Kelvin

The floor tiles don’t feel cold though as they will be slightly warmer than the room temp. In houses I’ve lived in with tiled floors and radiators vs UFH the UFH has always felt nicer to walk on barefoot.

Any plumbing system badly installed will leak. UFH should have no joints under the slab/floor or hidden in walls. Typically it’s all in one place with all the joins visible and accessible albeit you might have the manifolds in different parts of the house. Had three UFH systems going back almost 20 years. All the issues I’ve had have been the typical pump failures, valve failures, expansion vessel, and PSU.

Our house isn’t passive but it’s still very efficient and I’ve been heating it with one 2kW oil filled rad and it’s very comfortable. Once we are living there with all the appliances on etc we’d only need the rad on colder days. My ASHP is sitting on a pallet yet to be installed (being installed tomorrow) If I was doing this again I’d have got a bit closer to passive standard, built it a bit smaller, possibly slightly less glass and possibly not installed an ASHP with UFH. That said UFH is very nice underfoot.

Yes anything like that could mark the alu cladding. Ours said to make sure we kept the cladding free from any run off from the building materials. Ours weren’t so bad because it was just the run off from the wood cladding treatment so I just had a soft cloth and clean water on standby for a few weeks.

It wasn’t a criticism so apologies if you took it that way. We visited two houses that had done it that way as it was the look we (well I)wanted too. However we didn’t like it as it showed up the flaws in the walls too much and we wanted to layer the lights more. My other half also wanted a ‘spectacular’ pendant cascade light to take advantage of the 5.1m vaulted ceiling. You can read that as expensive 😂 It is nice thing right enough as long as I don’t break it putting it up! Vaulted rooms are hard to light! I’ve also wired for stair lights but yet to decide how to do it exactly. I like what you’ve done but our staircase and hand rail doesn’t lend itself to achieve that very easily.

I’ve purposefully tried to avoid lighting that highlights flaws in the boarding and plastering in areas that are obviously visible. We’ve had three plasterers, two of them didn’t do the greatest job requiring a lot of fixing from me. The third one is much better but not perfect either. On the LED strip lighting up the vaulted ceiling. We looked at that for ours but it just seemed to create a very flat look it also really showed up the poor plastering/painting. While we cabled for these strips I didn’t fit them. Instead I’ve bought two double spotlights to allow us to vary the lighting down into the living area alongside some other lighting we have.

You don’t a crane to lift pre-made TF panels. It can be done with a telehandler.

The chances are slim but not zero. If you think you’re going to fret about it then change it. If you think you might fret now but it’ll pass then just leave it.

I’m against most holiday lets on principle as it drives property prices up in nice areas and reduces the number of available houses to buy (or rent) for locals. That said the only people I know that do well out of it are some friends with some bothies they built on their land. All to a high spec and come with the all important outside jacuzzi.

They want it 300mm wide because the trench should be back filled with fine fill (sand) at 75mm all around the cable or duct. You can’t achieve that with 100mm trencher. Whether the guys that come to lay the cable will care is another matter but I wouldn’t risk it.

There’s a lot of evidence out there that shows that alarms don’t significantly reduce your chances of being burgled. If you’re really worried and live in a high crime area move to somewhere less likely to be burgled. Look at the kind of cars you have and determine if they are the most stolen or not (Audi BMW Range Rover etc) Don’t have expensive easy to steal items on display or fit blinds/curtains/external shutters. Make your premises hard to access but also visible from the street with plenty of external lighting. You want tall fences hedging at the rear of the property and low at the front. Plant thorny hedges. Install gravel driveways and paths. Alarms and CCTV can act as a deterrent but if thieves view your house as an easy target because they have plenty of cover and there’s stuff worth stealing they’ll target your house. I’m serious about the cars. I had an Audi RS4 Avant for a while and sold it because they were so knickable.

An example from today. A sudden small pool of water appeared in one of the rooms. Ffs! No obvious source. But it wasn’t there earlier. Turned out the electrician popped in for a looksee and his water bottle leaked on the floor!

There’s been three/four storms since we started building in February. Record breaking rainfall round here. So far so good and the house isn’t finished yet. My anxiety levels have already dropped significantly.

Fitted them today so about 3 hours 😂 They are powder coated. My son in law is an electrician and he rates them.

The mounting holes have rubber grommets for the screws and the rest of seems well sealed against the rain. It’s certainly better made than what we had in the previous house and they never leaked. There’s a bit more wind driven rain here though.

I know what you mean. We aren’t living here yet but we rent two miles away. I’ve been down at the house at all times of the night in all weathers keeping an eye on things. Every morning I come down there’s a little part of me expecting something wrong. Other half thinks I’m mad.

Choosing tiles is hard. One single sample might look great but look terrible on the wall. We had 25 tile samples at one point and I got a bit tile blind. We loved a few patterned tiles but decided not to go with them and went with some large format textured cream tiles. The idea being that the bathroom furniture will break up the uniform colour as Gus suggests.

It’s exactly twice one of my quotes and I thought that was dear so yes it’s dear. In fact it’s dearer than my all up price including tiles and materials

They don’t pay much attention to any neighbour objections so I wouldn’t worry too much what the neighbour’s say.

For me the no toaster and hot water tap reduces the clutter ok the work surface. I justified both by removing a whole row of cabinets and worktop so we just have an island and tall cabinets. Therefore no space for either a kettle or a toaster. Actually saved us money. 😂

I’ve not owned a toaster for 20 years. I just use the grill in the oven.

That’s hard to achieve in practice. We have very few interior wall lights because of the unflattering way they can light the walls. I actually loved the irregular brickwork that the outside lights highlighted in our previous house.

Yes the ones we bought are like that.

They are both uplight and downlight (doubles) and downlight (single) It’s why we went for them as we are using the singles (downlight) in the single storey section and doubles (up and down) in the 1.5 storey section. I’m down the plot later so shall take some pictures for you.

I’ve never had any problems with the design killing GU10 bulbs in the past. They look like the Astro Dartmouth lights. We’ve gone with those both single and doubles in textured grey. They are very nicely made. https://www.keslighting.co.uk/astro-dartmouth-single-gu10-outdoor-wall-light-in-textured-grey-1372010.html