Ferdinand

Looking at those numbers, I would say that some of them should be reducible by perhaps a quarter to a third .. based on the areas Inknow about, but God and the Devil are both in the Detail here. On the doors etc, we have for £5742: And Declan said My recent experience, on the LBB for 6 doors and skirting throughout, came to around £90 per door for getting the heavy Oak Veneer Mexicano doors, ball bearing hinges, wing handles and tube latches bought and delivered per door. All good quality. The doors were about £70 of that, but the deal was very good and might be a bit more next time. Others are reporting numbers around £100 for similar oak veneer doors and furniture in a recent thread so that should be doable in the £100 ballpark. If you are using white egg crate doors or similar then you should be under half that. If you go for cheap doors consider better door furniture that you can reuse with better doors later. Fitting for me was about £80-100 per door including quite a bit of trimming to match existing frames. Note that this only included forming one doorframe. I paid £1.60 inc VAT per metre for 94mm bullnose pre-primered skirting. Buying that is a minor cost. Painting and trimming and attaching skirting will be more significant (probably glue it on). Obvs buy it in lengths and a selection that are slightly more than your varied room dimensions eg 4.2m for me -> no joins but go 2 feet too long for joins and corners rather than risk 1 foot too short. Get it all at once and get the calculations right or you may get another delivery fee for the small second order which is under the free delivery threshold. This latter is meat and drink; same principles apply everywhere. 4-5m skirtings in small hatchbacks can be done, but needs care ! Door linings, once the openings are formed, could be £30 depending on circs. I paid £25 for a white MDF 108mm version, but my supplier now advertises these at £54 - so it must have been a sale or to clinch the order. On that basis I would punt that you should look for your doors, skirtings and architraves to be somewhere under 4K, perhaps nearer 3.5k. procured and fitted. Paint the skirtings and architraves before fitting, and spray your walls first if they are being sprayed. F

This is one for the new PM to demonstrate authority in a manner which will be gentle but firm and resolute !!!

Are we doing Physics? Definitions of relativity, then. My favourite two: 1 - If you run fast enough into a 6 foot shed with a 7 foot ladder, it will fit. 2 - Essex. F

Some of those items look interesting and very round numbers. How soon do these need to be implemented? Do we have time to crunch them properly? That driveway, and then the plastering, are interesting for a start. To me, if that is all the electric components and fitting all the electrics, then that looks OK, but the plastering looks expensive for a small house unless it includes plasterboarding too. I think we need a breakdown by one more level of subtasks and time tbh. F

@laurenco Take note of this if you need to remove the condition for the Phase 2 without jeopardising the whole shebang.

In a place that size from cold it will take some time to heat the walls and foundations and so on before stabilising. It could easily be a couple of weeks or more. F

Maybe a small or irrelevant note, but is there value in protecting this from the cooker end? eg by fitting an MCB or trip of some sort for if it risks going over the cable limit. Then you just turn one off and continue. If it only happens at Christmas or a couple of times a year, that may be viable. Fixing the cable is the better way, but if that is very difficult...

Of course, though I thought it was a bit tortured, especially for the walrus.

It’s like a 70s porno mag updated for the Waitrose Generation: picture features of Readers’ Homes.

It depends how good your fabric is. If you only need a tea light for 3 minutes AM and PM to heat the whole house, then the extra rooms cost 3p a year each to heat, and buggering about with doors and temperatures (and complicated control gear) is as useful for your welfare as counting nose-hairs on a live walrus by plucking them out one by one with tweezers. If otoh your house is more like mine ie probably at about 2010 Regs Level then there may well be fewer losses (ie more than nearly zero) by a slightly more traditional heating strategy. I tend to use a practice somewhere between the two. (It is Saturday and I enjoyed a large Jack Daniels with my after dinner coffee, and I deny all responsibility for things I may say).

Unfortunately I have been reading Shakespeare quotes on bathrooms:

(Lowered tone warning to delicate blossoms) Magazine loo roll dispensers - presumably something like the LRB - were not necessary in a pre-loo-roll era when no one wore knickers or underpants. In 1562 your bathroom would have been finished by now since it would comprise a duckpond and a wall. I just managed to lower the tone on @Onoff ! Woohoo.

If people insist on bathrooms that look like the inside of an Elizabethan Dovecote, then there is price to be paid in blood and treasure...

I think many of us probably turn our heating off completely for between 5 and 9 months each year. Last year mine was off from about April to September. I think others with more insulation do it March to October. This spring was a little unusual :-o . I run my main thermostat downstairs at about 21, and upstairs at about 18 in my room and 20 in mum’s via TRVs. Bathroom underfloor on for a bit in the morning for warm tootsies, and the other bedroom upstairs relies on open doors or gaps thereunder unless someone is coming to stay. For most of the time all this is on a few longish time clock periods per day say 4 hours morning, lunchtime and evening to allow the ufh temp to be low. When it goes below zero I either put it on 247, or turn the flow temperature up, or some combination of the two. Others differ markedly. Ferdinand

Good to see it wrapped up. When is the House Party? Burp. A detail that interest me: Does a Council have the power to do this? What were they goung to cancel - the equivalent of an (in England) Building Regulations Approval or the Planning Permission? I am not sure whether in England a Council has the power to cancel. I thought a Building Warrant was like Building Regs, but how can they cancel something that has already been acted on? I can see that they could deny completion, but not how they could cancel the whole thing. Ferdinand

Stockholm Syndrome .

Good. It may feel that all the background work you have done has been time ill-spent. No so, as 1 - It is learning, and 2 - Contingency planning is worthwhile - it could have been different. Glad to hear the news. Ferdinand

Aha .. I had it down as the other. People spend less time in bathrooms than kitchens, so perhaps that is more acceptable? Half of my point is that extra noise may be acceptable to some people eg me and my handyman who did a lot of finishing type work while it was on trickle. Brst of luck.

I think the best encouragement I can point out is that when you needed to build the Maginot Line for your foundations it actually ended up costing quite a few k less than initially predicted. Iirc. I tend to think that your priority needs to be .. as you have intimated ... to be wind and watertight plus other bits, then to pause and focus on the next stages. Ferdinand

Based on your number of £4.2k and an approx area of 23sqm I make that around £180 per sqm fitted ex VAT. That is not a bad number if you get the VAT back. Last year I posted details of the replacement 2G windows for the Little Brown Bungalow in a thread here: Mine me was very similar, but a replacement including fitting, not new and came in at £170 per sqm for 19 sqm. Differences: Mine was more bigger windows, and no sliding door. Repacement not new. Mine was white frame at u value of perhaps 1.5. Assume yours is similar. Grained finish adds 25-50% to material cost. Yours as an upstairs patio door. presumably scaffolding doesn’t as already there. Details in my quote are extended windowsills for possible EWI later (will not happen .. costs fortune), keyed alike for doors, anti-bump anti-snap locks on all doors (necessary in Yorkshire which is the home of the door snappers). Mine includes disposal of old widows etc, which is presumably a cost loading. If you can deal with the VAT issue, get the details as you want them, and the company are OK to deal with, then your quote seems good to me. I will PM you the people I used, who are near M1J28 so may be more in reach than Timbuctoo or Chelmsford. Pay at attention to the finish of the hinges and handles .. white or gold will wear more easily than silver imo.. Presumably you can ask for a little lollipop in order to clinch the order - maybe details as desired and 3.8k to 4K as the price. But perhaps if you change the details afterwards it will add to the cost. Read that thread and run your detailed requirement through these people which will give a check. Mine was 25% below the lowest they quoted in their range of prices. https://www.doubleglazingontheweb.co.uk/ May be worth talking to your local Eurocell as they are a nearly local supplier, based in Derbyshire. Ditto Synseal, but I do not have testimonials for the latter ... @Grosey used Eurocell iirc. Ferdinand

As to ways of reducing the noise level if it is unacceptable, I can think of 1 - Install a sound deadening material on the side of the cupboard, and possible the wall at the back to reduce reflection of noise, and airflow would be via top and bottom. On the side of the cupboard something like a trim strip on the edge would hide the material, though it is in the corner so not noticeable. 2 - You could also add a blanking panel across the front of the gap, either level with the cupboard - even a door that just looked like a narrow cupboard with hinges and a handle, or a panel just fastened on with spring clips and two cupboard handles on the outside so it can just be lifted off, or even a panel using perforated mdf like a radiator cover.corner could be like. A mini anechoic Get the right stuff and that corner could be almost a mini anechoic chamber. Do you have any of that pyramid moulded type packing foam do use with say double sided tape to experiment? Personally I think a trimmed down if necessary cupboard door plus appropriate sound absorbing material behind it would be the most elegant / effective. HTH Ferdinand

I have several of the Low-Carbon Tempras installed and I have not had any complaints about noise over several years, and when I hear them in 6l/s mode I do not hear anything I consider unacceptable. The only differences I can see is that yours is SELV the low voltage option and seems to be installed facing the end of a cupboard, but that should not make a difference surely since the airflow is not direct? Unless that tight corner is acting a# a noise reflected / amplifier. But noise is unavoidably a very subjective thing. Ferdinand

@Vijay One point we have not explored is whether the site is owned personally or as a limited company. If it is a limited company he could be doing it to close it and walk away as soon as possible, so he can get his last lot of money out. Ferdinand

Thank-you for the rapid replies to this question. To reply to comments: I have raised this and it is confirmed that we have the right stuff. 12mm thick, ribbed on one side, dimpled on the other, and has been down for 3 years at the existing gym already. Indeed, quite like horse matting. @Barney12 Yep .. like horse matting. 8x4 sheets would weigh (I reckon, having carried some in the move) approximately 20-25kg each. We must have moved about 60 of them. One issue is that the underside is ribbed, which moves me towards cartridge glue using beads of glue, rather than paint-on. One nice thing about a gym is the muscly volunteers who are around. The weights are made of a rubbery material themselves (haven't enquired exactly what, but they bounce to an extent), and we have had a "don't drop barbels unless a a safety need" practice, since we have been upstairs. I am told that a raw concrete floor would be OK practically, but we take care of our kit and having a matted floor means we keep the lifetime guarantee on the kit. Looking further, that I looks like a small qty of leftovers or post-date, which would be fine except for the small numbers. I have found the same product at just over £7.00 a tube here with free delivery. https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B004R24U76/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?smid=A23QNSXGYIM2TJ&psc=1 I am not a true Amazon Offers nerd, and I am not quite sure how I found it, though it may have been via this "offer listing" (whatever that is in the Amazon ecosystem): https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/B004R24U76 I do think Evo-Stik have a range confusion problem. Far too many similar sounding glues. Perhaps they are in a livery change - the same product seems to be both black and silver. I couldn't possibly comment. Is this on the option list in your development with the smooooooth kitchens in the other thread? Wine cellar or dungeon - take your pick? Thanks. For this particular application the tub and paint option seems to be working out more expensive, because we would be wasting some glue due to the ribbed underside of the mats, even at 50% or 25-33% coverage. Looks like we are going to end up with three to five lengthwise beads per mat. I have a sample of this arriving this morning which will be tested on our test-mat. Criteria is that it should stick quickly, must not move but should be peelable-off without too much palaver. If this works the cost will be something around £3.00 and a bit per cartridge. Will update with the results of the test. Ferdinand

I think we need an independent witness to this claim. And why has this photo not been published?