Kelvin

Do you plan on living here a while? If so do you need the extra bedroom or will it be a room that never gets used? I think you should design your house for you and use every sqm and not the next people but have enough flexibility in the design to easily change it should you sell it. Our house design only has two rooms described as bedrooms, one upstairs and a guest bedroom downstairs beside a big wheelchair friendly bathroom. Upstairs is a master bedroom suite with large bedroom, large bathroom, and a large dressing room that’s open at the top of the stairs. It also has a study downstairs that’s beside the downstairs bathroom. Therefore can either be a two bed house, three bed house or a 4 bed house with a little modification. On the rooflights - I agree with Ferdinand, if you have a nice view then make sure you can see it from upstairs. If not then maximise light. Ours are 1600x900 to let us see the view we paid for and to let in lots of light.

No probs

Really sorry to hear. Presumably the certificate is transferable. I didn’t think they were very robust though should you need to make a claim. Different lenders have different criteria. You managed to get a mortgage with a certificate. But the mortgage market has tightened up since you built. When we sold our house last year (barn conversion with a warranty) the buyer’s mortgage lender had us jumping through hoops to prove all manner of things and taking out insurance indemnities for a few things none of which we had to do when we bought it 7 years earlier and it was with the same lender. You might get a cash buyer of course and not face any troubles like our neighbour did. While you can get a warranty retrospectively it is very expensive. Good luck.

Rats are clever little buggers. I thought I had rat proofed our chicken run as no rats for two years after building it. We put the house on the market and obviously the rats spotted it on Rightmove as they moved in to the chicken run underneath the coup. I didn’t notice straight away but did notice that the chickens were suddenly getting through a lot more food. Eventually I noticed the tell tale signs of some excavation work at the back of coup. Moved the coup, the pallet it sat on and the slabs the pallet sat on. I was very impressed with the basement apartment they had built. Sleeping quarters packed with feathers, en-suite loo in the opposite corner, and a well stocked larder of chicken feed and various bits of vegetables. There were two very neat tunnels great escape styli leading out from either side of rat mansions underneath all my carefully installed rat proof mesh, underneath my sunken perimeter barrier all the way to the boundary with the neighbouring field.

If you want message me your email address and I’ll forward an email I got from http://aecb.net that has some info and several links

I’ve looked into this a bit. Primarily it will come down to what you prefer the look of. Smoked engineered oak looks much better (to me) than bamboo which tends to look more like patchwork when laid and almost tile like. Bamboo isn’t as durable as engineered oak so if it’s in a high traffic area keep that in mind. It’s also more susceptible to marking. However, it is from a very sustainable source so if you care about that then it wins hands down. Technically it’s also not a wood per se as it’s a grass processed into planks. Not that this matters much.

HH are a firm of architects so they’ve done all our drawings and submission for planning, warrant, and organised all the SE work etc. They can also manage getting all the other professional stuff done like topo survey, site investigation, drainage, utilities, etc but I did all of that before I bought the plot and they used the reports. They use three kit manufacturers I believe. One for their SIP builds, one for CPS and an Austrian company for the CLT builds.

Yes I don’t think ESCROW would work for many timber kit companies. In my case because they sub-contract the work to another company my assumption is they release the money to them as they need to fund the manufacture of the house. If I can find an insurance product that isn’t too expensive I’ll do that. If not I’ll need to swallow the risk.

Well technically 328ft 😉

The standard length for a Cat5 cable segment is 100m including all the patch cables until you get to router/switch.

If the plant room is big enough for everything without compromising access then put it there rather than taking up cupboard space. In terms good Wi-Fi access. Don’t use access points or plug in extenders use a genuine mesh network (not every mesh network setup is genuinely a mesh network) The fastest on the market is probably the Netgear Orbi system. They have various setups but the two pack system should cover the house easily enough. You can add more satellites if it doesn’t. It’s not cheap but it is very good and very fast as it has a high speed backhaul setup between the Orbi devices back to the router.

Our ASHP installer specced our system with a 250 litre cylinder but I’ll get that increased to 300 litre minimum as we regularly have people stay. We had a 300 litre tank and ASHP in our last place it is was fine even with a house full. 120 litre tank is far too small.

Even if they put networking cable terminated in every room it shouldn’t be that expensive. I’d get a second opinion to sanity check all the costs or seek out another electrician to quote the electrics. As others have said, if you have no plans to fit things like cameras in the house or any sort of automation then one cable per floor makes sense for Wi-Fi access points.

Ah right. My mistake I got in my head that they were talking about just electricity. That makes sense now.

I can’t answer your specific question but there is a lot of mindless copying of regulation text in reports you pay for in my experience. Clearly things need to be designed correctly!

Yes I wish I had considered this a bit more deeplt before signing the contract. 🙄 I’ve asked them about an escrow service too. The guy I spoke with at BJP was really helpful. He said he rarely sells the advanced payment product (because it’s dear I guess) but did mention he’s seen an increase in the number of people asking for these kinds of products. Yes there are other companies that offer this type of insurance (Allianz for one) but the blurb seems to assume you are a company rather than an individual. I have a few follow up calls to make next week about it.

Those numbers don’t make sense based on average kWh usage do they?

I posted a similar question recently. I asked my timber kit company (Heb Homes) what client protection they had in place should they go bust. They laughed nervously when I asked as no one had ever asked them this. After a few weeks they came back to me with two options: insurance with BJP insure (at my cost) and a personal guarantee in writing from one of their directors (while laudable won’t be worth much in reality) My situation is slightly more complicated in that it also includes all the windows and doors and that Heb Homes don’t make the kit, they sub the kit out to another company and the windows to Nordan. I phoned BJP insurance and they have a product called advance payment insurance but it’s expensive at 10%-15% of the total contract value which would be at my expense. I’ve asked HH if I can pay part of the invoices on various credit cards so that would give me some protection just waiting on their answer. There are other things I will ask them to do such as show pictures of our materials with order numbers and my name on. No doubt they think I am being over cautious (difficult) but that’s three people I know or heard of losing large sums of cash to a timber kit company going bust.

I’m going to have a similar challenge to address. My garage is going to be 10mx6m insulated steel building (40mm walls and roof) with an insulated floor. I’ll initially use it as storage and site office. My plan is to partition one end of it and build another insulated room inside it. It’s likely to be too warm in the summer and too cold in the winter so I intend to fit a multi head split A2A heat pump.

Oh what a nightmare. This is exactly the situation I am trying to avoid as my timber kit supplier has similar terms (presumably most do) in that they’ll have 90% of the timber kit cost including windows prior to us starting. In fact a few months before we start. I am really gutted for you.

It looked beyond saving and there wasn’t much patching up in evidence

My thought was what would they have done had they not got that inheritance to build the house. The house they were in was little more than a shed and was falling apart. While it wasn’t exactly like many other GD situations they still ended up only being able to do it due to external input. That said he did pull the extra from his pension.

The limit tends to be 3.2m. There’s also a limit on the weight that a lot of suppliers will provide in a single piece which also depends on access, stairs etc. solid worktops are heavy. 30mm thick quartz is something like 80kgs/sqm. Microcement is a great option too. We are considering it too for a few different areas. Other half to do our entire floor in it but I’m not convinced.

The recent energy crisis will help change people’s attitudes towards heating with gay abandon because it used to cost buttons to better understanding that reducing the need to heat your house in the first place makes more sense.

It’s even more complicated than that. What about folk that pay a combined amount for rent and utilities. Most student accommodation is organised like that and they already get stiffed from my son’s experience. Same with folk that live in caravan type parks etc. This isn’t an easy nut to crack.