Kelvin

At the risk of repeating myself, you’re opening post said the planners want a barn style which none of these are. You’ve had loads of suggestions on barn styles any of which the planners would likely accept if that’s what they want. You’ve been advised that you can’t afford stone cladding on your budget. What you can do is mix cladding types with some stone to link it to the vernacular and the rest a cheaper alternative. Not sure what else I or anyone else add so good luck.

I like the one that looks like a farmhouse but not the white one that’s on an estate. You’re self-building rurally so don’t build an estate house.

Rather than phone your operator go in to one of their shops (dunno if sky offer this but presumably you could still go into an O2 place) WiFi calling generally has to be enabled by the operator. Trying to navigate their call centre is a pia. We’re with Vodafone and have Apple phones and, like the advert says, it just works. It also works on a Samsung A3 backup phone.

I tried to get HH to agree to the credit card route. They agreed to do it but ran into problems setting it up so it never happened. Therefore I currently have 40% of the kit price sitting with them with not much protection. They said they are introducing a vesting certificate process which should be in place soon. Anyway consequently I have a nervy three months waiting on it being delivered. For this reason I’d never do a timber kit in this way again unless there was some protection in place. I’m am a bit peeved about it with HH as I flagged this up right at the start and they agreed to the CC protection.

But it’s contained like any other part of the infrastructure of a country. Unlike a nuclear power station which would be a disaster for a much larger part of the World beyond the immediate warzone.

Plus of course wind turbines don’t melt-down and cause a major disaster nor are they much threat in a war zone.

Bottom one will be a dearer roof top one would look bad enough on an estate. You seem committed to this style so I suggest you get actual idea of cost and take it from there.

If you have busy household, plan on filling the house with IoT devices and live in a suburban area there might be some advantage with WiFi 6. While I don’t have Sonos I do have several streaming devices (Bluesound and RPi DAC) and never had any issues using Tidal, Spotify, or streaming directly from my server.

Yes you can take pictures of most things from the public highway. Just make sure there are no people about not because you can’t take their picture it just saves any hassles if they see you. Alternatively go knock on their door and tell them you love their house and are planning your own self-build and ask if you can take some pictures of it.

Bunging two arches on a standard house won’t necessarily win any favours

Yes he’s trying to incorporate the look.

It’s also why 2 storey houses are hard to get through planning in rural areas. It can be done but would likely need to be well done/different etc. A standard square 2 storey is very unlikely. There’s a reason the Scottish based timber kit companies have so many room in roof dormer window houses or barn styles in their portfolios, they achieve planning. The point above on timing is really important. 8 weeks minimum to achieve planning (ours took 12 weeks). 12 weeks to achieve building warrant (we got ours in 8 right enough). That’s assuming no issues come up. Add in several more weeks for everything else. Let’s say 30 weeks minimum to get to a point where you can start building. It’s not likely to be this year. Meanwhile your money is worth maybe 10% less or you have to add another £25k. We started the process last March. We’ve made a basic start on the groundworks and the kit erection is planned for April. I’ve done everything I can to make it happen faster but have been thwarted by delay after delay.

Yes like we’ve been saying these are traditional Scottish cottages. They also often have blue doors.

Agreed it’s just as ignorant a viewpoint.

One arch wouldn’t work either imo. I don’t like the design of it generally. To make it look less like a new estate house you could do a mixture of white render and wood cladding. We drove over to Loch Rannoch today and passed several new builds all of which were barn/Longhouse style. Get something like that designed and you should achieve planning.

In practice it doesn’t happen though.

That arch looks well integrated into the design. The pic you posted just looked like two arches added for the sake of it

Square boxes with two rooms and toilet downstairs and four small bedrooms upstairs is easy to ‘design’ and fit on small plots. We’ve designed ours so that we could live downstairs should we end up incapable of climbing the stairs.

The reason we all focused on barn/longhouse styles is because the thread is called that. Everything you’ve posted is not a barn though.

Yes a nice looking house would suit a wooded environment. Arch looks great. More complicated roof so adds to the cost.

Traditional Scottish Whitehouse design. You can be creative enough with the layout to create a modern open plan feel

It would have been 7 but I added another room. Actually it could have been 6 but the other half compromised (she hates doors) by changing a door to a glass door. We only have one short L shaped corridor in the house off the open plan area and there are three rooms off it so it would have meant 4 doors creating a dark corridor so we removed the door from the open plan area. My original design was two offset dual apex roofed barns joined in the middle with this corridor with a long rooflight.

Sure but it matters to my wife 😂 I’ve not made a final decision on whether we’ll add home automation to the house and if we do how much and what technology. Previously it was a mixture of stuff including some homebrew stuff. That worked for me but didn’t for anyone else in the house 😂

Yep. Just counted them. 😂

Yep. I’ve ditched all of that out of our design. The heating and MVHR will be as straightforward and out the box as it can be.