless it was very large)

I meet a lot of joiners / carpenters in my travels, but so far I have only met one i regard as good enough to work on my own home, and he did some of my kitchen fitting and jung some of the doors, which he made a very good job of. I define "good enough" to work on my house as capable of doing a better job than I can, and it is saying something when a lot of the joiners I see I don't think can do a better job than me. But just moving a hinge over by a few mm is a difficult job. I would have altered the door stop and taken the hit on re painting after that,

I am no fan of the concept of an open plan kitchen / "family" room. For a while while we were "in build" we used that room as a living room and it really really really irked me when the fridge / Freezer fired up. You just do not want that sort of appliance in what is supposed to be a living room. Now we have all but finished I love the separate and quiet living room and regard the other room as what it really is, a kitchen / diner (though it does have a sofa and tv for when we want to watch different things)

And if it is above that rate it would probably fail BC anyway? Ours was 1.4 and I was hoping for lower.

Do you have a measure of how much electricity the heat pump is using to heat the house in a year? There are 2 measured of flow temperature that we need to know. One is the flow temperature of the water coming from the heat pump. This will be the higher figure and will need to be reasonably high to run the upstairs radiators. you should be able to read this from one of the parameters on the controller for the heat pump. The second is the flow temperature into the under floor heating. Usually on the UFH manifold there is a blending valve that sets the UFH water temperature, and a little thermometer on the manifold to show what the temperature actually is running at. This is easy to increase a little by adjusting the blending valve on the manifold.

I believe it is required to confirm the ventilation rates are adequate (whether mvhr or trickle ventilation) and ensure CO2 levels do not get too high. I don't have them as my building warrant pre dates that requirement but when I first looked for one they were very expensive. I would hope now all houses have to have one they will be somewhat cheaper.

A colour blindness test was part of the medical before I could start my apprenticeship.

The garage part does not need any insulation. So you don't need to dig deeper.

Scotland has been set in the ways of timber frame for decades. So TF is "how we do things up here" But that does not mean it is the ONLY way, it means anything else most builders will consider "unusual" I can't see a problem with lack of bricklayers, after all if they can find them for the outer skin why not the inner. Perhaps they don't trust BCO to pass it and don't want grief, but again up here you need a building warrant which is akin to "full plans approval" in England. So if it's on the plans and BCO have approved the plans and it is built to the plans, BCO will pass it. I know of a pair of new houses built in Lairg a few years ago that are built entirely of cavity brick and block with no TF involved, because that is what the (English) customer insisted on.

If the architect cannot understand what the BCO is saying, you have the wrong architect.

If the extension is part store and part garage, you would have the store bit level with the rest of the house, and the garage bit 100mm (or more) step down from the store for reasons already mentioned.

Not long after the new colours came in I found I could sell lengths if red & black removed from a rewire on ebay for more than the cost of new cable.

I was going to ask just where do you expect to get the fuel from.

Double check valve required in Scotland by Scottish water, which must be an admission the single check valve incorporated into the boundary box that they supply does not work

It is true that a 3 phase board cost a lot more than a single phase board, but the way I would tackle it is just fit a single phase board now. you can add a second or change to a 3 phase board later if you need to.

Re which pole, if the land owner with pole 345 gives consent without contest or conditions I would go for that, and even ask them if you (or your contractor) could dig the short bit of trench on their land as that would be cheaper then the DNO doing it. There is little to choose between the options from a technical point. You could get 3 phase to future proof yourself but only use 1 phase (to simplify solar PV self use) to start with knowing if you really need more power (multiple simultaneous EV charging for example)

If this is a new build, then you will have a SAP assessment and as long as it is done honestly and accurately you will know how much heat the whole house needs and can size the heating system. e.e. I knew the worst case heating demand for my house was just over 2kW so I chose a 5kW ASHP and under floor heating.

It's easy to say a brick house lasts a long time. But look at all the early (and some not so early) 20th century brick houses. By todays standards re insulation and air tightness they are absolute rubbish. It would probably be better if these were now accepted as "end of life" and there was a program to replace them with new energy efficient houses.

We had the waste water charge thing with the council tax. There is no joined up thinking between the different council departments. YOU have to tell council tax that you are not connected to mains drainage.

Can you not ask your local building control? Here you can phone the "duty building control officer" for a question like that. I had to get permission from SEPA as we discharge to a burn and that does need granting of a permit. But if you just submit your building warrant, BC will soon tell you if SEPA permission is needed and I found building control a lot easier to deal with on technical matters like this than planning ever were. They won't just throw out your building warrant, they will wait until you have permission from SEPA if it is needed.

We used the Marley Edgemere Riven tiles. That was a planning decision as the planners wanted us to use slate, and the Edgemere Riven finish were about the only concrete tiles they would accept that looked enough like slate. The Riven version of the Edgemenre tiles were thinner than the standard Edgemere and so probably about the same as your Forticretes ones. I didn't have any problems with breakages in use but I did have a LOT of broken tiles coming off the pallet. So much so that I notified the supplier that we had an issue with breakages. As it turned out, by carefully picking out the broken ones and putting them in 2 piles, broken left side, and broken right side, we were then able to use the ones broken on arrival for all the valley cuts so there were not in fact many wasted and we never did have to proceed with a claim for breakages. I did the roof myself so I was happy to spend the time sorting the tiles in that way. I wonder if a roofer paid on a price would do that, or just pick them off the pile and then end up with a pile of unusable broken tiles? Once I discovered the breakage issue, I had a golden rule, NEVER cut a good whole tile, go and find a broken one on one of the pallets.

I think houses "settling" is a thing of the past. I have not seen a modern house with cracks anywhere. We tend to have properly designed well engineered foundations now, not a trench that's not very deep and "that will be okay, it's how we have always done it"