Kelvin

Our house has a fairly high consumption which makes the sums a bit more sensible. We fitted 19 x 445W PV panels (East/West), 24kWh of battery storage and a wholehome backup gateway for £13,000. The payback seems to be between 5 and 7 years depending on how optimistic/pessimistic I am with the numbers. We’ve had one power cut since it was installed and I only knew about it because it sent me a notification to say it was off grid.

Exactly. The market is slow in much of the country. You are a committed buyer. The seller should jump to it but doesn’t stop you from researching solutions too as you are.

They are giving you time to resolve it from what you said. So sort that out and there’s nothing to tell them. Even if they did tell the lender they’ll be looking for a satisfactory resolution so will give you time to resolve anyway.

They are absolutely obligated and now that you know of this issue it can’t be ignored. The lender might choose to lend anyway or might not until it’s resolved.

Given the island is relatively compact then I agree with this. But it depends on how the island will be used. If you entertain a lot so have folk sitting there as you prep food you likely wouldn’t want the hob or the sink on the island. If you just used it as a breakfast bar and rarely had folk sitting there then having the hob on the island might be more practical. It really comes down to how you live. We mostly use ours as a breakfast/lunch bar so works well for us having the hob and sink on the island although our island is quite big which helps.

Just to add how petty our situation was. The building regs issue was there were three minor conditions that hadn’t been discharged. Two of them related to the build process (noise and mess) and the third I could demonstrate had been done even if it hadn’t been discharged (surrounding land had to be returned back to pasture land). The bank was insisting these were discharged by the council a few years after the barns had been converted. I phoned the council (not disclosing who I was or any details about the house in case I needed to indemnify against it) They said it would be unlikely they’d discharge them now and if so it could take months as not a priority and they were still all working from home as most of the paperwork wasn’t on the planning portal. I couldn’t quite believe the bank was insisting on getting a noise condition discharged years after the builders had left site. It really was just a computer says no situation.

The challenge is that lenders are becoming increasingly pedantic about these kinds of details. We had a really frustrating experience selling our last house. The lender (Santander) questioned every tiny detail slowing the whole process up for weeks including a minor building regs non-compliance that the buyer didn’t care about. Ultimately that required taking out an indemnity to get past it.

The plans had the wall on left coming out 750mm either side of the rooflight as this should have been separate bedroom. We changed it to open plan upstairs multi-purpose room and opened up the ceiling to the ridge beam. It’s 3.6m wide at this point. Had we left it as per the original plan it would have been a smallish slightly cramped feeling bedroom. Done like this it feels much bigger than it is. Similarly had we built the wall at the stairs making it a bedroom it would still have felt bigger. The other picture shows the curve in the plastering. We brought this wall out to 850mm rather than 750mm which made it higher pushing the ceiling up a bit. It also gives us handy accessible roof storage that runs the full length of the room. There’s a similar space in the other room. I put all the shower plumbing in these voids which makes them really easy to access. One for the upstairs bathroom and the other serves the downstairs bathroom.

Something to think about is using some software that you can easily generate 3D views of the layout. I used a mixture of RoomSketcher (really easy to use but has some limitations in layout) and SketchUp. It really helped us visualising the rooms and we made a few changes as a consequence.

Ours is a 1.5 storey room in roof although the ridge height is a bit higher. What we did was not put in the dwarf wall on one side so the sloped ceiling meets the outside wall. This allowed us to make roof void on the opposite side deeper and therefore the wall a bit higher. We also vaulted the ceiling on one side right to the ridge beam and made the ceiling in the other room as high as possible. This made the upstairs feel much more spacious despite the sloped (coomb) ceiling. The other thing we did in our bedroom is where the ceiling meets the wall we had it plastered in a curve (there is a name for this) rather than as a sharp edge. This also makes it feel bigger as the wall merges in with the slope of the ceiling up to where the ceiling goes flat. Agree with ProDave. It’s a really nice clean layout making use of all the space. Will be great to live in.

Thread spurred me into action and now down to 500W.

A bit like John above. MVHR, ASHP, sewerage treatment plant, two UV disinfectant lamps, two water treatment systems, borehole pump control, DAB water pump, Starlink (quite power hungry) plus a load of computer equipment then the usual household stuff. A lot of that is relatively low power but it all adds up I guess. Cutting it from 800W to 600W was relatively easy so there’s a bit more to come and I have a few unused smart sockets so will be able to power some things down on a schedule. Coincidentally the PV generation on an overcast rainy day matches the house background load.

I’ve just had a look at the door. I’d forgotten it has a spring beyond the catch so it wouldn’t ever slam open like that. It might spring back and whack you in the face though.

https://catlighting.co.uk/lighting-inspiration/

It is dodgy for obvious reasons. £20k is a lot of scaffolding or you plan on having a while.

We went to see a lighting designer when we were planning everything. She had a holiday rental that she also used to show what could be achieved with lighting. She was a big advocate of up lighting shelves/alcoves and the like. She used a lot of small directional led lights that they use in museums and display cabinets. It was really effective. One of the most effective and cheap to do was a tiny LED built into a shelf (it was routed in) with a large glass paperweight sat on top of it to diffuse and scatter the light through it. She had these on the floor as well.

Bloody hell. That’s frustrating. The install team will take 2 hours to do that if it’s anything like ours. The only difference was no road closure and the cable was longer. I backfilled the trench but left it open at the bottom of the pole which was in my neighbours field so put a bit of plywood over the opened trench and a cone.

Not so good then. There aren’t any plastic parts in the one on our door. Our bedroom doors are inward opening but are tilt and turn windows so not really designed to be used as doors other than as a fire escape. They don’t have a flush threshold so anyone that tries to step out trips over the frame going out or kicks the aluminium cladding coming in.

Yours must be slightly more sophisticated than the one we have as if someone did that it would just go past the notch. The issue with that door in the wind is it slamming shut rather than getting ripped open. It’s a heavy big thing as well so would knock you into next week. But you highlight exactly the problem when you have folk visiting and they do stuff like this because they don’t know how things work. The top hung Velux windows is another example. If you open them them enough for the wind to get under them they get banged fully open. We’ve had this happen a few times and it’s caused a fine crack in the timber in one corner.

The background load of our house is 600W. It was 800W but I’ve done a bit of optimisation to reduce it.

You can get integral door stays for garage access doors. Ours has one. You open the door past a notched hook at the top of the door and a catch slots into it locking the door in place. To disengage you push the door past the notch to release the catch. Our garage door is metal and I wanted it outward opening as it’s harder to break into.

Our French doors (timber ali clad) are outward opening and wind is a real problem at times. It has a built in door stay (pull the handle up and it locks the door at that position) The garage access door is also outward opening and in strong winds it’s really chuffing hard to open it.

I lit our alcove at the back to wash the light down the large format tile that formed the back of the alcove so I’d say it depends on what you want to highlight. It’s also on a dimmer circuit this it it fully bright. I used very narrow LED strips, the narrowest they did and it’s mounted inside a track. The other thing to consider is make sure you have easy access to the driver. In my case there’s a walk in cupboard to the left behind that wall so all the wiring is inside a wall box.